Black Gen Z couple teaching their young daughter to ride her bike on a street at sunset

Why Cultural Fluency Matters

Top brands secure their competitive advantage by leveraging deep, data-driven insights that drive cultural relevance.

Consumer Complexity Creates New Growth Challenges For Brands

The cultural intelligence gap means missed opportunities & lagging relevance ​

Understand Cultural Values & Beliefs to Unlock Relevance

Culture comes from the deeply shared core values and beliefs that drive our experiences and purchase decisions.

Culture feels most real in its expressions:

  • How we communicate and connect
  • The games we play and our fandoms
  • Our faith, rituals and observances
  • Our fashion, music and art
  • The artifacts and objects in our home
  • Our homes, cities and landscapes themselves

But culture also depends on origins: the demographic identities and the shared attitudes that result. Cultural origins are the source of meaning behind cultural expressions and a critical component of cultural fluency.

Read our blog about Why Culture Matters

Unlock Cultural Fluency to Win

Culture is the intersection of consumers’ shared origins and expressions, revealing their deepest behavioral motivators. It opens up a world of insights, replacing conventional psychographic and demographic analysis with discovering the “why” behind consumer decisions.

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Your Cultural Fluency Roadmap

Collage customizes your brand's cultural fluency journey based on your maturity model. From strategic planning to identifying growth audiences, brands leverage Collage's cultural intelligence platform to jump start growth from day one. By deeply understanding the purchase drivers of your target audiences and assessing where your brand's cultural fluency in the competitive context, marketing and insights professionals can take action with intention across new marketing campaigns and media buys.

  1. Recognize that consumers demand cultural fluency. Our research found that 67% of consumers feel brands don’t conduct sufficient research when it comes to authentically representing the diversity of every demographic in advertising. But cultural fluency goes well beyond representation.
  2. Make culture a core component of your strategic approach. Top brands recognize today’s consumers are not a monolith and dive into micro-segments and audiences to understand differing and shared cultural traits, passion points, fandoms, and moments that matter.
  3. Leverage culturally-focused data and insights. Leading brands don’t rely on anecdote. They combine in-culture expertise with deep analytics to decipher and navigate cultural complexity and nuance.
  4. Drive ROI with the Halo Effect. Top brands use cultural specificity to authentically target specific segments in ways that also appeal to broader audiences.

With cultural fluency, you accelerate business growth for both the immediate and long term.

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Assess. Understand. Act.

By diving into key culture-based data and insights on the fastest growing segments from the beginning, brands build in a competitive advantage into their growth strategies, creative briefs, advertising effectiveness, media buying and new product development. Cultural fluency translates into enduring growth. To learn more, download our CMO Whitepaper.

  • Brand
    Health

    How well does your brand resonate with different consumer segments – and why?

  • Brand
    Advocacy

    Are user experience and performance strong enough across all segments to generate positive word of mouth?

  • Competitive
    Advantage

    What are your brand’s strengths among different segments; and what weaknesses do you need to address?

  • Ad & Media
    Effectiveness

    Are you developing culturally-relevant ads from the beginning of the process? Or do you modify later and spend media dollars to test?

  • Identify
    Segment Gaps

    Which growing consumer segments have affinity, relevance, fit or trust for your brand but have not yet purchased?

  • Untapped Opportunities

    What emerging trends align with your brand’s values? What is your brand’s differentiation based on cultural traits?

Pernod Ricard logo

We are very fortunate to be partners and to work alongside Collage. From internal meetings about terminology, and multicultural understanding, and keeping our focus, to very specific tailored programs and research they’ve conducted for us, Collage has been integral to Pernod Ricard’s multicultural journey.”

Christian Arango, Cultural & Inclusive Marketing Manager
Pernod Ricard

Frequently Asked Questions

DEI is internal policy; inclusive marketing is external consumer engagement.

Up to one‑third of shoppers cut spend when brands retreat.

Use B‑CFQ across Relevance, Trust, Fit, Values, Memories and Advocacy.

Shared‑values storytelling and co‑creation beat token imagery.

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