The other influencer strategy: Scaling brands with Cultural Influence

Are you Investing in Cultural Influence or Influencer Culture?

One compounds influence into billion-dollar brands.

Whilst the other loses 86% of its audience in three seconds.

Today’s marketing follows an influence equation aimed at volume: Newness × Frequency × Reach

Brands are spending more and more on renting the attention of the followers (aka ‘community’) influencers build. Unilever has pledged to allocate half of its global advertising budget to an ‘influencer-first’ strategy. But this transactional influence strategy is starting to show diminishing effectiveness as people have developed unconscious patterns to avoid anything resembling marketing – 45% of boosted creator spend on Meta delivering zero value.

And the returns will get worse as digital attention and engagement shift:

• Audiences are disappearing into ‘dark social’: the ad-free worlds of DMs, group chats, and Discord servers. Instagram engagement has collapsed from 2.94% to 0.61% over the last year.
• As the ‘dead internet theory’ rapidly becomes a reality, with half of all internet traffic now bots, the marketing metrics of the 4Vs are rendered false positives, as brands confuse chatter between AI agents and AI influencers for genuine influence.

Brands need to operate on a new influence equation: Depth × Community × Meaning

It’s increasingly easy to copy product and media (sometimes with just a prompt), so depth, community, and the meaning you create are what competitors can’t clone. This is a compounding advantage as one truly engaged community member has the impact of 234 social media followers, creating a multiplier effect of advocacy.

In hyper-crowded categories, such as beauty and personal care, where over a quarter of all new brands launch, cultural influence provides a sustainable path to differentiation and long-term growth. Dove has become Unilever’s largest brand, generating nearly 10% of the group’s sales by shaping cultural conversations and investing in communities. Its growth is a testament to the value of deep cultural resonance.

In contrast, we can all learn from VF Corp’s expensive blunder of what happens when you disregard your community for the sake of reach. VF acquired Supreme in 2020 for $ 2.1 billion. A valuation Supreme built with its devoted, tight-knit skate and street community. VF’s strategy to scale the brand alienated rather than partnering with the very community it sought to attract. The brand’s influence dulled, with VF writing down the brand’s value (goodwill/trademark), and in 2024, it sold Supreme for $1.5B, swallowing $600M in losses.

The hard truth is that you can’t buy cultural influence. You have to build it.

The Strategic Framework for Building Cultural Influence

Cultural influence isn’t the ‘nice to have’ that supports your ‘real’ marketing. Instead, it’s the foundation that makes everything else succeed. While people have started discussing cultural influence, it’s striking to us how little attention is given to understanding how it works.

Several of our clients have recently asked us to apply this understanding as they develop methods for identifying and measuring what truly makes a difference. Therefore, this framework consists of three interconnected components: the Architecture, which defines the brand’s core identity; the Playbook as a guide on how to engage and grow with communities; and the Compass of Key Value Indicators (KVIs) to start measuring what genuinely matters.

Part 1 / The Architecture (The What) / The Four Brand Pillars

Before you can engage a community, you must first define what your brand stands for and where it belongs. The architecture is defined through four pillars:

1. Myth: your purpose and origin story

The creation myth explains why you exist. True mythology connects to more profound human truths and shared aspirations. This creates believers and a purpose worth defending.

2. Rituals: the tangible experiences

The strongest communities are woven together through repeatable behaviours (individual or shared). These rituals become a meaningful part of people’s lives. Such experiences generate unique interactions, making membership tangible and reinforcing the brand’s mythology.

3. Distinctive symbols: the unique identifiers

Create a powerful sense of insider status and shared identity. The IYKYK (if you know you know) principle: visual and verbal lexicon that insiders recognize – symbols, subtle signals, and insider references that act as a shorthand for belonging.

4. Cultural Space: where you belong

Stop leading with demographics. Find the cultural space where you can become an indispensable part of people’s identities and conversations. Understand, amplify, and help resolve the core cultural tensions, contradictions, and unspoken truths.

We’ve defined the architecture; Strava shows what it looks like in the wild. Strava offers a blueprint for when the architecture becomes a business model, not just a campaign strategy:

• Myth: ‘Virtual Locker Room’ was founded by ex–Harvard rowers who missed team camaraderie. By defining athletes by effort, not speed, Strava fosters motivation, belonging, and mutual respect: ‘if you sweat, you’re an athlete’
• Cultural Space: Team-sport culture. Strava transformed the individualistic nature of personal fitness tracking into a culture of team sports. It met a core tension: individual sports are often a lonely pursuit, yet athletes crave motivation, validation, and connection. It first earned credibility with serious cyclists (middle-aged men in Lycra or ‘MAMILs’ as the founders called them), and has expanded to over 50 sports today.
• Rituals: Built into the platform. Kudos for daily encouragement, Strava Art for creativity, Year in Sport for identity, and friendly rivalry and motivation – local clubs, King/Queen of Mountain (KOM/QOM), performance prediction, training logs and remote races with real merch.
• Symbols: ‘If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen’ mantra, the instantly recognizable orange activity line, scoreboard (KOM/QOM crown). The value of Strava lies not only in its code but also in the 150 million athletes already on the platform and the two million users added each month, collectively forming a vast and defensible network.

Brands that align these four pillars become irreplaceable parts of their communities’ identities. But how do you build these relationships?

Part 2 / The Playbook (The How) / Principles for Engaging Community

Stop leading with demographics and start identifying your communities – 69% of adults are more influenced by shared interests than shared age. This playbook moves beyond the brand-as-host model as communities now self-organise across IRL and niche digital spaces, often beyond a brand’s reach. So brands need to be part of a community, rather than try to manage it. Participate, don’t perform. And relate to your community as people, not consumers. Engage through their passions, creativity, and identity.

Our principles for engaging communities help you navigate this thoughtfully and avoid appropriation:

+ Learn the grammar: Before engaging, invest the time to listen. Understand the memes, lore, and cultural touchstones. This is the foundation for authentic participation and representing a community accurately, avoiding stereotypes.

+ Create mutually beneficial value: Treat communities as a living system. Reciprocate, don’t extract, and the value becomes mutual and compounding. Contribute genuine value by uplifting your community, enabling creation, and (co-)funding projects without strings.

+ Empower organic creation: This is the highest level of trust. Not just the community trusting you, but you trusting the community. It’s about respecting your community and letting go of control to allow valuable exchanges to happen organically.

+ Grow networks through reputation: People belong to overlapping communities. Your actions and impact in one community affect your welcome in others. This requires a long-term commitment to act with integrity and uphold commitments, even in challenging times.

+ Bridge through affinities: Grow by identifying and building bridges between communities, such as shared members, complementary needs, or aligned values. To build bridges that strengthen rather than dilute your network, understand what is truly relevant to each community.

When subcultural fluency happens, the success can be rapid and unexpected.

K-Pop: Demon Hunters was built as a love letter to K-pop – made with K-pop industry collaborators, idol vocals and layered with insider references for stans. The film struck a chord with the zeitgeist by swapping generic U.S.-centric tropes for K-pop’s energy and pressures: perfectionism, performance, and sisterhood over romance. Crucially, it turned the power of fan love into a world-saving narrative: the Honmoon (the protective barrier) literally strengthens through the idol–fan connection that Netflix extended into real-world sing-along screenings, inviting audiences to ‘seal the Honmoon’.

As a result, it has become Netflix’s most-watched animated original and second most popular English-language film (180M+ views). It resonated so deeply with the subculture that fans became an army of creators and evangelisers. Within days, it jumped from a streaming title to a cultural event: fan art and dance covers flooded the internet, real-life K-pop idols did their own takes, cosplayers showed up at various Cons, and the fictional groups, Saja Boys and HUNTR/X, surpassed records set by BTS and Blackpink on U.S. Spotify.

The multiplier payoff of the network effect

A common critique of community-led cultural influence is that it’s a slow path to growth. However, this confuses foundation building with stagnation. When done right, a community’s value appreciates until it becomes a self-sustaining multiplier of growth.

Different mechanism, different math. You’re not scaling through individual reach; you’re scaling by expanding one trusted connection into hundreds through shared passion and values. Every new member and every new connection increases the network’s value for everyone. Healthy communities create their own content, answer their own questions, and lead their own rituals, reducing acquisition, marketing, and support costs while compounding growth.

This model is especially effective when a brand fosters connections among diverse communities. This generates significant Cultural Network Value, which we define as the combined strength of a community’s internal relationships and the brand’s ability to connect communities through their shared affinities.

LEGO offers a masterclass lesson. Once centred on children and parents, the brand built two types of bridges that lifted 2024 revenue 13% to over $10 billion while the broader toy market shrank. First, it expanded the AFOL (Adult Fans of LEGO) subculture by serving existing fans with complex 18+ builds and then pulling in the home-design and craft communities by repositioning bricks as DIY décor (Botanicals and LEGO Art). Second, it reached crossover fandoms by licensing mega-franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter.

Figma’s bridge strategy was different but equally powerful. As a UX/UI design platform, its core community was designers, but Figma recognised that design is cross-functional. By welcoming PMs, engineers, and marketers onto the platform, Figma turned collaboration into adoption. Now, more than two-thirds of its users are non-designers. This momentum fuelled their IPO debut (barely a decade after launch): Figma’s stock surged ~250% with a market value reaching $56 billion on the first day.

Part 3 / The Compass (The Value) / Key Value Indicators (KVIs)

To guide this ongoing process, brands need a new set of diagnostic tools.

Traditional marketing KPIs (revenue, market share) are lagging indicators; you’re responding to things that have already happened. Key Value Indicators (KVIs) serve as a compass, leading indicators that track where value or issues are likely to emerge. This allows brands to be agile in a fast-moving, volatile world.

When Meaning Resonance flags, you’ll know culture has started to leave you behind. When Memory Equity fades, your pricing power will begin to erode. When Passion Intensity drops in a core community, you’ll see future churn.

Five KVIs that can help you measure your brand’s cultural influence:

1. Cultural Network Value: Internal community density plus external bridge capacity. It’s not just about the number of people in your community, but also about how deeply connected they are and your ability to communicate with other relevant communities.

2. Passion Intensity: Measure how deeply your brand connects to what people care about. Time spent, deep attention, creation velocity, and ritual participation.

3. Meaning Resonance: The gap between what you think your brand means and what culture decides it means. Analyse narrative drift (intended message vs received message) and track whether you are leading cultural conversations or just following them.

4. Memorable Equity: Cultural capital you can bank. Can people recognize you from a fragment? Do your phrases enter everyday language? Does your aesthetic spawn imitation or parody?

5. Cultural Resilience: Loyalty – yours and your community’s: The degree to which your community will actively support, defend, and sustain your brand through periods of controversy, disruption, or instability and the extent to which you reciprocate that support

Tomorrow’s Influential Brands are Investing in Cultural Influence Today

When attention shifted from TV to Instagram, traditional brands stuck to their media strategies, while digital-native brands like Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club built billion-dollar businesses in the feed. The first movers didn’t just win: they wrote the playbook and reshaped categories.

Now we’re at another inflection point. But this shift isn’t simply about moving spend to a new platform. It’s about moving from buying reach to earning trust. As bots flood feeds, ads are ignored in three seconds, algorithms gate attention, and audiences go dark, the highest ROI influence comes from the relationships you earn and build.

Sustainable, durable value lies in growing your Cultural Network Value: the strength of your communities and the affinities that connect, which together create resilience. A new entrant can copy features, undercut prices, or mimic your campaigns, but replicating your network is hard.

This isn’t just about brand loyalty. It’s about brand leadership.

The brands that understand this aren’t waiting for the future – they’re creating it.

Start by answering one question: “Which cultural space do we belong to and how will we show up?”

Contact

Cato Hunt – Co-Managing Director · c.hunt@space-doctors.com

Sui Lai Kang – Senior Director · s.kang@space-doctors.com

Sources

• Are Creators Really Effective?, CreativeX (Jul 2025)
• After Unilever’s Influencer Pivot, Creator Rates Jump 30%, The Drum (Jul 2025)
• LinkedIn Leads in Engagement at 6.50% — Here’s How Other Platforms Stack Up, Buffer (Apr 2025)
• 2025 Community Trends Report, Circle (2025)
• More than 25% of all New Brands Launched are in the Beauty and Personal Care Industry, Euromonitor International (Aug 2024)
• Supreme’s Future Now Rests With EssilorLuxottica After $1.5 Billion Deal With VF Closes, Women’s Wear Daily (Oct 2024)
• “Passion Over Age”: The 2024 Subculture Field Guide Urges Marketers to Embrace “Niche Over the Norm”, PR Newswire (Nov 2024)
• “I Don’t See the Fandom Slowing Down”: How ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Became One of Netflix’s Biggest – and Most Unexpected – Hits, The Hollywood Reporter (Aug 2025)
• Figma Shares Jump 250% in Their Stock-Market Debut, Wall Street Journal (Jul 2025)