To Lead Culture, “Connect to Communities in a Meaningful Way”, Says Smirnoff Global Brand Director

For Smirnoff, living in culture means “meeting our consumers where they are, versus expecting them to come to us,” said Stephanie Jacoby, the vodka’s global brand director. But it means more than jumping on social trends. It requires nuanced understanding and adding value.

"If you can lean in and create that sense of belonging, connect to these communities in a really meaningful way, and participate in a way that drives it forward, that message is going to be bigger than just that community,” she added.

The cross-disciplinary LBB and RWS-presented panel – completed by RWS Group senior director James Alexander, RSA Films director Meji Alabi, and Adobe Firefly’s director global agency partnerships Jay Ganaden – unpicked what it really takes to go beyond responding to culture and to truly connect with various communities.

As a creator and director with Nigerian heritage who was born in London and grew up in Houston, Meji values his “blend of all different cultures, come together. So, when I'm creating, I'm creating from that palette.”

Culture comes from people, he said, adding that authenticity is actually pretty simple: “We should work with creators who are from that culture, within that culture. Since the world is diverse, it's not necessarily where you're from exactly, but it's also your lived experiences and how you can apply that to your work. So I feel that, in order to be authentic, get the best engagement, you need to be working with people from within those environments.”

It’s a principle that shows in Meji’s portfolio of work with brands. He spoke about a Guinness project from 2022 – ‘Black Shines Brightest’ which was made with a UK team in Nigeria. “They listened to us, they took on board what we were saying, and it was incredible. In the end, it came out absolutely amazing. And I think just because the creative agency had respect for the culture, they had respect for the creators that they were working with. In the end, they got the best product. Nobody was trying to impose ideas[...] Trust is important, and when you build that trust with the agency and they trust you as a creator, then you can really create a product that's insane and resonates with people.”

While AI enables ideas to scale and move faster, James agreed with Meji that trust is central. “We still always have to allow that space for creativity and make sure that from right at the beginning, right through to delivery, we have the ability to inject human, creative input and trust as well. Trust your local teams, your local agencies, to be creative in the way that they need to be with the guardrails and the enablement covered off in terms of what's what the brand wants to communicate.” Ultimately, commands from above don’t allow for connection to flourish. "Creativity doesn't scale through control; it scales through enablement and trust," he said.

But connecting with communities also takes an attention to detail. "Culture is something that is lived and not necessarily surveyed," observed Jay from Adobe, looking back to a project when he was early in his UX career that observed culture quite closely, taking into account the intricacies of how Disney fans behave at Disney World to create the Magic Band – an elegant solution to various problems of the theme park experience that he said “became a sort of collectible in itself. That was about tapping into that culture of the people that attend Disney World.”

So how do we measure a brand’s connection to culture? “I think we probably need to come up with new methodologies to do this,” ventured James, “to understand how well a brand is participating – the community membership of a brand, as opposed to the more transactional metrics around engagement. But my sense is that that's an area of growth that we can look at developing as brands and agencies.”

For Smirnoff, the key indicators they drive towards are to be perceived as a brand that is “leading the way, a brand more interesting than other brands.” That drives what they call ‘distinctivity’. “Distinctivity is the key driver of pricing power,” she said. “That's the measure that we're constantly tracking to see if our culture activation and how we're showing up is moving that in the right direction.”

But there’s also an important “very non scientific measure of this,” she added. “Does it give you goosebumps? Does it move you?”

As a filmmaker, that’s Meji’s central metric, he ventured. “You know when you make something that means something. You can feel it.”

Even for the AI expert, universal human emotion has to be central. “If we start with this universal truth, or, you scaffold it on human stories of redemption, of happiness and the pursuit of it, these things that sound cliché – how is it [then] adapted to your brand? That's storytelling 101, right? And are you rooted in those very human-feeling stories? I think that's the starting point.”