Culture Driven Brands Win
Why Substack, Cultural Relevance, and Breaking Silos Win in Today’s Brand Playbook
In a noisy digital world, brand strategy hinges on three truths: owning your voice, aligning internal teams, and earned attention through cultural relevance. These established playbooks are already driving success.
1. Own Your Story—Start a Brand-Run Substack
Rare Beauty’s substack, “Rare Beauty Secrets” offers more than product drops. It delivers behind-the-scenes insight, mental health authenticity, and founder-aligned storytelling. The result: high engagement, strong open rates, and 17% of subscribers found via Substack’s discovery tools according to voguebusiness.com.
Why this works:
Direct relationship building: Every email lands in a subscriber’s inbox, not shoved or dodged by algorithms.
Agility: In-house created content lets you pivot faster than social media.
Depth over flash: Audiences crave substance, and they get it in every issue.
Want your brand to break through noise? Take a page out of Rare Beauty’s playbook and start building exclusivity and trust via owned channels like Substack, not just chase likes and impressions on social media channels.
2. Break Down Internal Silos
Weber Shandwick’s Jim O’Leary frames five seismic shifts that will reshape communications and marketing over the next 5 years; the attention, creator, stakeholder, experience, and intelligence economies, and he warns against operating in silos.
For agency leaders: In today's world, nothing is siloed. The separate disciplines of earned media, digital, advisory, influence, and intelligence have converged. Only those who operate seamlessly across all areas will survive the shifts reshaping our profession.
Brands tied in knots between digital, creative, legal, and media ops will lose ground.
Which leads us to a better model for the future:
Cross-functional squads: Tiny teams (squads) with combining roles with members from various areas like creative, data, PR.
Unified metrics: Combine attention, sentiment, and outcomes.
Shared tooling: Use centralized platforms for content, analytics, and distribution.
When teams collaborate instead of clash, your brand moves faster, and louder.
3. Lead With Cultural Relevance, especially for Gen Z
At Cannes Lions, brands heard loud and clear: Gen Z wants content that reflects their inner world. Pinterest’s Sara Pollack described them as builders of “vision boards”, planning purchases and experiences far in advance. As far as, Gen Z is concerned Millennials are behind in this forethought when they were the ages of current members of Gen Z.
Brands responding and adapting well are:
Embracing nostalgia: VR fashion shows, interactive shopping.
Timing moments: Releasing campaigns that speak to current experiences.
Meaning, not messaging: Building emotional resonance instead of ad fatigue.
Conversions follow emotional bonds, not vice versa.
Final Take
Your brand doesn’t have to chase every trend or spend a fortune on ads to make an impact. Start by owning your voice, breaking internal silos, and building cultural resonance. Do these three well, and you win trust, loyalty, and real ROI.