Most brands wait to be invited into the cultural conversation. The ones worth studying went ahead and started one.
There’s a difference between dominating a category and driving culture, but most brands never figure out how to do either. But dominating a category and driving culture are not opposing goals — often, they are interconnected.
Dominating a category means you outsell or outrank the competition, often by outspending them. It’s a real achievement, and most businesses would take it happily. But a handful of brands do something harder: they produce moments — products, partnerships, programs, activations, stories, campaigns — that people outside their customer base talk about, remember, and repeat. That’s culture. And it’s why, when we built the criteria for the Brand Hall of Fame, cultural impact became one of the attributes we weigh most heavily in deciding who gets inducted.
Cultural impact isn’t the same as popularity
Plenty of huge brands are well known and instantly forgettable. What separates the inductee-caliber brands is that they don’t just follow the zeitgeist; they help create it. They occupy the newsfeed instead of just showing up in it.
Four brands that changed the conversation
MTV is a clear example. It didn’t advertise music videos into popularity — it invented an entire viewing habit and with it, a generation’s identity. “I want my MTV” wasn’t a tagline people repeated because an agency was clever. It was a rallying cry because the network had actually changed how an entire generation experienced music.
Levi’s did something quieter but just as durable: it popularized Casual Friday. A denim company didn’t just sell pants; it rewrote a workplace norm that outlived the campaign that started it by decades.
That’s the tell of real cultural impact: it keeps showing up long after the marketing budget that launched it is gone.
ESPN turned sports highlights into appointment television and then into a cultural vocabulary of their own: SportsCenter catchphrases entered everyday conversation the way slang does, not the way ad copy does. And Budweiser figured out, decades before anyone called it “content,” that a Super Bowl ad could be a cultural event people discussed at work the next morning, whether or not they drink beer.
The actual mechanism
None of these brands got there by playing it safe. They made things — a network, a workplace norm, a broadcast format, a shared moment — that gave people something to talk about besides the product itself. That’s the actual mechanism. Culture doesn’t attach itself to brands that are merely good at what they sell. It attaches to brands willing to make something worth talking about beyond the transaction.
The challenge, if you’re building a brand
Stop asking how to win your category and start asking what conversation you could start that has nothing to do with your product category at all.
- What would it take for a journalist, a creator, or a stranger at a dinner party to bring you up unprompted?
- What moment could you manufacture that people would repeat without being asked to?
Most brands wait to be invited into the cultural conversation. The ones worth studying went ahead and started one.
Chris Kneeland is the co-founder of Cult Collective, The Gathering Festival, and the Brand Hall of Fame, all headquartered in Calgary, AB.
