Changing the game. Creating culture.

Since the fall of 2007, I have been asking myself the same question over and over and over again:

As advertisers, are we trying to change culture’s perceptions, or are we trying to create a new culture?

I graduated from Wartburg College in May of 2007, two weeks following this momentous and surprising day; I started working at Harvest Moon Advertising in La Crosse, WI. At the time, I had an idea of what advertising was and how it worked. But what I still don’t know, three years later, is what purpose does advertising/marketing serve? I understand that we are supposed to help market a brand, their products and services – but when I started to think about the role we play in business and society, I wondered if we can do more.

As my career has grown and my experience has evolved, I have started to look beyond the standard advertising definition and considered a different approach. Something more. Something bigger. Something new.

Changing a culture’s perception about a brand is basic advertising and marketing. This is generally what you see on TV and hear on the radio. Changing a perception is essentially, informing the target audience of what the brand is, what it stands for and how it can help you, the customer. Changing perception is safe.

This is what I used to think advertising was. This is what I used to think was our only objective. But what if we had the power to create a new, cooler culture around a brand, product, and idea? Starbucks has.

Starbucks is a coffee shop. And there’s absolutely nothing special about their coffee (except they have a flavor for every damn season). But they have made it cool to do two things:
A) Drink Starbucks coffee
B) Hang out at Starbucks

You can’t go anywhere without seeing anyone – business professional to homely college student – carrying their warm, cup of Starbucks. And if that isn’t enough, they let us, their audience, create a new, universally known brand name – ‘bucks.

Drinking a cup of Starbucks has become a status symbol. It gave us a new status. A cool status.

They didn’t change our perception. They didn’t waste their time. They skipped that step and went right to creating a new, hipper culture that focused around one thing – their brand. Their (product) coffee just kind of fell in line, and then into our hands. They made it cool to carry around a blazing-hot latte on Saturday morning around the mall. They made it cool to walk into class late with cup of joe. They made it cool to ask, “That’s not a Starbucks?” They made us cool.

Starbucks is king of simple marketing, because we do their hard work. They own social media pages on Twitter and Facebook with network sizes that rival blonde homecoming queens. In fact, their interactive push is another outlet for them to create culture. They have followers and friends that post messages, share photos, share videos, share stories on Starbucks’ page. It’s like their social networks have forgotten that Starbucks is a corporation. Or, is Starbucks just that good. Do they make it appear to their network that they aren’t just a corporation? That maybe they are something more. That maybe they are a new, cooler, hipper, culture.