Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel is the Senior Lead of Global Insights at Reddit, and a cultural theorist, writer, and strategist specializing in inclusivity within marketing, media, and tech. With a PhD from Duke University, she's a senior insights lead at Reddit and has advised global brands like Nike and Disney. Her book, "Cultural Intelligence for Marketers: Building an Inclusive Marketing Strategy," offers a practical guide to navigating the intersection of cultural shifts and commercial purpose.
I start all these interviews with the same question. I use this in my work actually, too, with a question I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian and she helps people tell their story. I steal it because it's such a beautiful question. But because it's such a beautiful question, I kind of over-explain it. So before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. All right. And so the question is, where do you come from?
What a question. A beautiful question, indeed. And a complicated one. My mind goes to thinking about my immigrant story and how the question of where do you come from can be complicated and at times painful. And I suppose painful, not in a kind of cringy way, but in a beautiful way, because it points to the complexity of human experience.
It's a complicated question for me primarily because I'm not only an immigrant, but I'm somebody who left home by myself when I was still a minor. I had just turned 16 when I left my family and my home behind. And what one would refer to as where I come from.
So there is no straightforward answer to that question, because where I come from is both there and here and in other places as somebody who has crossed borders from a rather young age. But from a genealogical point of view, I come from Eastern Europe. And I suppose I like to think about the genealogies of struggle that I come from.
And that's something that I speak and write about quite a bit. And I like the word struggle because it can be taken up as something to describe adversity or difficulty or struggling to endure certain conditions. And I come from genealogies of people who struggled and survived under occupation and war and living decades under authoritarian rule.
So where I come from is defined by those repressive histories and being born into a repressed society. But I also think about where I come from from my experience of being in struggle. And so when I answer that question, I would always say, well, I come from Eastern Europe, but I also come from the US South and Durham, North Carolina, which is where I was part of a lot of political and social movements that have been my political home that are not genealogically where I come from, but politically and in terms of my values are a home that raised me and that shaped me into who I am. So this is my way of answering that question, I suppose.
Yeah, it's beautiful. Do you have a memory of being a child and like what you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you have a recollection of what you kind of wanted to be?
Yeah, so interesting to say that out loud, given the current political environment we're in and the electoral politics in the United States. When I was growing up, I was convinced I would be the president of Latvia, which is—I'm not sure if I actually mentioned. I said maybe Eastern Europe, but I grew up in Latvia.
And I was growing up when the first female president of Latvia was in office in the late 90s. And that was my vision for myself and something that I was completely convinced of. And it was an interesting contradiction of living in a cultural and social environment where no one had ever told me that I couldn't.
But there were also a lot of different repressive ideas around what it means to be a girl and who you're supposed to become. So I had a grand dream of being the president of my country. And that was that was my first aspiration.
And I have since admittedly become a little bit more skeptical of electoral politics.
What was the impact of that, just the impact of seeing a woman as the leader of your country? Do you remember how significant that was or what it felt like?
I think on some subconscious level, and I should clarify, I was like six or eight years old. So on a subconscious level, it did open up possibilities for me of what was possible. It was never necessarily positioned to me that a girl is not supposed to be a leader.
However, a contradiction exists when you exhibit leadership qualities as a girl in post-Soviet Latvia in Eastern Europe. It becomes more of a problem that you realize. But growing up, it did, I suppose, give me an idea that I could be anybody and I could achieve whatever I wanted to.
No one ever told me that that was an unattainable position. So I suppose it impacted me even at a very young age and subconscious level of seeing somebody that I saw as my role model and how that has influenced me and shaped me and my passion for women's empowerment.
Yeah. So where are you now? Tell me a little bit about where you're located and what you are up to these days.
I am located in Birmingham, Alabama, in the south of the United States. And as I said, home is here and there and everywhere. So where you come from is a complicated question.
But this has been my new home for the last almost three years now, going on third year. I'm here because my spouse also has an immigrant story. He is a son of Haitian immigrants who is pursuing his neurosurgical career here in Birmingham, Alabama.
So I'm here supporting his immigrant dreams. And meanwhile, I continue my work primarily in brand research and cultural strategy. I work within or I have been working within the space since leaving the academy, which was another home of mine for many, many years.
Yeah. When did you first encounter the idea that you could make a living doing this thing called brand consulting or brand strategy?
Very late into the beginning of my career. In fact, it was not only not on the horizon, it was not within the realm of my consciousness, in the least for most of my academic slash activist career. As I alluded to, I've been part of a lot of social movements and political causes.
And for the longest time, I was on the opposite end of the spectrum. And in fact, I would probably be the person to critique and boycott brands and in other ways, challenge what brands were doing, which I'd like to hope now makes me a better strategist and a better marketer. Just understanding the spectrum of how people see brands.
And it first occurred to me at the end of my doctoral training in 2019, when I started exploring career paths outside of academia, I trained in cultural studies and specifically in Black Studies and Feminist Studies. And I joined a brand-a-thon at the beginning of the pandemic that was focused on creating ideas and coming up with creative campaigns to encourage mask wearing, specifically in predominantly conservative states. And so that was my first exposure, real hands-on exposure, besides thinking about media studies and brands and advertising as part of cultural production and pop culture.
It was the first time I became aware of the role that I can play in shaping behavioral adoption and driving cultural ideas. And so from there on after, it was a straight line for me or a straight journey into cultural research and strategy.
Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about the kind of clients you work for and the kind of questions that come to you with? Yeah, what kind of work are you doing?
Currently, my work has shifted because I went in-house and I'm currently an insights lead at Reddit. And so a lot of my work is actually more so in the realm of what I would call digital topology, studying online communities and essentially supporting Reddit's ad business and supporting our clients across a variety of verticals from financial services to travel to CPG to tech and in identifying communities online that align with their needs as a business, right? And reaching those communities and engaging them.
Prior to Reddit though, I was a consultant and I worked in cultural research and innovation strategy. So a lot of my work involved applying semiotics, cultural analysis and media studies to help brands understand and uncover areas of opportunity, reposition their brands in line with emergent trends as well as identify insight related to overlooked audiences. So much of what I focused on was drawing on my black feminist studies training, gender sexuality studies training and critical race studies training to help brand clients like Nike, Hinge, Amex, Disney, etc. activate with consumer segments that they might have overlooked in the past.
What do you love about the work? Like where's the joy in it for you?
The joy is truly in understanding the power of culture and more specifically the power of brands and culture and the kind of influence that brands as producers of media have in the world. I find that in marketing and in brand strategy specifically, we talk quite frequently about trends and what trends can do for brands and what culture can do for brands. But I find that the conversation about what brands can do for culture is there but comparatively not as explored or not as rigorous and top of mind for us.
And so I find joy in really bringing that to the forefront both as a practitioner now but also as an academic and somebody who passionately believes in the role of public intellectual work and thought leadership to change the discourse to shift and advance standards in the industry and in a profession. And my joy and my mission is really to bring to the forefront the kind of impact and influence that marketing has in culture, the kind of influence that brands have on shaping consumers behaviors and practices, norms and values, stereotypes, narratives that we see, and so on and so forth.
I really resonate with everything you just said. And I remember, it just occurred to me, I remember feeling like brand was the idea I always had in my head. It was like a Trojan horse that you could just smuggle in all these big beautiful ideas into the corporate sphere because brand is this sort of shared entity, right?
And I don't know if I'm not, I mean, that's what came to my mind. I don't mean to impose that on you. But I thought, I love how you said, we don't often really talk about what brands do for culture.
So I wanted to just sort of start at first principles because you also point out that maybe even the advertising and marketing world doesn't really talk insistently about what culture is. So what is, how do you define culture and what do brands do in culture?
I think of culture as an organizing system of beliefs, values, norms, expectations that we have or ourselves and each other. And the kind of meaning making that we are engaged in every day to make sense of the world, to understand it, to interact with it and to establish what is normal, what is valued, what is holy, what is forbidden, what is acceptable, what is celebrated, what is excluded and so on. And so it is an ecosystem of practices and behaviors that we have taken for granted and we have inherited.
And one way I think about it is the moment we are born, there's so much that goes even to the words, it's a boy or it's a girl. From the moment we come into this world, we are inundated with these sets of ideas, expectations around who we are, what we might be interested in. Thankfully, that's changing because culture is ever evolving.
But those kind of cultural scripts or rules are something that we inherit, adopt and then perpetuate from the time we are born. And to me, that's so powerful. And that's also so overwhelming in a sense, because everything around us is culture, which is why it's so hard to define it.
And when I think of brands' involvement in that, it seems to me pretty obvious because brands do use storytelling and representation to appeal to what we care about, what we desire, what we aspire to. I was just getting ads for cars and different kind of new models, right? Even the stories and narrative aspiration of what we want is embedded in those kind of stories that we are consuming through mass media, including advertising.
And so then there is such an undeniable symbiotic relationship between mass media, including advertising, that draws on culture as a material for inspiration and also for behavioral manipulation, right? In convincing people to behave in certain ways, to buy, etc. So I know I answered a little bit more than you asked, but that is why I think culture is so relevant to what we do.
I mean, this seems particularly challenging as change is happening so quickly, right? And the responsibility for brands to sort of participate in a meaningful way is, you know, the last 10 years has been this really challenging time for brands who are accustomed to maybe not assuming that kind of responsibility for meaning and for culture. Who gets it well and who doesn't get it well? I mean, you've written this book, Cultural Intelligence, right? To give people a guide. I mean, what kind of guidance do you give to brands on how to decide the role they play in culture?
I'm not sure that there is a brand that I think does it perfectly or I think is a brand that gets it all the way right. And I think part of that, now that I have transitioned from academia into commercial world with both my feet, I realize part of what we as marketers and people of conscience, people who want to do commercially viable but also responsible work are dealing with is constraints of the system, right? And we're talking about brands that are part of businesses that are looking to not make social impact per se in their work, but to make commercial impact.
And so when I think about what brands could be doing better or what brands in my view should be doing or rather marketers and brand leaders who are in charge of these brands is to actually reckon with the history of advertising. And I'm going to pivot a little bit the question or my answer to the question because that's something that I really want to talk about and what I described in the book, which is the long history of the relationship between representation, inclusion, social responsibility and brands that actually started way, way, way before than 10 years ago or 15 years ago when so-called brand purpose or social purpose entered the marketing arena. And currently I am on the hunt for this letter that one of the civil rights leaders actually sent to the CEO of Coca-Cola in the mid sixties demanding better representation for black Americans and threatening boycotts.
So on the contrary, now we have in the last year or so a lot of research coming out about boycotts, about brands facing pressures from consumers to do better, to be more inclusive, to be more socially responsible. Well, those calls have been coming from the margins all along. And the difference was that in the sixties, those consumers segments were not seen as influential.
We're not seen as worthy of listening to. And what we're now seeing is that people who care about these values and care about engaging in culture and with culture in a matter that's conscious and responsible have the power of the dollar behind them. So I think to be a conscious marketer and a brand leader, one has to really reckon with the history that has been erased and that has been sidelined and has been overlooked in marketing and advertising so much so that if you talk to an average marketer in our industry, they likely wouldn't even know that there's a long history of brands being implicated in the civil rights struggle in this country where there has been so much struggle to my earlier point about the word struggle in regards to demanding that brands act more responsible.
I probably didn't answer your question, but I found that important to mention because I do get a lot of questions around which brands are doing it well. And I guess my answer just to summarize is that I don't know if as an industry we're doing good enough.
Yeah, yeah. There's a therapist I quote often, Harlene Anderson. She is instructing her students on becoming therapists, and describes questions as conversational and not to be asked to get an answer, but to be asked as a way of participating in a conversation. So I have no expectation of getting any answers. I'm really just here to see what happens when I ask a question.
I love it.
I wanna, you came back to that idea of struggle and I just, I would love, are there examples or stories that you have about the struggle? What am I asking? Cause I think this is like to the point, like I came into this work with this really ideal about the Trojan horse, that there was a way in which some sort of understanding of the people on the other side of the transaction would transform the way brands operate in culture and in the world. They would sort of assume responsibility for being better. Are there any examples of brands doing this well or at least leaning in the right direction or what, yeah, what do you tell a brand leader who wants to guide their brand in this direction? What kinds of activities can they do to try to steer their brand in the right direction?
There are certainly examples of brands that I talk about often. In the book, I talk about Billie, which is a razor brand. So they started as a startup around 2018, around that time, if I'm not mistaken.
And they are one of the brands that I mention nearly in every interview that I do because I think they are a prime example of what it means for a brand to transform culture or to participate in culture in a way that carves out commercial advantage while also responding to the cultural movement and, in fact, leading the cultural conversation.
So for those who might not be familiar with Billie, Billie is a brand that was one of the first to put out campaigns around their direct-to-consumer, at that time, direct-to-consumer razor products and show women and their natural body hair in depictions of women using razor blades, right? Razor products.
And if you go back to the archives, so to say, of the 2018, 2019 culture conversation, it was seen as offensive, as rather outrageous, and certainly as groundbreaking. And they really left a mark on the category and they really broke into the category with something that wasn't yet normal and normalized in the way that it is now. Now that body positivity and body acceptance, size inclusivity, all ofthese things are being taken up by brands widely, but they saw that opportunity.
They identified what their consumers were yearning for that was missing from the category. They pinpointed where the culture was headed and they showed up with a product and a narrative around that product that really registered emotionally with women who have never seen their own body hair on the screen or in an ad. So that is an example, I think, of a brand that combined commercial opportunity with a cultural opportunity and leveraged it for the benefit of the business.
Now you can see Billie in Target. And if you go to the razor aisle, you'll see a bunch of other brands who look like Billie and try to emulate Billie, and have come after Billie. And so they have done that for commercial advantage, but also they shifted cultural conversation in a way that is really meaningful, but also really positive for representation that women and particularly young girls are now consuming when they are exposed to mass media, including marketing and advertising as they're coming of age.
Yeah. I wanna get to, because my newsletter is called THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING and you've used the word meaning in meaning making, what does meaning mean? When you use that word, what are we actually talking about when we talk about meaning? What does that word meaning mean for you?
What does the word meaning mean to me? To me, it immediately evokes this notion of ideology, which I'm very attached to as a classically trained cultural theorist, as somebody who finds value in semiotics, not only for academic inquiry, but also for business and commercial innovation. And meaning is truly how we make sense of the world.
It's how we assign value to things around us and how we make sense and define things. If I mentioned the word red, it evokes so many things. And if you ask me, if you give your answer, and if we ask a bunch of other people what they associate with the color red, we're likely to get somewhat similar responses.
Red, the color of passion and love. Red as in stop, right? Red as in tomato, right? If I wear a red lipstick, that projects a certain image. So in that small example, I think meaning is all about how we make sense of things. But most importantly, meaning is shared.
And in that sense, meaning is a shared system of what we might call representation. Because when you and I look at the red stop sign, we interpret it in the same way. And when we look at the red rose, we also are likely going to interpret it in the same way.
So all that is to say that meaning is shared. And meaning is the kind of web of signs and symbols that we all require to make sense of our condition, of our interactions, and move through the world.
Yeah. Do you have, what's your sort of methodology in terms of research? How do you get smart about the meaning of a brand or, yeah, the state of a category? What's your sort of preferred methodologies? And of course, I'm totally self-interested and will eventually ask you about the role of qualitative and ethnography and all that stuff.
The approach that I like to take is very interdisciplinary. So a lot of what I rely on is semiotics as a tool for understanding how culture is manifested, how is it shifting through the collection of signals and analysis of visual and verbal cues. And that might mean desk research, which I know a lot of times can get bad rep in marketing and strategy circles, specifically when we're pressed for time and we are looking for that stat to put in a pitch deck or something like that.
But I'm really thinking of desk research in terms of media and cultural analysis, gathering materials from social media, from pop culture, from politics, and really creating a mosaic of cultural artifacts and then looking for patterns that evolve in that picture of what is transpiring within culture or category. And specifically in category and brand analysis, I rely a lot on visual analysis of cues and signs and symbols that show up in everything from ad campaigns and ad narratives to product packaging and visual cues used by the brands. So that's kind of one way of approaching it.
And then additionally, I do discourse analysis. So as I mentioned, currently I work for a social media company. So a lot of that has to do with understanding online conversations, what is happening, conducting social listening.
And that's where we see some of the quant tools enter where we are not only trying to analyze the conversation by reading, analyzing the themes, narratives that emerge, but also the quantitative element of mentions, conversation volume, growth of certain communities, etc. So those are some of the methods that come to mind. And I do also have some experience in ethnographic research and direct consumer research, which I do less of now that I am with an online social media platform, but have done extensively in the past and find it so important, particularly when it comes to uncovering insights from people and groups of consumers that have been historically overlooked in advertising and marketing.
What's your sense of the difference between the kind of learning or the kind of understanding you get from a semiotic analysis or discourse analysis and what you get from a conversation or an ethnographic interview?
Such a good question. I write about that a little bit in the book. I find that the challenge that strategists, marketers, researchers face within the commercial context is that oftentimes, in my experience, working in various contexts, we expect people to give us the analysis of culture or the analysis of a category. The worth, the value of qualitative research is to hear people's stories and how they themselves make sense of their condition, of their lived experiences, of their reasoning, of their interactions. Which I think is very useful for finding that special insight that might be bubbling under the surface. It's not very obvious.
And understand how people think about their experiences. Because at the end of the day, to me, if I am interviewing somebody, if I am talking to them about their experience, whether with a product or a category or a cultural topic, it's really understanding their experience of it, their subjectivity, their way of seeing the world.
When I think about semiotics as a tool, I'm thinking more of a systematic analysis of what is being represented in media. And in part, what that person that I'm talking to is consuming, what is shaping their perceptions, what is shaping the kind of narratives that they are exposed to through media, through politics, through conversations online, through mass marketing, et cetera. The visuals that they receive. So in some ways, perhaps we can think about, or I think about, the qualitative ethnographic approach as bottom up and then semiotic approach as more of a top down where we are more focused on these kind of macro narratives that are shaping the cultural discourse.
Yeah, that's beautiful. Can you tell me just a little bit about semiotics? Not everybody really knows what that is. I think it's sort of a, like everybody in the UK knows what it is and practices it. But in the States, it's not something you kind of bump into all that often. I mean, more and more, it's true.
Well, funny enough, when I was consulting, I worked primarily with UK agencies, which is a great pain point for me because I do believe that semiotics has immense commercial value and is absolutely underappreciated in the US marketing circles, primarily because I suppose it's not as scientific, even though semiotics is an art and a science. And the way to understand semiotics is to think of it as a study of representation. So semiotics really is concerned with analyzing signs and symbols that we see around us.
And it could be something as simple as a milk packaging, milk package, milk packet, or something as grand and macro as a presidential ad campaign, right? So we are looking at the way things are represented and the way that meaning is encoded in those forms of representation. So other ways to think about it is to ask, how is meaning, or in other words, messaging, to use more simple language, communicated in direct and indirect ways?
How is meaning communicated through explicit language and implicit language, meaning symbols, colors, signs, things that are beyond spoken language, but that we all register and understand on a subconscious level. That's the way that I would describe it.
Yeah, it's wonderful. I'm curious about the value of semiotics is it is, is it theory? Is that an accurate term? I'm reminded of a conversation, one of these conversations I did with Kate Sieck, who's an anthropologist working in the business world. And she advocates really strongly for that theory, academic theory, when applied to method, it makes method super strong. It's a way of strengthening qualitative if you've got theory to back it up.
You come from academic world and are operating in the commercial space. Is semiotics a kind of sort of framework or theory that makes a strategist stronger or more effective in that way? And then follow up sort of what's it been like? What's the biggest, what's the most biggest challenge of coming from academia into commercial wackiness?
Absolutely. I mean, my whole mission, I suppose in the commercial world is to bridge the gap between academic theory and commercial practice. And one of the reasons for that is that shortly after I came on the scene in the commercial world, after 2020, I found that brands were asking questions that academic theory has answered long time ago.
And that's how my book came to be. It's an answer to a lot of the questions that marketers have asked about brands, identity, representation, inclusion, that coming from the disciplines of black studies, gender sexuality studies, critical race theory, decolonial theory. I found a lot of the answers already existed.
And so I wanted to bring some of those concepts and framework into the practice of marketing because I do believe that it can be useful and effective and very beneficial in the marketing practice. And so to that end, semiotics is an academic theory and semiotics or semiology is really originating in the disciplines of linguistics and understanding how language is formed. So to my earlier point, language can be written and spoken and language can be unspoken.
And so in that sense, semiotics is a rather complex theory that I would not even argue that I am fully reversed in terms of academic specialization. But all that is to say, I am absolutely convinced that marketers can only be more efficient and more successful when we look to other forms of knowledge that exist outside of business, precisely because as marketers, we deal so much, even though if we don't talk about it that way, with psychology, sociology, behavioral science, narrative, discourse, identity, representation, all of these things have been taken up by researchers, thinkers, artists, intellectual activists outside of the confines of business and somebody who came in to this work as an idealist as well, my growing concern is that there is a kind of, I might not want to call it anti-intellectualism, but suspicion of academic knowledge and I'm really committed to working against that.
What is the, I'm just thinking about your inner idealist and your mission, what's your touchstone? Do you have a theoretical touchstone or a mentor or like a hero that you keep returning to to inform your mission and your work to sort of awaken the marketing world to the intelligence of academic knowledge?
Absolutely. Well, funny, anyone who knows me knows that I am obsessed with Stuart Hall, who is a cultural theorist, that's on the academic side of things. And so it's rather funny because anytime we do any kind of icebreakers in my team meetings, and you have to talk about the last book you read or something that inspired you, I always talk about Stuart Hall.
His work informs so much of my own thinking. And so I always, always, always return to his written work and the way that the British School of Cultural Studies has reformed our understanding of culture as a system of ideologies. So that's my inspiration from the academic world.
But as I mentioned, I'm always looking to bridge the gap between academia and business. And in business, this is absolutely easy question to answer. I look up to my friend, mentor, colleague, Dr. Marcus Collins, who wrote the foreword to my book, for which I'm very grateful, and has his own bestselling book for the culture. And Dr. Collins is an experienced advertising executive, but also a professor at University of Michigan School of Business. And he's one of the people who I think is paving the way in the industry and inspiring these new ways of combining academic knowledge, infusing theory with practice. So he's somebody that I'm constantly studying and taking inspiration from and seeking guidance from in how he moves through the industry, precisely because he's just so fantastic and brilliant at bringing academic ideas into the business world and making them accessible, which is certainly something that I'm working on as somebody who started in academia rather than started in business and then went into academia. So it's something that I'm always inspired by.
Yeah. I would love to hear a little more, Stuart Hall, can you tell me a little bit more about what you love about his work?
Oh, absolutely. I love that anybody asks me about Stuart Hall and I don't get that question a lot. Stuart Hall was a renowned British Jamaican cultural theorist who was one of the founders of British Cultural Studies or School of Thought that we know as British Cultural Studies.
And Stuart Hall's work really focuses on the idea of culture as a system of representation, as a collection of ideologies that are in constant tension with each other. And so, beyond Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies, we talk about following Raymond Williams, the residual, the dominant and the emergent cultural forces. So really the work of Stuart Hall and the work of Cultural Studies as a discipline is to understand culture as a push and pull between more dominant cultural ideas and emergent cultural ideas that are rising on the margins, that are rising in subcultures, they are rising in social movements.
And one of the biggest contributions that Stuart Hall has made to the disciplines of Cultural Media Studies is to say that people, that audiences are not passive consumers of culture, that people who consume mass media, be popular culture or marketing or advertising, are always reinterpreting messaging and applying their own meaning to it. They're negotiating it. And that's actually one of the examples of academic theories that I use in my book to show to marketers how they can draw on the basics of audience theory, excuse me, reception theory per Stuart Hall, in which he talks about how when audiences receive messaging from media, they might accept it, they might challenge it, they might renegotiate it.
And so it basically drives home the point that when you're sending out your messaging and narratives in the form of marketing to audiences, it is expected that certain segments of your audience might react differently to the messaging that was in front of them because they're actively engaged in the process of meaning making. And so that's the theory I use to explain the backlash that brands have received in the past for putting out messaging that is either insensitive, not inclusive or outright offensive. It is because marketers have not anticipated the reception of their messaging precisely because they did not account for other forms of interpretation that overlooked groups of people might have in response to their marketing messaging.
So that is a little bit about Stuart Hall and also a little bit about how an academic theory, like the work of Stuart Hall, can be adopted in marketing to make sense of some of the challenges and potential solutions.
Yeah. And so what does Stuart Hall, what are the implications of this for a marketer? I mean, it seems like, I mean, yeah, what are the implications for the marketer? Maybe we've already talked about this and this is a very naive, redundant question, but- Not at all. I love everything you've said about, everything you've just said, I have a lot of connection to, so I'm just curious. Yeah, what are the implications? When you know this, what do you do differently?
When you know this, you understand that as a marketer that is producing media, you are imbuing the media you produce with your own assumptions, your own biases, your own subjectivities and your own ways of seeing the world. Hence, meaning making, right? We all make meaning in our own ways based on the conditions with which, where we come from, the experience that we've had.
And that is precisely what has happened in marketing and advertising for so long. To pick a very tangible example, that is precisely why people, and specifically women with darker skin tones, for decades could not find a product that matched their skin because people who were producing marketing campaigns and products were operating within their own meaning-making system, so to say, within their own worldview and completely ignoring the fact that there are groups of people that have different lived experiences and will have different interpretation response to their message. So once you realize that and you realize that you are inserting meaning into whatever you produce, and that meaning is going to be disseminated to people who are going to perceive it through their own lenses, for their own worldviews, as a marketer, you can start being more self-aware and self-critical of the importance of what I call social consciousness, somebody might call attention to bias, or other ways of being more inclusive, more expansive in, A, how we do research, how we arrive at an insight, who we cast, whether in our research studies or in actual campaigns, how we send out the work into the world, and whether we ask this one question, which I find very useful in my work, what is missing? What am I missing?
Who is missing here? What is being overlooked? What is unspoken? What is being silenced? What is something that we might be missing here? And I find, once we start asking that, we find things that have previously been overlooked and now can make our work only more effective and stronger.
Yeah. How would you characterize the way that the marketing, the commercial world has tried to pick these ideas up or address what's missing, the blind spots, the biases that you're talking about?
I am conflicted on this question because I definitely do find that I meet a lot of brand leaders and marketers who genuinely want to adopt these ideas and put theminto practice. At the same time, as an activist and somebody who has been in various social struggles for a long time, I also know it's just a condition of what it means to advocate for new ideas, that they are going to be constrained by systemic factors. And what we see throughout the history of social movements and social struggles, and I don't think that the question of inclusion and social responsibility is marketing in any exception, is that there's always going to be a push and pull between the dominant forces that have always defined, here's how we do things and here's how things run and here's what we value versus how we want things to be.
And these days, I find that there's more so creative energy in that. I used to speak a lot about co-optation, about appropriation, about the ways that brands can be performative and can co-opt social struggles or even these kind of movements for greater inclusivity, which I think always is going to be the case. But there's also some creative energy that I am trying to find inspiration from in that soul impulse saying, this is how things have always been, but this is not how things should be.
And asking who taught us that profit should come at the expense of ethics or who has normalized and made it widely accepted of an idea, a concept, a framework, a mindset that there is a distinction between profit and purpose, between being commercially successful and being ethically responsible. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question, but it sounds like you're okay with me taking whatever I want to take in. That's where I feel most passionate about is that we have erected these binaries in how we think and inevitably what brands do and how brands respond to this recent or not so recent attention to inclusivity and representation and social responsibility and social consciousness is ultimately going to be limited by these frameworks that have defined how we do things.
But there's something creative and generative in trying to break them apart and challenge them and ask who said that it has to be so.
Yeah, that divide is so deep and strong on both sides. I feel like I know, and I say this a lot too, because I spent some time working with sort of not-for-profits and I would put them on sort of the culture side where they value culture, right? But they don't want to participate in commerce because they feel like that's for the marketing people who are really interested in persuading and being bad actors. And then it's also, there's this question of brands on the commercial side who probably are reluctant or terrified or just clueless about the opportunity they have to participate in culture.
Right, which often really baffles me because when I think about, you know, commerce and success, commercial success, a lot of it comes from innovation and innovation is ultimately change. It's progress. You can't innovate if you are stagnant.
You can't innovate if you just accept culture as is, or if you try to play it within, you know, what I would call a dominant narrative. Innovation by itself, any innovation that has happened, whether it's by engineers or activists or artists, has happened because it leaned into that area of the unexplored, of the unknown, of what's coming, of what's emergent. So certainly the dogma or the way of thinking in the world of commerce is to follow the playbook and to focus on profits and to do what has worked.
But I'm always very curious about folks in commerce who are a bit fearful or antagonistic towards the ideas of cultural change and kind of that creative innovation because culture is evolving and headed forward whether we want it or not. And so if we want to harness it and want to leverage it for commercial advantage, for cultural impact, you name it, it seems like it's inevitable that we have to look to the horizon and at least lean into what's possible just a little bit.
Yeah. Oh, I love everything you just said. It occurred to me too because you used the dominant and the emergent, right? Is that from semiotics, that framework?
That is from one of the essays by cultural theorist Raymond Williams, who's also one of the founding fathers, so to say, of British cultural studies. And that's one way in which he described culture. And that's actually one of the main frameworks since we're talking about academic frameworks that can be adopted in business and in commerce.
So the RDE framework, as we call it in semiotics and in cultural analysis, is one of the ways that a lot of the consultants and cultural analysts working with brands and innovation teams will categorize signals and rather codes that they have identified, right? So if we're working on identifying innovative areas in a category, in culture, et cetera, we would think about them through the codes that are dominant versus the codes that are emergent.
And is there an R in there too?
Yes, residual. So residual is the, no, no, no, totally fair question. Residual is what's receding, what we might be seeing, but it's kind of less often, you know, is part of the conversation.
And one visual example, I'm a very visual person that I've seen in one of the workshops or talks that I've attended that really captures it for me. It was visualized as a platform at a train station. And the residual is a train that's in the distance, you know, headed to the distant direction.
You barely see it. You are aware of its presence, but it's receding. And then the dominant essentially is the train that is at the station, right? And the emergent is a train that's approaching the station. So that's one of the more simple ways of thinking about the residual, dominant, emergent framework.
Yeah, yeah. And is it fair to say that you try to help people discover the emergent narrative? Is that, or is that over simple? Is that reductive?
No, I think that's absolutely fair as much as that sounds specific or simple. I'm not sure which one, but that's exactly it with brands that want to be a challenger or brands that want to prepare for the future, right? You can be a brand that is seeking the emergent category in order to break into it here and right now and be one of the first to do so.
I talked about Billie. Billie identified the emergent narrative of body acceptance, body positivity when it was not dominant yet. They really dove deep in there and claimed that territory for themselves.
So that's one example. But you can also be a brand that knows that in order to thrive and in order to survive as a business, you have to prepare for the future. And so that's where that kind of work intersects with futures thinking and futures research, which I've also done in the past, where we are really looking towards the future and mapping what's to come.
And perhaps as a brand or in business in that specific context, you might not want to break into that particular emergent territory or category, but you certainly know that your business will be affected by it. And so in that kind of work where it's really about expansive understanding of the future that's to come, we would look at everything from politics, technology, governance to business and society to really understand what's emerging on the horizon. And brands that are here to stay for tomorrow invest in that kind of future forward work.
Beautiful. So we're at the end of time, but I sort of hadn't asked you about Reddit. And I just wondered if there's a... How has it been working at Reddit? Reddit is such a phenomenon. It's such a unique community and collection of communities and subcultures and stuff. What's it like working there?
I've always sworn that I would never go in-house. When I left academia, I was cozy in my consulting lifestyle where I would still select the projects that I work on and have the freedom to have my own schedule. So Reddit was an opportunity that I couldn't refuse despite the vow of solitude and independence that I made when entering the world of commerce.
And it is because Reddit is an archive of human data. It is a repository in human behavior. And if you are somebody who's an anthropologist or somebody who's just simply interested in how people think or what people say when no one is around, it's just a massive resource of information.
And what's particularly exciting to me and I find exciting for a lot of marketers and brand leaders is that it's a forum that's open to anybody. And I talked to quite a bit of researchers who have experience doing focus groups or doing ethnographic research and for which we still have to navigate to that distinction between the interviewer and the person who gets interviewed, right? And the scenario where you are extracting information from, so to say, the subjects of research, right?
And the power dynamics and that, et cetera. Reddit provides a unique, I think, opportunity to do social listening of the kinds of conversations that happen between people in online communities where there's no researcher present, there is no one observing them. And so when coupled with other research tools, I find it to be a really fascinating archive of human data, as I already said.
And so for that reason, going in-house at Reddit was an easy choice because having access to all that information on the backend is something that makes my job really, really fun every day.
Cool, thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation and I appreciate you, yeah, joining me.
Likewise, Peter. This was a blast. I loved it. Thank you for having me. And I so appreciated the opportunity to share some of my thoughts.
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