QUESTION EVERYTHING The Hidden Forces Shaping What We Buy, Wear, and Talk About: with Culture Strategist Linda Ong (Cultique)
May 1, 2025
Linda Ong, a cultural strategist and co-founder of Cultique, shares insights on how culture shapes consumer behavior. She discusses the importance of identifying cultural signals before they trend and the shift from exclusivity to experience in luxury. Ong explores how personal pain can enhance cultural intuition and explains why horror films thrive in uncertain times. With fascinating takes on Gen Z's contradictions and the evolving nature of brand identity, this conversation reveals the intricacies of analyzing culture in our rapidly changing world.
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Culture As An Ecosystem
- Culture is an ecosystem of ideas created by civilization across art, fashion, sports, architecture, media, and more.
- Cultique treats culture like real-time anthropology, not just social listening, to understand context and meaning.
The Cultural Bell Curve
- Emergent ideas sit on the ascending part of a cultural bell curve and often counter or evolve the zeitgeist.
- Cultique focuses on these emergent shifts to anticipate how the zeitgeist will change rather than simply forecasting trends.
Protect Your Brand's Cultural DNA
- Map a brand's cultural DNA before reinventing it to avoid losing the core that made it work.
- Use historical context (why it started, when it succeeded) to guide repositioning decisions.
