Cultural Relevance: How Purpose-Led Brands Stay Connected

Key Takeaways:

Cultural relevance demands that organizations align what they do and how they do it with the values, behaviors, and experiences of diverse communities rather than simply targeting new demographics with unchanged offerings
Achieving cultural relevance requires moving beyond performative gestures to substantive changes in organizational culture, programming, leadership, and decision-making that reflect genuine commitment to inclusion and equity
Culturally relevant approaches integrate multiple perspectives including indigenous peoples, underrepresented communities, and diverse cultural groups into the fabric of operations rather than treating inclusion as add-on initiative
Purpose-led brands must balance staying true to core values while remaining agile enough to engage with emerging cultural conversations, subcultures, and societal shifts that shape audience expectations
Building cultural competence requires ongoing introspection about hidden biases, privilege, and systemic barriers alongside practical challenges of resource allocation, partner collaboration, and authentic community engagement

When Crocs - once ridiculed as fashion's punchline - partnered with Balenciaga in 2017, the collaboration sold out within hours. The unlikely pairing signaled something profound: cultural relevance had shifted.

What matters isn't timeless elegance or traditional prestige. Relevance now lives in authenticity, self-expression, and understanding the communities that give products meaning. By leaning into its divisive design rather than fighting it, Crocs transformed from cultural outcast to selling over 100 million pairs annually across 85 countries.

This transformation reveals what business leaders increasingly recognize: cultural relevance isn't optional for brands seeking sustainable growth. It's the difference between organizations that shape conversation and those struggling to keep pace with a world constantly changing around them. For purpose-driven brands specifically, cultural relevance becomes the bridge between values and viability—ensuring sustainability commitments resonate authentically rather than feeling like corporate obligation.

Research from Contagious identifies three spaces where brands build cultural connection: behaviors (evolving audience actions), values (societal causes and beliefs), and interests (lifestyle pursuits). Organizations that understand how people use culture to make meaning—not just what culture is—gain influence that transcends product features or marketing spend.

Understanding Cultural Relevance Beyond Demographics

Cultural relevance extends far deeper than diversifying marketing materials or adding faces of different ethnicities to campaigns. The concept, rooted in multicultural education theory developed by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings in the early 1990s, originally described culturally relevant pedagogy as teaching that enables students to experience academic success, develop cultural competence, and build critical consciousness.

Adapted for organizations and brands, cultural relevance means what you do and how you do it connects meaningfully with multicultural audiences. This definition encompasses programming, advocacy, messaging, partnerships, pedagogy, and the entire approach to work—not surface-level representation.

The Shift From Mainstream to Diverse Cultures

Mainstream culture appears increasingly homogenous—think Instagram face, copy-paste interiors, logo blanding. Yet economist Tyler Cowen argues this homogenization occurs precisely because profound diversity thrives at cultural edges. The internet enables non-mainstream communities to flourish without compromise, creating subcultures that unapologetically express distinct identities.

For brands, this fragmentation creates both challenge and opportunity. The singular monolithic audience no longer exists. Cultural competence now requires understanding which communities you can authentically engage with, bring value to, and learn from rather than broadcasting to everyone.

Beyond Performative Inclusion

Many organizations confuse cultural relevance with surface changes that maintain status quo while appearing progressive. Real cultural relevance demands examining organizational culture, mission, and values—potentially changing them to authentically serve diverse communities.

As The Avarna Group notes, cultural relevance isn't changing marketing messages to reach populations of color without changing what you do or how you do it. It's not pulling a "Chevy Nova" by altering brand aesthetics while operations remain unchanged. It's not assuming wilderness is universally good without considering historical context and different cultural relationships with nature.

Three Dimensions of Cultural Relevance

Organizations build cultural connection across interconnected dimensions that together create authentic resonance.

Behaviors: Adapting to Evolving Audience Actions

Culturally fit brands demonstrate agility around changing consumer behaviors and dexterity on platforms audiences adopt. Cultural leaders go further, setting new benchmarks that reshape industry dynamics.

This requires being social-first rather than treating social media as afterthought. As Nick Law, creative chairperson of Accenture, told Contagious: "Social is the core media of our time. And yet, most agencies have got this copywriter coming up with ads and then the social team cut them up and put them on social media."

Heinz demonstrated behavioral agility when responding to viral photo of Taylor Swift "eating a piece of chicken with ketchup and seemingly ranch." The brand quickly replied with image of its Kranch sauce mocked up as "Ketchup And Seemingly Ranch (Heinz's Version)"—generating 4.72 billion impressions by acting at the speed of culture without testing delays.

The key insight: when culturally relevant moments align with brand, press go. No qualitative or quantitative testing. Put out the idea, see if people react, then scale based on response.

Values: Taking Positions That Reflect Genuine Beliefs

Culturally fit brands take clear positions on beliefs held by audiences and organizations. Cultural leaders shape society's values through commitment to positive change.

Dove's decades-long campaign for real beauty demonstrates sustained values alignment. Starting in 2004, the brand's commitment to building self-esteem in women and girls evolved from Campaign For Real Beauty to recent campaigns like #DetoxYourFeed and Reverse Selfie addressing social media's reinforcement of toxic beauty standards.

Crucially, Dove's campaigns include education, training, and lobbying for legal changes. As Ogilvy's former global lead explained: "We're an actionist brand, not an activist brand. We want people to take responsibility and drive change."

The distinction matters for purpose-led organizations: values must pervade operations, not exist as marketing slogans. You can't make up your right to comment on social issues through short-term campaigns. Cultural relevance demands living values throughout the organization—the kind of authentic commitment we explore in ethical practices.

Interests: Engaging Passion Points Authentically

Culturally fit brands engage people's passion points genuinely, often through sponsorship or timely content. Cultural leaders become tastemakers, elevating brands into richer lifestyle scenes rather than borrowing relevance from existing cultural moments.

Gucci reorganized around the principle: "Have a product that is exclusive and create a culture of inclusivity." The luxury label dipped into cultures at the fringes—recruiting TikTok trainspotting star Francis Bourgeois, collaborating with The North Face—to impact mainstream perception. These unexpected partnerships demonstrated how internet's cultural gatekeepers cross into fashion landscapes authentically.

Baileys reversed sales decline by listening to customers and leaning into food trends. By reframing product as ultimate treat and ingredient, the brand launched visually rich campaigns and always-on publishing model of recipes, dramatically boosting consumption occasions and increasing sales by 32%.

Practical Challenges of Building Cultural Relevance

The gap between aspiration and implementation reveals where many organizations struggle with cultural relevance.

Moving Beyond Tokenism to Structural Change

Real cultural relevance requires reallocating budgets to prioritize equity and inclusion over other operations rather than relying on grants. It means making inclusion a strategic priority, not diversity initiative managed separately from core business.

This involves engaging with—not "serving"—marginalized communities in ways that honor true partnership. Sympathy and charity differ fundamentally from empathy and active two-way engagement. Organizations must eschew traditional notions that historically silenced voices and denied experiences, embracing collaborative stewardship instead.

For environmental organizations specifically, this means teaching about wilderness while acknowledging indigenous peoples forcibly removed to create protected areas and African American communities for whom wilderness historically represented unwelcoming places. Cultural integrity demands including voices of people disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation in campaigns and advocacy—a principle central to effective sustainability initiatives.

Developing Cultural Competence Organizationally

Cultural competence extends beyond individual awareness to institutional capability. This requires:

Expanding engagement definitions: Moving beyond traditional notions of outdoor recreation to include diverse ways people connect with nature—picnicking in local parks, playing soccer in fields, fishing in local waterways, cycling in greenbelts.

Reexamining programming locations: Making experiences accessible for people unable to travel to backcountry, or ensuring lessons learned in remote locations transfer to participants' own communities.

Modifying program structures: Including people who can't take extended time off, prefer adventuring with families, or rely on technology to promote outdoor passion.

Meeting people where they are: Not expecting communities to come to you on your terms but adapting to their needs, schedules, and preferences.

Building Critical Consciousness

Culturally relevant pedagogy emphasizes developing critical consciousness—ability to recognize and challenge inequitable systems. For brands, this means willingness to explore hidden biases, privilege, and ways organizations constantly (often unintentionally) disadvantage certain people.

This introspection extends to examining how mainstream culture, leading culture, and organizational norms may marginalize or exclude diverse cultural groups. It requires creating space for difficult conversations about power, access, and whose perspectives shape decisions.

Research in higher education shows culturally responsive teaching improves academic achievement through cooperative learning, reflection, sharing, teachable moments, and discussion that engage all students. Organizations can apply similar principles: teaching to all cultures, not just about them.

Strategic Priority: Embedding Cultural Relevance

Organizations serious about cultural relevance make it core to strategy rather than peripheral program.

Committing Resources and Accountability

Cultural relevance requires dedicated resources, clear ownership, and measurable objectives. This means:

Allocating budget to support inclusion work rather than expecting diversity directors to fundraise for their own positions
Establishing metrics beyond demographic numbers to assess whether changes create genuine belonging and engagement
Building accountability structures that make cultural relevance everyone's responsibility, not burden placed disproportionately on people of color or marginalized groups
Creating evaluation frameworks that assess both what you do and how you do it against cultural relevance standards

Developing Culturally Relevant Approaches

Effective implementation requires systematic frameworks. Consider:

Instructional materials and curriculum: When creating educational content, include multiple perspectives, diverse examples, and recognition of varied cultural context. Avoid centering dominant narratives while marginalizing others.

Community collaboration: Build genuine partnerships where communities shape programs rather than merely receiving services. This collaborative model respects community knowledge and lived experience as essential to academic success and organizational effectiveness—an approach that strengthens employee satisfaction internally as well.

Technology and access: Ensure digital platforms and resources reach diverse audiences. Consider connectivity barriers, language access, cultural norms around technology use, and whether tools actually serve community needs.

Assessment and research: Measure outcomes across different populations to understand whether initiatives achieve intended impact for all groups. Disaggregate data to reveal disparities rather than averaging away cultural differences.

Staying Agile in Constantly Changing Landscape

Cultural relevance isn't static achievement but ongoing practice. Organizations must develop capacity for:

Living at speed of culture: McDonald's "Dare To Be Relevant" framework embraces "Living in and leading culture at the speed of culture." This requires agility to adjust to rapid change—the biggest challenge of our times.

Continuous learning: Culture is constantly changing, new platforms always emerging, so staying relevant requires continual innovation rather than relying on single intervention.

Long-term commitment: One-off campaigns create cultural flashpoints but genuine relevance requires sustained approach. As Zeitgeist Labs founder told Contagious: "Don't build your brand in culture, build culture into your brand."

Application for Purpose-Led Organizations

For sustainability-focused brands, cultural relevance intersects with environmental and social commitments in ways that demand particular care.

Connecting Environmental Values to Cultural Context

Environmental organizations must recognize that nature means different things to different cultures. What mainstream environmental movement celebrates as wilderness preservation may carry painful historical associations for indigenous peoples or communities of color.

Culturally relevant approach to sustainability acknowledges these varied relationships with nature, environmental degradation's disproportionate impact on marginalized communities, and diverse knowledge systems—including indigenous environmental knowledge—as valuable resources for addressing climate challenges.

This means creating space for multiple voices in environmental advocacy, not assuming universal relationships with outdoor spaces, and being willing to challenge conservation models rooted in exclusion—principles that align closely with ethical sourcing throughout supply chains.

Building Inclusive Sustainability Movements

Cultural relevance advances sustainability goals by expanding who participates in environmental work. The diverse tapestry of our society engages with nature in varied ways—not always through solitary escapes and solo backpacking trips that mainstream outdoor culture valorizes.

Purpose-led brands can build cultural relevance by:

Featuring diverse communities in campaigns and leadership
Addressing environmental justice alongside conservation
Recognizing urban green spaces and local parks as legitimate nature connection
Partnering with organizations led by and serving communities of color
Examining how sustainability messaging either welcomes or alienates different audiences

Authenticity in Purpose Activation

At Grounded, we work with purpose-led organizations to build cultural relevance that authentically advances both values and viability. Our approach recognizes that sustainability commitments must resonate across diverse communities to create movements capable of addressing systemic challenges.

This requires moving beyond performative diversity to structural inclusion—examining organizational culture, decision-making processes, partnership models, and communication strategies through lens of cultural relevance. The goal: ensuring purpose activation strengthens rather than alienates relationships with communities essential to long-term impact. Our sustainability communication frameworks help translate these commitments into messages that genuinely connect.

The North Star: Authentic Connection

Cultural relevance ultimately centers on authentic connection—understanding communities deeply enough to create genuine value rather than extracting attention or resources. This demands humility to learn from diverse cultures, courage to examine organizational biases and privilege, and commitment to substantive change.

The practical challenges are real. Budget constraints, entrenched organizational culture, measurement complexity, and discomfort with introspection all create barriers. Navigating these obstacles requires treating cultural relevance as strategic priority, not optional enhancement.

For purpose-driven brands specifically, cultural relevance determines whether sustainability values resonate broadly enough to catalyze necessary change. Messages about environmental protection fall flat when they don't acknowledge varied cultural relationships with nature. Calls for climate action lack power when they ignore communities bearing disproportionate impact of environmental degradation.

Building cultural relevance takes hard work—ongoing reflection, genuine partnership, structural change, resource commitment, and willingness to challenge status quo. But organizations that invest in this work build trust, relevance, and impact that superficial diversity initiatives never achieve.

The opportunity: cultural relevance done authentically expands movements, strengthens brands, and advances purpose in ways that benefit everyone. It transforms organizations from entities imposing values on communities into collaborators co-creating solutions that honor diverse knowledge, experiences, and aspirations. Author:

Matt Deasy

linkedinMatt Deasy is Business Development Lead at Grounded and an independent consultant, helping purpose-driven brands scale impact with clarity and commercial strength. Matt is a certified ‘*B Leader’ - *a trained consultant officially recognized by B Lab (the nonprofit behind the B Corp movement) to support companies on their journey toward B Corp certification, a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Sustainable Business Strategy program, and studied the UN Sustainable Development Goals program at the University of Copenhagen.

Matt brings a unique blend of entrepreneurial grit and sustainability expertise to Grounded, has contributed to publications such as Sustainable Times and B Lab Portugal, and is an expert ambassador at Brilliant Ideas Planet, exploring the evolving role of business in addressing global challenges.

Finally, as lead of Grounded Expeditions, Matt designs immersive, impact-driven experiences that connect business leaders with impact solutions. His approach draws on over a decade building and scaling snow and surf businesses across Europe and North Africa, alongside extensive travel to 80+ countries across every continent. These global experiences inform his belief that commercial success and environmental stewardship can—and must—go hand in hand.

Matt continues to explore how brand storytelling, partnerships, and strategy can accelerate the transition to an economy where purpose and profit reinforce each other.

LinkedIn | matt@grounded.world

Frequently Asked Questions About Cultural Relevance

Cultural relevance means what an organization does and how it does it connects meaningfully with diverse audiences and communities. It extends beyond demographic representation to encompass organizational culture, values, practices, and authentic engagement with varied cultural groups. Cultural relevance matters because fragmented media landscapes and empowered subcultures mean brands can no longer rely on mass messaging. Organizations must understand specific communities deeply—their values, behaviors, and cultural context—to create genuine resonance. For purpose-led brands, cultural relevance determines whether sustainability commitments feel authentic or performative, shaping whether diverse communities embrace or reject environmental messaging.

Cultural relevance represents the outcome of effective diversity, equity, and inclusion work rather than being synonymous with it. Diversity describes demographic composition, inclusion addresses whether people feel welcomed and valued, while cultural relevance assesses whether organizational offerings and approaches actually resonate with diverse communities. An organization can have diverse representation without cultural relevance if it doesn't adapt what it does or how it operates. Cultural relevance requires examining and potentially changing mission, values, programming, and partnerships to serve multicultural audiences authentically rather than expecting communities to adapt to existing organizational culture.

Culturally relevant pedagogy, defined by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, describes teaching that enables students to experience academic success, develop cultural competence, and build critical consciousness. Applied to organizations, these principles translate to: creating pathways for diverse communities to succeed in your programs (academic achievement equivalent), helping people maintain connection to their cultural identity while engaging with your brand (cultural competence), and developing capacity to recognize and challenge inequitable systems (critical consciousness). Organizations use culturally responsive teaching approaches like cooperative learning, reflection, sharing, and discussion to engage all participants rather than centering single cultural perspective.

Authentic cultural relevance starts with genuine introspection about organizational culture, values, and practices. Purpose-driven brands should examine whether sustainability messaging acknowledges varied cultural relationships with nature, whether environmental advocacy includes communities disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation, and whether outdoor programming honors diverse ways people connect with nature beyond traditional backpacking. This requires reallocating budgets to prioritize inclusion, establishing true partnerships where communities shape programs rather than merely receiving services, including indigenous and multicultural perspectives in environmental storytelling, and examining how conservation models may have historically excluded certain populations. Cultural relevance cannot be achieved through marketing changes alone—it demands operational transformation.

Common mistakes include changing marketing messages without changing operations, inviting grassroots organizations to diversify your ranks rather than examining your culture, working with underserved populations within structures that don't invite their collaboration, hiring diversity directors without providing resources or authority, assuming your approach is universally good without considering cultural context, enlisting people of color to shoulder cultural relevance work without shared accountability, treating cultural relevance as numbers game rather than authentic engagement, and engaging in technical best practices without doing adaptive work that challenges organizational assumptions. These performative gestures often damage trust more than no diversity efforts because they signal that organizations value appearance of inclusion over substantive change.

Cultural competence—the ability to engage effectively across diverse cultures—enhances organizational effectiveness by expanding who can successfully participate in programs, broadening stakeholder relationships, improving innovation through diverse perspectives, and building trust with communities essential to mission success. Research shows culturally responsive approaches improve outcomes across populations by honoring different ways people learn, work, and engage. For purpose-driven organizations specifically, cultural competence determines whether sustainability initiatives resonate broadly enough to catalyze necessary change. Environmental movements that lack cultural competence alienate communities whose participation is essential to addressing systemic challenges like climate change and environmental justice.

Developing cultural relevance requires commitment to ongoing learning through partnerships with organizations serving diverse communities, engagement with multicultural education research and frameworks, staff training on implicit bias and cultural competence, evaluation of programs through lens of whether they serve all populations equitably, and willingness to seek feedback from communities you aim to serve. Organizations benefit from working with consultants who specialize in equity and inclusion, reading research on culturally responsive practices, examining case studies of organizations successfully building cultural relevance, and creating internal structures for continuous reflection on whether operations align with cultural relevance values. The most important resource is genuine commitment to change rather than seeking quick fixes or surface solutions.

Cultural relevance doesn't require large budgets but does demand authentic commitment. Small organizations can start by examining their current culture and practices honestly, seeking input from diverse communities about what would make programs more relevant, building genuine partnerships where communities shape rather than just receive services, expanding definitions of engagement to include varied participation styles, creating space for diverse voices in decision-making, and being willing to change approaches based on community feedback. Limited resources actually force organizations to prioritize authentic relationships over expensive programs, focus on depth of engagement over breadth of reach, and build grassroots partnerships that create mutual value. Cultural relevance centers on respect, listening, and adaptation—none of which require significant financial investment but all of which demand genuine commitment and humility.