Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, spent an unusual amount of time thinking about jugs. He called them the "thingiest of things" and returned to them with what can only be described as unseemly frequency, fixated on the idea of a vessel as "formed emptiness" — a void that gathers and pours.
Needless to say, Heidegger did not attend many advertising conferences.
But his jug has arrived on Madison Avenue anyway, smuggled in under the word that now appears in nearly every brief, pitch deck and measurement framework: culture. Specifically, the question of how brands "play out in culture," or exist "in culture," or achieve "cultural relevance" — phrases that have become so common in agency presentations that they function as a kind of incantation, meant to signal seriousness without requiring precision.
The trouble, as David Bain, a strategist, recently argued in an essay for The Drum, is that the preposition does real work. To say a brand operates "in" culture is to treat culture as a container — a vast jug into which marketing can be poured, activations deposited, meanings retrieved. But containers, as Heidegger's wretched vessel demonstrated, are not neutral. They define what fits, what spills and what the holding does to the thing being held.
"Any useful container needs a wall," Mr. Bain wrote. "But where is culture's wall?"
The answer, he suggested, is nowhere — which means the container is everywhere, which means it is not really a container at all.
This would be a purely philosophical problem if it did not have budget implications. Marketing measurement tends to look for culture where it is easiest to photograph: collaborations, drops, creator partnerships, the circulating material of digitally distributed taste. But culture, Mr. Bain noted, is often most powerful where it is least announced — "tacit, habitual, embodied, inherited or unspoken."
(Or, to put it another way: it is not what people post but what people do not have to say.)
The word persists, Mr. Bain argued, precisely because its imprecision is useful. Call it cultural relevance, cultural magnetism, cultural dynamism — the label shifts but the vagueness remains. "Anything so gloriously undefined," he wrote, "is comfortingly impossible to fail at."
Heidegger, one suspects, would have found all of this very interesting. But then, he found jugs interesting.
Original story published in The Drum: "David Bain: The thing no marketer will admit about ‘culture’ | The Drum"