Marketing often treats culture as something external. Whether it be a context to tap into, a tone to match, or a trend to ride, marketing materials often reflect the cultural values of a time. But brands have a push-and-pull relationship with culture. While they do respond to culture and borrow from it, they also exert significant influence in defining what feels normal or desirable.
Brands are powerful partners in normalizing social movements, sharing values at a frequency and scale few other institutions can match. The reality is that brands have a large role in culture, and with that power comes responsibility. Consumers expect brands to participate in culture, but there are also challenges to this approach that can undermine authenticity and erode trust.
How Branding Influences Culture
We tend to judge a brand’s cultural influence by its splashiest campaigns. But brands truly shape culture by repeating the same ideas until they start to feel normal.
Take sustainability. Over time, environmental language moved from CSR reports into packaging, earnings calls, and product design. As more companies integrated climate commitments into their public identities, environmental responsibility became part of the baseline consumers and investors use to evaluate brands.
The same pattern has applied to diversity and inclusion initiatives. Diverse representation in marketing materials, public hiring commitments, and inclusive employee policies and benefits collectively helped reinforce the idea that inclusion is part of modern corporate legitimacy.
This is what cultural power looks like in practice. Brands don’t invent values out of thin air, but they provide repetition and visibility at a much higher scale than any individual could hope to accomplish.
How Brands Benefit From Cultural Participation
In a Fast Company piece, marketing professor Robin Landa argues that companies and consumers alike stand to gain from brand participation in cultural movements. Brands who utilize the cultural power of their platform set themselves apart from competitors in a big way. At the same time, they gain loyalty, visibility, and enthusiasm from their following.
Beyond the social benefits of brand participation, cultural commitments help consumers assess not only what a company produces, but how it operates. This is especially true for younger generations. A 2025 Sustainability Survey by Deloitte found that over half of Millennials and Gen Z would pay more for sustainable products, and that a quarter do sustainability research before purchasing.
To put these benefits in Landa’s words: “Leaders who act as cultural stewards, not just profit maximizers, build the most influential brands.” However, these benefits are contingent on continuity. The same mechanisms that build differentiation and loyalty can amplify scrutiny.
The Accountability Gap
Brands wield cultural influence without the accountability structures typically associated with cultural power. There’s no election cycle for brand values, nor a set public process for deciding which norms get reinforced.
Brands must walk the tightrope of participating in movements authentically, without misrepresenting the values they’re claiming to stand for. They must also account for backlash from opposing groups. These risks may prompt brands to opt out of social movements altogether, sensing this as the ‘safe’ option.
At the same time, opting out isn’t a clean solution. Silence, too, communicates values. Choosing not to engage can reinforce existing norms just as much as speaking up can challenge them. Brands participate in culture whether they acknowledge that role or not. When values are amplified during favorable conditions and muted when inconvenient, audience trust suffers. The signal consumers receive is not that the brand is neutral, but that its commitments are conditional.
For brands, the challenge is understanding that consumers expect alignment and accountability. Cultural relevance may help improve short-term performance, but only active participation and continuity sustain trust in the long run.
