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← Back to IdeasThe Mainstream is a Myth. And Chasing it is Making Your Brand Irrelevant
This piece was originally published at Little Black Book.
Too often in our industry, the rooms where we work are organized in a way that would be unrecognizable to the people we aim to reach. That starting point has been wrong for a long time and we've been too comfortable to say so out loud.
It’s led to an assumption that has hurt marketing: the belief that the mainstream is still a useful place to organize strategy around. It isn't. And the cost of holding onto it is much steeper than that of a bad campaign or misallocated budgets.
Culture has never moved from the center out. It moves from the edges in.
Culture arises from the communities our industry has spent decades treating like footnotes. One need look no further than the Super Bowl for this misconstruction in action. Bad Bunny headlined the halftime show, yet 40% of the population is still classified as a “specialty audience”. One of those facts is a cultural moment. The other is a strategic embarrassment.
This represents a pattern that’s long been repeating. The industry discovers a community that's been shaping the market all along. The pivot happens, the campaigns follow. And the communities on the receiving end notice the difference between a brand that was present and one that arrived when it became commercially obvious. That distinction compounds in ways that are very difficult to reverse.
Moving beyond diversity as a framework isn't a retreat from the conversation – it's where the conversation finally gets interesting.
The more useful lens is what I'd call interculturalism.
Interculturalism isn’t a more sophisticated version of multicultural marketing, but asks a different question altogether. Instead of trying to reach diverse audiences, interculturalism asks what the world looks like when you see it whole. A world built in the intersections, where cultures don't just coexist but actively shape each other. Most of us are holding multiple realities at once, letting them collide and inform what they believe, what they buy, and who they trust. That's the modern fabric of our world and where the most consequential brand work of the next decade happens.
The brands breaking through aren't winning because they target better. They're winning because they find truths in those intersections; specific enough to feel real, universal enough to travel. That's intercultural intelligence. And the difference matters more than most planning processes allow for.
Most brands have the data. Latino buying power in the US alone is $2.5 trillion. A World Cup on American soil arrives in June. What most are still missing isn't the numbers, but the human thing underneath them. We know how to reach these audiences. But do we understand them well enough to deserve their attention? The margin for getting that wrong is narrowing.
Intercultural intelligence widens the aperture.
The culture has moved. The consumer has moved. The only thing standing still is the strategy.
Brands need to change who's in the room when the thinking starts, letting intercultural intelligence widen the vantage point before the brief exists. The brands that do so will have the advantage — creating ideas that feel rich, marketing to audiences that feel seen, and building trust that pays off long term.
The brands that move now aren't just protecting market position. They're deciding what kind of company they want to be. In a country changing this fast, that decision is the most consequential one a leadership team can make.