Understanding Popular Culture & it’s Impact on Advertising: A Playbook for Unilever
The homecare and hygiene brands at Unilever (Vim, Rin, Surf Excel, Domex etc) have embarked on a journey to seek and unravel nuanced insights, with the ultimate goal of creating advertising that is culturally synced, relevant and unmissable to their target audience. In order to do this, the brand teams realized the importance of identifying the emerging trends as depicted in popular culture and integrate the relevant themes within their communications.
Through a deep dive into pop culture themes and stories, and consumer immersions across India, we developed a guidebook with tenets for building impactful communication across the themes and stories that were identified.
Consumer Insights
The nation has experienced unprecedented shifts in the last 5+ years. There has been a shake-up at an ideological level with a clear push towards the idea of hyper-nationalism and a sense of majoritarian unified identity. At an economic level; policy shifts towards an organized economy [Demonetization and GST] and the emergence of a vibrant and aggressive e-commerce economy have has trickle down effect as the non-Urban milieu grapples with the changes. The Pandemic was a cataclysmic shock and impacted every facet of life and across the board . What we are observing today is a process of sense-making at a larger level. Pop culture study reflects this inherent churn and a near scattered landscape vs. a unified and/or integrated notion of meaning. This is deeply affecting the collective and the individual both as visible across pop culture