New research from Oxford Saïd Business School’s Future of Marketing Initiative and M&C Saatchi Consulting has pronounced that 32.8% of a brand’s value is ‘created in culture’.
A statement from M&C Saatchi Consulting called this ‘the first empirical model to quantify the relationship and impact of brands and culture’. The model in question is called Return on Cultural Power, which measures the returns on a brand’s ability to influence behaviour through communities, participation and shared meaning.
‘Meaning and behaviour are shaped collectively through communities and participation, not just within individual minds,’ explained Dr Felipe Thomaz, associate professor of marketing at Oxford Saïd Business School. ‘This collaboration allowed us to measure those dynamics systematically and connect them to tangible business outcomes.’
The Return on Cultural Power model uses traditional brand metrics, real-time monitoring of platforms like Reddit and Discord, and search and sales tracking. Using this model to track the impact that cultural power has on brands, the study found that nearly a third of a brand’s total value is created directly within culture through community participation.
To help businesses bridge the gap between cultural momentum and commercial return, the model integrates a diagnostic mechanism known as the 6C framework, which evaluates a brand across six critical cultural dimensions: conviction, connection, credibility, coherency, collaborators, and cut-through. While the broader Return on Cultural Power model identifies whether a discrepancy exists between a brand’s community relevance and its financial performance, this specialised framework pinpoints exactly why that disconnect is happening. By assessing factors ranging from a brand’s earned right to participate in a specific subculture to its effectiveness in partnering with community creators, the 6C framework transforms abstract cultural signals into an actionable business strategy, giving leaders a clear, data-driven blueprint to fix failing engagement and successfully convert cultural relevance into revenue.
Rhonda Hiatt, CEO at M&C Saatchi Consulting, said that this framework ‘gives leaders a clearer way to assess when to enter a cultural moment, when not to’ compared to the backward-looking data most marketers use.
While data from communities like Reddit can be dangerously volatile, for brands looking to be more agile and seize on big cultural moments, this model is being presented as an alternative to the traditional salience/reach model. The researchers argue Return on Cultural Power is a tool capable of identifying accelerating trends or intercepting community backlashes weeks before they pop up on the corporate radar.
