Lux understands culture as the shared meanings that consumers assign to concepts, products, and behaviors.
Put simply, culture emerges wherever people discuss and create shared understanding.
While many people are familiar with major examples of cultures, such as the culture surrounding sneakers or gaming, culture exists around any topic that is actively discussed. Whether it's chocolate cake, cleaning products, or complex societal issues, culture is the result of individuals exchanging ideas, building meaning, and establishing norms.
Shared meaning is the essence of culture, and these discussions define what something represents in people's lives.
What is Consumer Culture?
Consumer culture reflects the collective understanding of how products and ideas fit into people’s lives. For example, chocolate cake might symbolize indulgence, celebration, or craftsmanship, depending on its cultural context.
How Does Lux Understand Culture?
Lux’s methodology combines the study of various levels of culture, which you can learn about more in-depth below:
- Macrocultures: Broad, overarching trends influencing large demographics.
- Microcultures: Niche subgroups within macrocultures that hold distinct perspectives.
- Contextual Connections: The interrelated meanings surrounding a trend, highlighting its cultural depth and complexity, and bringing macrocultures and microcultures into contact with one another.
Example Deep Dive: The Culture of Chocolate Cake
In our work, the Virtual Anthropologist analyzes hundreds of thousands of consumer verbatims before the data is presented.
But in this case, lets look at three consumer verbatims on the topic of chocolate cake: a number much more suitable to humans!
The hardest thing to say no to is chocolate cake.
I grabbed a chocolate one.
Yes! And the best thing about it.
When we perform cultural analysis, we understand this conversation about chocolate cake as portal into the culture of chocolate cake.
By analyzing this conversation, we determine what chocolate cake means to the people in this conversation.
We call the totality of these meanings the macroculture: the broadest culture of chocolate cake and all those engaged with it.
We call the distinct subgroups of meaning the microcultures: the smaller, sub-cultures that share a unique meaning of chocolate cake.
To really make this clear, we need to talk about meanings.
Meanings
Let’s go back to those consumer verbatims about chocolate cake, through the lens of cultural anthropology.
The hardest thing to say no to is chocolate cake.
I grabbed a chocolate one.
Yes! And the best thing about it.
We can see a bunch of different meanings that highlight the role chocolate cake plays in people’s lives.
- Chocolate cake = irresistible
- Chocolate cake = classic
- Chocolate cake = central to celebrations
- Chocolate cake = a way to show off their aesthetic eye
- Chocolate cake = a crowd pleaser
Note that none of these have to do with the dictionary definition of chocolate cake (a “sweet food made by baking a mixture of flour, eggs, sugar, fat, and cocoa in an oven”).
Instead, these five meanings are distinct understandings of the role cake plays in people’s lives.
Our team studies these meanings as microcultures, which emerge from different conversation themes.
Contextual Analysis
Another important thing to note is that the second and third comment never refer to chocolate cake.
The hardest thing to say no to is chocolate cake.
I grabbed a chocolate one.
Yes! And the best thing about it.
Rather, we rely on contextual understanding to know that “chocolate one” and “it” refer to chocolate cake.
We also use contextual meaning to understand the “Yes!” in verbatim as a recapitulation that “it’s not a birthday without chocolate cake.”
When we crunch our data, our AI engine extracts these contextual meanings to ensure we’re capturing a full picture of culture, the maturity of ideas, and the population of consumers participating in that culture.
The above culture is comprised of three comments. Now scale that up to millions of data points in a vector data base and you have an idea of what our big data cultural analysis involves.