Cultural Hijacking: The good, the bad and the ugly

By Laura Hinchelwood

It’s not often I feel the need to take to Linkedin, or indeed any social platform, merely to have a rant. But a few weeks ago, I found myself doing just that! It followed the launch of Taylor Swift’s album announcement and suddenly, everywhere I looked brands were jumping on the old sparkly orange and green bandwagon. Literally everywhere I turned was awash with this horrific Baked Bean and fluoride colour palette that quite frankly I see enough of on a day to day basis from my toddler. And what made it worse was, absolutely none of it made any real sense to me. It was content for content’s sake. It was ‘just because’. It was boring, predictable, repetitive and unimaginative. In fact, it actually made me a little bit mad and saddened at my industry.

The world’s most brilliant creative masterminds resorting to mere copycatting. It was basic on the most basic level.

They all started to blend into one, but I persevered. I took a handful of examples and tried to look at them in more detail to see if there were any that I really thought “okay, yeah that’s cool”. I concluded Sharpie’s effort was okay. I felt like they had the most plausible reason for doing it and it had an authentic link to the brand’s products and audience. Sparkly gel pens, back to school, young kids buzzing about Swifty, AirPods blah blah. It made sense and it was nice – nothing ground-breaking, but nice.

But even though I’d found one example that I thought was at least ‘alright’, the whole ‘paint it orange’ fad made me reminisce on a time when brands would be at the forefront of starting new trends and sparking new conversations rather than merely photocopying what was already there.

Since then, I have thought long and hard about this whole cultural hijacking phenomenon.

The most successful earned campaigns have always been ones that are inextricably linked with cultural truths and real world happenings, because it’s the stuff that really matters to people.

But I also wonder whether the rise of social media and Ai tools have just made it too easy to be lazy with it (cue Swift example). For me, regardless of how popular something is in culture, your response as a brand still has to feel genuine, otherwise what’s the point? And god forbid, maybe even be a bit original?

I may not be a Swifty but I am an Oasis fan, so let’s have a look at those campaigns for a sec. I’ll be honest, I even got bored of these in the end there were so many. I thought Lidl’s parker was predictable as hell. Just another middle isle push – snore! But there were some gems in there too.

I liked ‘Aldeh’ very much – that was brilliant. Why? Because they only did it at that one store in Bury New Road. They kept it hyper local where people would appreciate it and love it.

They didn’t do any London stores or anywhere else they were playing. They did it where it made sense and local people would appreciate the pronunciation spin – so much so they’ve actually kept it! And it went national, of course it did.

I also thought Specsavers effort was genius. I drool over whatever they do anyway, but this was so funny I almost choked on my eye-wateringly expensive Joe & The Juice Tunacado sarnie.

‘The Original Blur Rivals’… STOP IT! The witty word play is brilliant enough, but it’s also the fact that unless you were an original Oasis fan, you’d probably be none the wiser that the feud ever existed.

It spoke less to the kids there who maybe started listening to Oasis last year and more to the original 90s crowd who lived it, experienced it and let’s face it, now in their late 30s +… probably do go to Specsavers! Einstein!

Moving onto another more recent golden example of cultural hijacking done right - Lime during the rail strikes. Honestly, they couldn’t have done a more perfect job on this if they’d tried. We all knew it was coming and I think lots more brands could have done something clever with it. Lime really shone with its ‘Good Service on all Limes’ campaign, parking them up outside London stations as an alterative. Super clever.

In the end, the success and failure of all these campaigns for me boils down to a couple of things:

1.        Just because something is popular, it doesn’t mean you can’t be a bit original. Copying something outright isn’t clever and most people see straight through it. Marketers can be smarter than that.

2.        Just because something is making waves, it doesn’t mean you have to ride it. In other words, unless you KNOW your audience are a pack of Swiftys, why bother sending your IG feed orange? It won’t do anything except make your actual customers feel a bit disconnected from you

3.        Don’t always approach these things with the aim of getting blanket national coverage or going viral on social. Sometimes, marketing towards specific regional audiences or smaller interest groups can be really effective. They’ll carry the torch for you and if its clever enough, it’ll go national anyway

4.        Use these golden moments to say something about you and your brand. Because that’s really what we’re all trying to do in this game, right? We’re not really trying to say something about train strikes and Oasis. We’re trying to use those things merely as a springboard for our own messages, products and services. It doesn’t have to be an explicit sales pitch, but unless there’s a real brand benefit to come of a hijack, why bother doing it?

Interested in cultural hijacking done right? Then contact us for a cuppa at lara.leventhal@visiblepr.co.uk