Context Companies have sunk billions of dollars in

Context

Companies have sunk billions of dollars into producing content on social media, hoping to build audiences around their brands. But consumers haven’t shown up.

What Went Wrong

Social media has transformed how culture works. Digital crowds have become powerful cultural innovators—a new phenomenon called crowdculture. They’re now so effective at producing creative entertainment that it’s impossible for companies to compete.

The Way Forward

While crowdculture has deflated conventional branding models, it actually makes an alternative model—cultural branding—even more powerful. In this approach, brands collaborate with crowdcultures and champion their ideologies in the marketplace.

In the era of Facebook and YouTube, brand building has become a vexing challenge. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factor became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hoopla, such efforts have had very little payoff.

A version of this article appeared in the March 2016 issue (pp.40–48, 50) of Harvard Business Review.