All great #marketing starts with a clear picture of "Who." And "Who" isn't about
By Mikeblack · March 18, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
All great #marketing starts with a clear picture of "Who."
And "Who" isn't about surface labels.
GenZ, Hispanic, Black ...
Those are descriptors, not strategy.
Real growth strategy comes from understanding the shared cultural mindsets that cut across demographic lines.
• Passion points — sports, hobbies, music, food
• Media behaviors — where people actually spend their attention
• Attitudes — self-expression, anxiety, optimism, patriotism
• Values and beliefs shaping how people see the world
This is why the old approach to inclusive, #multicultural marketing failed.
It created an "Other" group that alienated the core consumers of brands, while coming across as superficial and unauthentic to those young and diverse consumers brands so desperately wanted to woo.
Finding "cultural through lines" is the name of the game - and it opens your brand up to more people, rather than fewer.
That is not to say there isn't a time and place to lean into a Gen Z or Hispanic focus. But that's only one facet of your strategy.
Your marketing strategy should view culture through a shared-mindset lens, and you should continuously explore new shared mindsets for expansion—forming new hypotheses and testing them.
And then having a consistent, sales-predictive framework to measure whether those initiatives are actually working.
That's hard with traditional #marketresearch because it requires a large scale, always on ethnographic approach vs small scale, moment in time and costly 1:1 interviews with consumers.
Your goal should be finding technology that unlocks deep cultural ethnography, at scale. That's how modern brands grow and win.