Meet the Expert: Gasper Patrico

Chief Creative Officer & President, Intersection Studio

Self-described as a journalist and storyteller, Gasper Patrico filters everything he does through the lens of strategist, creative director and producer. It is this perspective that drives his passion for shaping and sharing the stories of organizations that choose to make a difference in the world. His background includes a BA Journalism, University of Michigan, Screenwriting Studies, UCLA and USC, and posts as writer/creative director at major agencies. As the head of a firm responsible for activating brands capable of quickly building trust with customers, he uses cultural strategy as a key lens in his tool kit. While politicians, artists, and social activists outside the business world have known the name of the game in building iconic brands is innovative ideology, we asked Gasper to share his insight on how businesses can leverage cultural strategy as a powerful marketing tool and see their competitors in the rearview mirror.

What is the meaning of cultural strategy branding?

A business professor and author, Douglas B. Holt is responsible for igniting my enthusiasm about this powerful concept with his book, How Brands Become Icons—the Principals of Cultural Strategy. In it, he unpacks how certain brands become iconic and, also prescribes a methodology for communicators to determine whether they have a cultural strategy opportunity. It is the strategy that replaces the old cliché that if you “build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door.” His premise is that for certain product and service categories, building a better mouse trap is table stakes, but not enough. Certain savvy players have a different kind of opportunity in the marketplace. In Holt’s opinion, success is not in building a better mouse trap, rather, companies succeed when they forge a deeper connection with the culture. Essentially, they compete for culture share, not market share. It’s a different mindset.

Given your experience, how would you differentiate cultural strategy from other marketing strategies?

My view of cultural strategy is the opportunity for certain kinds of products or services to connect with a customer’s deeply held beliefs, their world view—how they see themselves as a person. Branding anchored in cultural strategy applies particularly to categories in which people tend to value products as a means of self-expression. Health/beauty, entertainment, tech, automotive, and beverage are a few. And let’s not forget nonprofit and social impact organizations. For these categories, cultural strategy presents communicators a chance to move beyond what the brand does or how it performs to why it does what it does. It’s about stepping into the culture and declaring why the organization exists in the larger context of society and having a real clear notion of why that may find common ground with its stakeholders.

Can you give an example of a company that has successfully used cultural strategy to increase market share?

Apple computers in the late 90s is an excellent example. The company was on the ropes, and Steve Jobs came back to reinvent the company by introducing the “Think Different” campaign. It was a call to action for the new internet culture that was exploding with possibilities of a heightened economy and a promising future. In this exciting environment, there was a certain subculture of people who were indeed thinking differently. The Apple campaign stepped into the gap between “what is and what could be” and took advantage of an ideological opportunity. They harkened back to the days of Einstein and people of greatness that always zigged while others zagged. In this, they connected with the ethos of the culture and millions of consumers who believed that creative imagination could buck the status quo.

Apple’s position was declarative and clear: Yes, Apple made computers but what they talked about was creating technology that would benefit and empower mankind. You weren’t buying a computer but buying into a dream of who you could become. Compare this approach to Dell talking about its workhorse computers with lots of ram and basically asking the consumer if they wanted to order one. The difference was stark. Apple was making an iconic cultural statement while Dell remained product-focused.

What is the takeaway from this example for professional communicators?

Cultural strategy gives you a window to see if there is an opportunity for deeper connection with what customers believe and what their world view is and connect them to what the organization is representing. In the case of Apple, the social disruption was with the explosion of the internet. The culture was shifting dramatically: the old order versus the new order; the old economy versus the new economy. There was a complete shift in the belief of what was possible.

More importantly, there was a shift in the myth that companies could inextricably gain market share by just saying here are the benefits, here are the features and so just buy it. Very innovative to have a company saying, “Hey you know there is a lot of s*it going on in the world and we want to speak to that. We’re not just making machines that compute, we’re making machines that change the nature of mankind.” So, what did Apple do? They went on to invent the iPhone, which changed everything.

Cultural strategy and healthcare. What does that look like?

With an eye toward using a cultural strategy approach, what should be on the communicator’s radar is the occurrence of historic social disruption. In 2008, there was social disruption of the economy, Obama was elected, and he chose healthcare legislation to be his first legislative achievement. Suddenly, marketplace myths were blown up such as that you couldn’t get health insurance if you had a pre-existing condition or the perception that healthcare companies existed to take care of you. Nerves became raw when people in this country found out the truth of how we were under caring for people who actually had insurance and how we weren’t taking care of people who could not afford insurance. That was a major social disruption.

The way social cultural strategy works is that it looks at the myth markets in the culture on a national level. In healthcare, it was essentially a myth that the health care system was the best in the world and that we took really good care of our people. What many people were truly feeling was that they couldn’t get insurance because of a previous condition such as heart problems or they had a disease such as cancer. Even if they could get insurance, they couldn’t afford premiums that were $3,000 or more a month. In between the gap of the “lived experience” is what Holt talks about as an ideological opportunity to fill the gap in such a way that you address the anxieties of the culture.

Is there a healthcare company that has effectively implemented a cultural strategy campaign?

Case in point is Dignity Health. I became aware of them a couple of years ago when the company released a campaign with the tagline and rallying cry of their new brand which was: “Hello human kindness.” In addition to being refreshing, what they are doing is offsetting the myth that healthcare will take care of you. What they are saying is that human kindness and compassion is not only a nice notion, it’s also a powerful healing tool that the company uses in its practice. What’s more impressive is that they base this premise on science, not how this would be a great communications campaign.

Dignity Health went into the subculture of medicine, researched leading authorities on the therapeutic methodology of kindness and partnered with a Stanford organization called the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education—a triple-threat group of doctors, researchers, teachers and clinicians who have done the science work on the use of compassion in medicine.

When they launched the campaign, they featured a video of their CEO declaring that the company was going in this direction. It showed him interviewing middle school students, asking them to share their definition of kindness. They included a doctor surfing with a wetsuit on rather than wearing a white coat who expressed his beliefs about the role kindness and compassion plays in healing. It all felt starkly authentic in a world of healthcare communications that fail to assuage customer anxieties with a barrage of features, benefits and disclaimers.

Is Dignity Health doing anything else to dovetail its communications with this compassion/kindness campaign?

Internally, Dignity Health also started doing interesting things. They initiated a Nurse Week because no healthcare organization can pull off this kind of delivery without a full complement of people to provide the services. They had videos of one nurse thanking another nurse for showing compassion with very specific examples—”When you did this, here is how it made me feel.” Dignity was bold in saying: This is the behavior we want to see and reward in our organization. They also collaborated with Stanford to present a compassion week conference for the leaders in the field of compassion and Dignity’s employees.

Dignity also has an interactive feature on its website–a locked video chat with a doctor within 20 minutes of requesting it. Just putting the infrastructure in place to make that commitment both legally and clinically is extraordinary. They’re very specific about when to use it and when not to use it by spelling out when it’s necessary to go directly to urgent care. In other times of stress, it’s beneficial to talk with a healthcare professional first to get their input on next steps. That whole concept is healthcare with kindness and compassion, not to mention that by the end of the call if you need a prescription, you can get it.

I believe this kind of corporate thinking and cultural strategy makes Dignity Healthcare an iconic brand. In none of its communications, at least their broad market communications, are they asking you to come and take part in their service. Rather, it’s all about what they believe about medicine and filling the gap between the myth in the marketplace and the ideological opportunity to say that the most important word in healthcare is kindness. That care requires caring and acknowledgement that there are many people in the healthcare system that want to “care better,” but the system makes it difficult for them to achieve it.

What is the key for companies to do cultural branding right?

The critical piece for this to work is CEO leadership. Executing cultural strategy requires vision, leadership that Brene Brown describes as a leader who is willing to rumble, to struggle with tough things, and to stretch. To not just say something that fills an ideological gap, but to build something in the organization that not only talks the talk, but walks the walk.

Change is the most difficult thing in an organization and, unless someone at the top is demonstrating and rewarding behavior that they want to see repeated, it won’t succeed. Because there are so few companies doing cultural strategies, you don’t see a lot of failures. Yet, the Super Bowl has been an opportunity for a company to step into that arena, such as the Chrysler campaign a few years ago about what it is means to be an American.

Any other parting comments?

It takes leadership and enough leverage inside an organization with shareholders to make a bold move. One of the best examples is Nike. Without Phil Knight, Nike would not be Nike. He gave them permission to do what they did, which was to “Just do it.” To lead all Americans into their potential, not just athletes. That’s iconic cultural branding strategy at its best!