We are Cultural Intelligence
What is Cultural Intelligence?
Culture is about understanding shared meanings and learned behaviours – it is understanding how we belong.
Cultural Intelligence
Who we are and how we act: dress, speak, buy things, or vote are all shaped and informed by our cultural context.
Mapping Cultural Change
The cultural landscape is always shifting, adapting and transforming, sometimes imperceptibly.
Cultural Tensions
A key aspect for developing brand understanding is to identify where the cultural tensions might lie.
Our latest webinar: How brands' communication travel across cultures?
In an increasingly complex world, understanding cultural context is essential to ensure brands are successful and campaigns resonate beyond borders.
Watch the webinar replay and learn from Ipsos experts.
Applied Anthropology
Although academics and businesses often have similar objectives, they usually operate in parallel worlds. Applied Anthropology brings those worlds together.
Reciprocity
Based on the experience of exchange, reciprocity relates to the practice of giving and receiving, through objects as well as gestures. Reciprocity brings the material and the emotional world into one place, placing importance on the symbolic nature of objects and the emotional expectation of exchange.
Rite of passage
A celebration, emotional experience, or transitional moment in life when an individual leaves one social group to enter another. A rite of passage involves a significant change of status in society, where the individual grows and becomes more enlightened.
Habitus
Individuals are influenced and organised by the path they tread in life, through a series of engrained habits, routines and socialised norms. Habitus is the way in which individuals come to perceive the social and cultural world around them. Consequently, it guides their everyday behaviour.
Identity
Identity is made up of the qualities, beliefs, personality traits, looks and expressions that define a person or a group. Identity is created through emotional perceptions of the self and of the other, and naturally creates feelings of inclusion and exclusion. It is always in the meeting with the other that the identity of the self is formed.
Glocal
The point at which local culture is influenced and reformed by external global trends. Glocal culture celebrates the external influences of globalisation through a cultural norming worldwide. The concept of glocal plays a role in the way we interpret human and social truths.
Mastery
The acquisition of knowledge or the perfection of a skill creates a sense of mastery in a person (or group of people). At its core, it embodies a desire for self- improvement, which itself can become addictive, as people strive towards an end goal that they may never be able to reach. Mastery is a double-edged sword, as it can create a sense of pride (sometimes falsely), confid...
Exoticism
Exoticism is sometimes seen as the charm of the unfamiliar or the creation of an exciting, inaccessible “other”. It is often used to sensationalise cultural difference, presenting these desirable “others” – be they people, places or products - as a unified entity with attributes and ways completely different to one’s own.
Myth
Myths are stories created to give meaning to social order or values. They reflect the underlying human need to find patterns of order in the social world and to combat chaos and disorder. These stories as myths come to express the fears, dreams, goals, anxieties, and ambitions of societies and individuals, as well as the central ideas of the time.
Materiality
Our abilities to express ourselves are intrinsically linked to our relationship with objects and things, which become symbolic of our relationships with other people and our place in society. Objects make up our living environment which in turn guides and shapes our behaviour. Materiality is a recognition of the value inherent in an object or brand; ownership infers symbolic va...
Social capital
Social capital is made up of a web of social relations that allow us to thrive – or cause us to struggle when absent. Social capital is what generates social cohesion and connectedness, and it is created through reciprocity, trust, and cooperation between and amongst individuals who make up a social unit. Access to social capital is a determinant of well-being in society.
Imagined communities
A socially constructed community based on a strong sense of group identity and group acceptance, created and imagined by people who perceive themselves to be part of that group. By processes of inclusion and exclusion, the group consciousness is formed through a separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Latest thinking
Commercial semiotics is a market research method that decodes what consumers see in your brand (the 'signs' – words, colours, logos, sounds, images, concepts) and the implicit meaning they give those signs.
Semioticians interpret brands by breaking down the signs into their underlying associations. It reveals the potential of your brand to connect with consumers in your category and markets, helping you understand and steer your cultural relevance. It can help your brand develop, grow, stretch and disrupt.
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