Tech Has A Cultural Credibility Problem. Here’s How To Fix It.

• Recent furores over the Met Gala and music industry marketing have highlighted big tech’s lack of cultural credibility
  
  
• Instead of superficial gestures, Gen Z want brands to make bolder creative and cultural moves
  
  
• Winning means engaging with culture from the ground up: a relational rather than transactional approach

What does it mean to be culturally credible? How do brands build a presence within culture that feels organic and tangible, rather than performative or superficial? It’s a question which has stumped marketing departments for decades. The answer, it turns out, is deceptively simple.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen some prime examples of how not to do things from tech brands in particular. Where conversations around the Met Gala would normally focus on haute couture looks and celebrity red carpet appearances, this year’s coverage has largely been derailed by the involvement of Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos.

Rather than being applauded for dropping upwards of $10m in sponsorship on the event in their role as honorary chairs, the Bezos family have instead been derided as “tacky”, and the Gala itself has been both protested against and boycotted. “If [the organisers] were looking to make the worst choice possible,” one magazine editor opined, “it seems like they’ve succeeded.”

Plenty of outrage has reflected the wider context of Bezos’ immense wealth and increasingly Trumpian politics. But it’s also about Amazon (a company known for low-cost, low-quality products, including clothing) and a founder who’s previously displayed zero interest in style, suddenly elbowing their way into highbrow culture. “What does Jeff Bezos have to do with fashion?” The New York Times quoted a local NYC resident asking, with good reason.

A similar controversy has erupted in recent weeks around Chaotic Good, a digital marketing agency whose tactics for making songs go viral on social media have struck a sour note with indie music fans. “The second SNL drops at midnight,” Chaotic Good’s founders have said of their approach to promoting independent acts like Geese, Oklou, Mk.gee and Wet Leg, “you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.” For listeners who’d naively assumed that grassroots success was a largely organic phenomenon, unlike major label artists, the use of “fake fans and cynical viral campaigns” has felt like a profound betrayal.

Both of these cases speak to big tech’s ongoing problem with cultural credibility. Amazon and Chaotic Good might have thought they’d found a quick hack to gain cultural visibility and buy-in. But to audiences embedded in music and fashion scenes - the very people whose hearts and minds these brands are trying to capture - a lack of cultural understanding and long-term relationship-building means they’ve come off as insincere and sketchy. “Money still can’t buy you cool”, ran one headline: a neat encapsulation of the wider theme.

Compare this approach to brands who’ve treated culture as a relational rather than transactional challenge, building their presence over time rather than suddenly gatecrashing the party. Wearable tech company WHOOP’s collaboration with designer Samuel Ross, embedding tech into activewear, feels like a fluid progression of their existing identity, integrating product design and storytelling, and feeling culturally credible. “Like you’re wearing something on your body continuously,” their CEO Will Ahmed told Vogue earlier this year, “it starts to blend into your fashion.”

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“I think a lot of new tech products are missing personality and a more human feel,” 27-year-old Idris told us, when we asked them about the connections between technical innovation and brand identity. “Everything is starting to look and feel the same - very clean and minimal, but sometimes a bit too safe and predictable.”

“Design in the early 2000s used to be cool, like the future was going to be fun and had a utopianvibe,” agreed 32-year-old Nuz. “Now it’s all doom and so much trash, electronics designed to stop working by design.” Both cited brands like Nothing as examples of the forward-thinking approach they want to see more of.

As tech increasingly moves into cultural spaces, particularly in relation to fashion, these questions will only become more pointed. “The real story isn’t that tech brands are acting like fashion brands,” reports Vogue Business, “it’s that technology itself has become a cultural object.”

The lukewarm reaction to Meta’s new luxury New York retail space, with a cultural offer that feels curiously bolted-on and superficial, or Palantir’s even more jarring attempts to position itself as a lifestyle brand, suggests that lessons around deep, ongoing cultural credibility are still being learned.

Once upon a time, reaching for a quick cultural tie-in might have felt like a bold, disruptive move for tech brands. Today, faced with increasingly savvy and sceptical Gen Z audiences, it’s unlikely to be enough to cut through. For brands without an innate connection to a particular culture or the patience to cultivate one over time, piggybacking onto a scene you have no history with comes with serious risks; confidently staying in your lane can often be the smarter cultural strategy.