Listened to any bongo flava lately? Read any manga? Enjoyed a nice, warm yerba maté? If you answered no to all of these, you need to get wise to the ways of Culture Crossers, the young consumer group that’s driving marketing trends across a multitude of categories.

Culture Crossers choose freely from all that the world has to offer, appropriating styles and customs from other cultures at will. They define themselves by who they choose to be, not by the culture, class, or ethnicity they were born into. However, the very things that make them who they are — fickle anti-conformists interested in scanning the globe and discovering things on their own — present formidable obstacles for marketers. In fact, Culture Crossers, ranging in age from teens to 30-somethings, may be among the hardest of all consumers to reach and effectively influence.

Breaking Boundaries
It’s easy to see why Culture Crossers have emerged. They’re members of the most diverse and open-minded generation of American society, people who grew up hearing buzzwords like “multicultural” and “inclusive.” Their social and educational circles likely have included peers of varied ethnic backgrounds. They’re a generation accustomed to seeing mixed-race couples treated with nonchalance, whether on television or in real life. And their role models come in all shapes and colors.

While generally not flush, Culture Crossers will spend significant dollars to buy a few style-defining products. Clothing is perhaps the most obvious example. Fashion is an arena in which this consumer group (or C-Type) can easily reference other cultures. The key is wearing something that nobody else has yet deemed fashionable or that is almost impossible to lay your hands on.

For Culture Crossers, the need to have apparel that is unique and hard to find creates extreme pressure for manufacturers. While ordinary consumers may complain about styles that are “last year,” Culture Crossers will decry anything that’s “too seen,” even if they were all over it last month. In this regard, foreign retailers, in many cases, have an easier time prying dollars away from this C-Type than domestic brands, but even mainstream retailers can compete if they think “alternative.” One strategy, used with great success by both Nike and Diesel, is to invite cutting-edge artists or cult figures to be part of the design process. Nike hired Stash, one of the most notorious New York graffiti artists of the 1980s, to design both T-shirts and sneakers. Diesel, meanwhile, commissioned the design work of Paul Pope, the only American comics writer and artist to have worked for Japan’s largest publisher of manga (Japanese-style comics).

Spirit of Adventure
Concept stores appeal to Culture Crossers, as long as you’re not talking about last year’s concept. One store currently popular among this C-Type is Surface to Air, located in Paris. The elements of its appeal? A combination studio-gallery store dedicated to showcasing and fostering creativity; a mix of patrons from Europe, Asia, and America, including alternative designers and artists from all over the world; and shelves stocked with books, limited-edition Surface to Air sneakers and T-shirts, sought-after jewelry from small designers, and other hard-to-find wares.

The openness to adventure and exotic exploration continues when it comes to Culture Crossers’ taste in food and, especially, drink. The element of cool imparted by, say, sipping an obscure sake poured from a well-designed bottle cannot be over-estimated. Also, this C-Type moves from coffeehouse to club. Make sure your brand can stay up all night.

So what’s the answer for a company aiming to capture this fickle demographic? Don’t market to them, market with them. Forward-thinking marketers are relying on the influential, leading-edge Culture Crossers themselves, tapping into the people who live the trends and lifestyles rather than the people who merely report on them. Make Culture Crossers a part of your team, commission them to create designs for you, and consult with them on packaging. At the very least, run your integrated marketing communications campaigns by them.

(For the record, bongo flava is a style of music blending hip-hop with native African sounds, and yerba maté is a beverage brewed from the holly shrub of the South American rain forest and sipped through a straw.)

– Adapated from Karma Queens, Geek Gods, and Innerpreneurs, by Ron Rentel with Joe Zellnik.

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