Many years ago, I chose Anthropology for my undergraduate degree. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I figured if I could understand other human beings, that would serve me well long term.
At first, I felt insecure about the choice. It wasn’t a business degree. Did I need an MBA? I decided I’d learn business acumen on the job instead. Five CMO roles later, I can tell you the anthropology degree wasn’t a mistake; it was a considerable advantage.
Especially when it comes to brand and messaging strategy.
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Table of Contents
Start With Questions, Not Assumptions
The advantage starts with what anthropologists are trained to avoid: ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is judging another culture by your own beliefs and standards. You’re bringing your baggage into something completely new, creating distortion.
Marketers do this constantly. We walk into brand work carrying assumptions about what the company is, what the market wants, and what the story should be. We arrive with answers.
Anthropologists arrive with questions. The discipline’s core method is participant observation: you observe and participate until you understand what things actually mean to the people inside the culture. Not what they look like from the outside. What they mean.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz called this “thick description.” A wink and a twitch look identical on camera. One carries meaning, the other doesn’t. Thin description records the behavior. Thick description captures the meaning. Brands live entirely in the second category.
Every Company Has a Culture
There is a real culture within every company. Language, rituals, myths, even taboos. Listen closely in any organization and you’ll hear words that mean something specific there and nowhere else. Stories that get retold at every onboarding. Things that become the DNA of the company.
Your colleagues are the biggest brand ambassadors, and collectively, they own the brand. The brand is a visible artifact of the culture. Understanding and synthesizing that culture is the critical factor in developing an authentic brand strategy.
Most brand work skips this. It starts with what we want to say. The anthropological approach starts with a different question: what is actually going on here?
That shift changes everything. You’re not building a brand, you’re revealing one. Or if you prefer the archaeological version: you’re excavating one. The brand already exists in the language customers use, the stories employees tell, the reasons people actually buy. Your job is to find it, not invent it.
But finding isn’t the whole job. What’s true, what’s distinctive, and where the company is actually headed rarely align neatly, and reconciling those three is where the real work happens. You choose what to amplify, what to sharpen against competitors, and what to grow into.
You reveal, then you choose. You never invent.
How to Apply an Anthropological Approach
My research process is applied ethnography, even when clients don’t call it that. Stakeholder interviews across the exec team, employees, customers, prospects, partners, and board. Employee surveys. Audits of existing brand assets, content, and competitors. Keyword analysis. Qualitative and quantitative, together.
All of it happens before a single word of strategy is written.
But the method matters less than the posture. Customer and employee interviews should be heard like an anthropologist, not like a marketer hunting for a testimonial or a buzzword. The brand’s real language is already being spoken. You’re there to catch it.
Then the data becomes evidence. And you turn evidence into a point of view: what’s true, what’s yours alone, what you’re willing to bet on next. Presented plainly, without spin, because it doesn’t need any.
That’s the actual job. You’re hired to protect the truth of a culture and choose the smartest strategy that culture can honestly support. Everything else feels superficial.
Data Tells You What. Meaning Tells You Why.
Surface metrics lie. An NPS score tells you a number moved, it doesn’t tell you what changed in the customer’s life. A retention rate tells you someone left, it doesn’t tell you what broke the relationship. Metrics tell you what happened. They rarely tell you what it meant.
Context is the brand. The anthropological approach insists on pairing every data point with its meaning, every behavior with its interpretation. That synthesis is where positioning comes from. It does not come from a whiteboard session, a three-year vision statement, or the AI bandwagon.
Authentic Brands Are Revealed, Not Invented
Authenticity is an overused word. Every company wants an authentic brand. Every team wants messaging that feels real. And yet look around: most companies miss, despite the best intentions.
They miss because they author instead of reveal. Authenticity can’t be written from scratch. It can only be uncovered, because it’s the alignment between what a company says and what it actually is. The best brand strategy will provide the roadmap for alignment.
The anthropological approach leads directly there. You observe. You participate. You excavate. And the truth you find inspires the brand, creates the story, and produces the thing everyone claims to want: authenticity at its core.
Before You Strategize, Observe
So here’s the challenge. Next time you begin brand work, resist the urge to write anything for two weeks. Just observe. Listen to sales calls. Read the support tickets. Ask employees to describe the company and compare that to how the website describes it. Speak to customers.
There’s the right beginning of your brand strategy, waiting to be excavated.
