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Relevance Is a Habit, Not a Moment.
Marketing · 7 min read · 1618 Media Insights
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Everyone wants to be relevant. Few want to be consistent.
Somewhere in every marketing meeting there is a person who says the brand should be “more culturally relevant”. Everyone nods. A week later the team is scrambling to post about a trend that peaked yesterday, in a voice the brand has never used, with a joke nobody can quite explain.
That is not relevance. That is borrowing someone elseʼs attention for an afternoon.
Real cultural relevance is slower and far more interesting. It comes from a brand having a clear point of view, a recognisable character and a format people have learned to expect, and then bringing those things to whatever the world is talking about. The trend changes every week. The character does not.
Two examples show what that looks like. One has been running for six decades, and the other produced one of the most talked-about stunts of recent years. Both worked for the same reason, and it was not luck.
Amul has been commenting on India since 1966.
In 1966, Sylvester daCunha created a little girl in a polka-dot dress to advertise Amul butter, partly to challenge a rivalʼs mascot. She first appeared on a few lampposts in Mumbai, and the public reaction was immediate and warm.
Over the years the campaign settled into what it is known for today: witty topical hoardings that comment on whatever the country is talking about, from cricket and cinema to politics and budgets, each with a pun and the same cartoon girl at the centre. It has produced thousands of ads, and it is widely described as one of the longest-running advertising campaigns in the world. The agency that created it still runs it, now led by Sylvesterʼs son, Rahul daCunha.
Look at what stays fixed. The character is always the same. The format is always the same, a hand-drawn hoarding with a pun. The tone is always the same, cheeky but never cruel. And the product, butter, is never far from the joke.
Look at what changes. Everything else. The news, the people, the issue of the day.
That combination is the secret. Because the frame is fixed, the brand never has to ask what it sounds like or whether a topic is “on brand”. It can respond quickly because it has already decided who it is.
There is a second, quieter lesson in how Amul assigns jobs to channels. Its agency has said the girl plays different roles on different platforms. On outdoor she is a social observer, commenting on India. On television, she sells food. One character, two jobs, and no confusion about which is which. A former managing director of Amulʼs parent cooperative has also said that its advertising spend was less than one percent of turnover, which is a reminder that consistency is often cheaper than novelty.
The lesson: if you fix the character and the format, the content takes care of itself. Constraint is what makes speed possible.
The owl had to be alive before he could die.
In February 2025, Duolingo announced that its green owl mascot, Duo, was dead. The app icon went dark. Posts across its social accounts mourned him. A fake accident involving a Tesla Cybertruck was blamed. Then it invited users to bring him back by collectively completing 50 billion points of lessons, and he was resurrected about two weeks later.
The numbers reported at the time were enormous. Brand mentions rose by about 25,000% in a single day, and the company is credited with around 1.7 billion impressions in two weeks, with almost no paid media. Analysts tracking the company noted that the campaign helped reactivate dormant users, with monthly active users rising by 13 million in the quarter to about 130 million
But look at why it worked. A mascot death is only funny, or even meaningful, if people already have a relationship with the mascot. Duo had spent years building a personality as the slightly threatening, relentlessly cheerful owl who guilt-trips you into practising. Audiences were primed to react. The stunt did not create the character. It amplified one that already existed.
There is a caveat that makes this a better lesson, not a worse one. By the middle of 2025, Duolingoʼs management said it was deliberately pulling back on the chaotic, viral style of content and moving to more positive messaging, and it acknowledged that this affected user growth in North America. In other words, even a hugely successful stunt is hard to repeat on demand. Virality is an event. A character is an asset.
The lesson: a stunt multiplies what is already there. If there is nothing there, it multiplies nothing.
Noise borrows attention. Relevance earns it.
Put the two cases side by side, and the difference between noise and relevance becomes clear.
Noise is reactive. It sees a trend and asks how the brand can get in on it. It has no memory, because each post stands alone, and it has no stakes, because nobody would notice if it stopped.
Relevance is selective. It sees a trend and asks whether it has something to say, in its own voice, that the audience would recognise as theirs. It builds a memory, because every piece adds to a character people know. It has stakes, because people would miss it.
Here is a simple test. Cover the logo on a post. If people would still know whose it was, the brand has a point of view. If they wouldnʼt, the brand has a content calendar.
There is a financial side to this too. Strong characters make each piece of content cheaper to create and more valuable to see, because audiences arrive already understanding the joke. Trend-chasing does the opposite. Every post has to start from nothing.
How to build a point of view that can stand being topical.
You donʼt need six decades. You need four decisions, made early and kept.
A character. Who is speaking? Not the company, a voice. Dry, warm, mischievous, earnest. Describe it in three words and be able to say what it would never say.
A format. What does a typical piece look like? A weekly illustration, a one-line observation, a short video series. A repeatable format turns a one-off idea into a habit, and habits are what audiences remember.
A set of rules. What will we never comment on? What tone do we never take? Every brand with staying power has a list of topics it avoids. Rules protect the character when the moment tempts you to break it.
A rhythm. How often will we show up? A modest, reliable cadence beats a loud burst followed by silence. Amul has been at it for decades, and nobody has ever called it a trend.
Notice that none of these decisions is about a specific trend. They are decisions about identity, and that is why they last
What this means if you have a small team.
Small teams often assume that cultural relevance needs speed and a large content operation. In practice it is the other way round. The bigger the team, the more approval layers stand between the idea and the audience. A small, clear team with a strong point of view can move faster than a large one with none.
So start small. Pick one character, one format, one place. Do it for three months before you judge it. Resist the urge to jump on every trend that goes by. Choose only the ones where your character has something real to add.
And be honest about what you can maintain. A modest series you can sustain for a year is worth more than a brilliant stunt that leaves the team exhausted and the audience waiting for the next one.
Where this leaves you.
Culture will keep moving. New platforms, new memes, new moods. A brand that tries to keep up by changing itself every time will always be one step behind.
The brands that look effortlessly current are usually the ones that decided who they were a long time ago. They let the world move around them, and they show up with the same face, the same wit and the same point of view, again and again.
Relevance is not what you say about the moment. It is who you are when the moment arrives.
Sources
These are for fact-checking and can be removed before publishing.
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Amul: https://www.afaqs.com/news/advertising/38597_amul-girl-gets-a-newdimension, https://yourstory.com/2017/12/amul-girl-india-rahul-dacunha, https://www.exchange4media.com/advertising-news/amul-publishes-18-adsin-a-monthgoes-aggressive-on-social-media-59947.html and https://www.amul.com/m/amul-topical-story
Good ideas are everywhere now. A well-chosen problem, held with discipline, is what turns one of them into growth.
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