👋🏽 Hey There

Lil’ Signals is your go-to newsletter for decoding the cultural currents shaping our world. If you’re new here, welcome. If you’ve been riding with me, thank you for sticking around.

This one feels a little different.

Not because the topic is new, but because my conviction around it finally is.

I’ve been writing Lil’ Signals for a little over a year now. The first piece went out on December 18, 2024. At the time, I did not set out to be a writer. I set out to give myself space to think out loud about something I cared deeply about, culture, and how it actually shapes consumer behavior and decision making.

I took a leap of faith doing something uncomfortable. Founder led writing was not in my DNA. But building Nichefire from the ground up forced clarity. Early on, I complained about not investing enough in marketing. What I eventually realized is that for most startups, especially early stage ones, marketing starts with conviction, not budget. The founders who take the reins and explain what they see in the market create the gravity.

So I started writing.

Over time, Lil’ Signals became more than a newsletter. It became a forcing function. Writing helped me sharpen how I think, how I explain, and how I understand culture itself. And here’s the uncomfortable truth I had to confront along the way, my early explanations of culture leaned too close to the mainstream narrative.

Trends. Demographics. Race. Segments.

Those are elements of culture, but they are not culture.

Culture is the environment people move through. The routines they repeat. The beliefs they inherit. The behaviors they practice until they feel natural. Culture is what shapes how people decide, not just what they buy.

That evolution in thinking is why this article exists.

Over the past year, I have watched marketers, advertisers, platforms, and tools rush toward “culture” as the next growth lever. Social listening dashboards are being rebranded as cultural intelligence. Trend decks are being passed off as cultural understanding. And while there is value in those signals, they stop short of the real work.

Nichefire was built to go deeper. Not to replace other tools, but to act as the connective tissue. The glue that brings together social listening, search behavior, qualitative research, and quantitative data into a clearer picture of what culture actually is and where it is heading.

This piece is my attempt to reset the conversation.

It is my last article of the year, and in many ways, a line in the sand. Not to gatekeep culture, but to clarify it. To explain why the industry keeps getting it wrong, and what needs to change if culture is truly going to be treated as business intelligence, not marketing theater.

If you work in strategy, insights, marketing, or planning, this one is for you.

Let’s dive in 🎯

Table of Contents

1. StoryTime

2. Lil Surfing

StoryTime

StoryTime: Stop Calling Demographics “Culture”

According to a recent piece from Ad Age, cultural fluency is being framed as the silver bullet for brand relevance and growth.

On the surface, that framing feels right. Culture does matter more than ever. Brands that understand how people think, behave, and make decisions outperform those that rely purely on media spend and reach.

But two things can be true at once.

Culture really is the next unlock for growth.
And the way most of the industry talks about culture is still broken.

Because when you look closely at how “culture” shows up in marketing decks, briefs, and brand strategies, it is often shorthand for something else entirely.

Race.
Ethnicity.
Language.
Geography.
Then a slide that asks, “What’s the opportunity and for whom?”

That is not culture.
That is segmentation.

What Culture Actually Is

At Nichefire, we define culture differently.

Culture is the shared beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, gestures, language, and rituals that shape how people make decisions.

Culture is learned.
It is practiced.
It is reinforced by environment.

This is why the classic “kid raised by wolves” analogy works. Strip it down to everyday terms and it becomes even clearer. If a Black child is raised inside a Japanese community, he will likely pick up Japanese norms, routines, and social behaviors. Culture travels through repetition and environment, not biology.

Melanin does not dictate behavior. Systems do.

And that distinction matters, because when brands confuse culture with identity labels, they miss the operating system driving choice.

The Problem With Downstream Insights

This is where many well intentioned marketing examples fall apart.

You have seen them before:

“Go local with Black led activations in Atlanta and Hispanic majority campaigns in Los Angeles.”

“The Quarter Pounder underperforms with Hispanic consumers, recommend the Big Mac instead.”

To be clear, these insights are not useless.

They are just downstream.

They tell you what is happening after a decision has already been shaped by culture. They do not explain why that decision exists in the first place.

When you start with demographics, you are guessing at motivation. When you start with culture, you are mapping causality.

When Culture Becomes a Growth Hack

Here is where frustration sets in.

The market says it wants culture, but what it often wants is trends it can exploit before someone else does.

When culture becomes a growth hack, it does not produce fluency. It produces extraction.

You see it in the patterns:
Trend jacking instead of relationship building.
Representation in the creative, but no representation in the room.
Surface level gestures that slide quickly into tokenism and backlash.

Yes, culture is the unlock.
But not culture as a new targeting layer.

Culture as a business intelligence system.

Signals Come Before Segments

This is where our approach at Nichefire starts to diverge from traditional cultural marketing.

Culture does not show up first as a segment. It shows up as signals.

People leave traces of change in what they:
Discuss through conversation and discourse.
Search for through intent.
Amplify through influence.

We start there.

Our breadcrumbs method requires alignment across discourse, intent, and influence before anything is elevated to trend status. Conversation alone is not enough. Search alone is not enough. Influence alone is not enough.

And we do not rely on a single channel.

We aggregate signals across social platforms, search behavior, blogs, and news. We blend what people say with what they actively go looking for. That combination lets us see demand forming early, not just conversation spiking late.

Traditional social listening gives you a snapshot of the current moment. Useful, but reactive.

Nichefire is built for foresight. We focus on what is likely to matter next, anywhere from one month to twelve months out and beyond. That gives teams time to time launches, brief executives, and de risk bets before the competitive window closes.

Fast Culture vs Slow Culture

Then comes the question most culture decks skip.

Is this a fast culture moment, or a slow culture movement?

Fast culture gets clicks.
Slow culture builds brands.

This distinction is critical. Some moments burn hot and disappear. Others quietly reshape behavior over years. Treating them the same leads to wasted spend and mistimed launches.

The Moments Matrix helps us make that call so teams know when to act, when to watch, and when to ignore the noise entirely.

This is how brands avoid becoming latecomers, showing up after demand crests, after competitors have already moved, and after audiences have decided who actually gets it.

Demographics Come Last, Not First

Only after all of this do we look at demographics.

At that point, you are not stereotyping. You are mapping adoption.

You are identifying which groups are picking up a behavior first, who follows, and who resists. That is fundamentally different from assuming behavior based on identity alone.

This is the difference between cultural intelligence and cultural marketing theater.

Cultural intelligence looks like:
Start with behavior.
Validate with signals.
Understand meaning.
Then segment responsibly.

Cultural marketing theater looks like:
Big Macs are for Hispanics.
Put a diverse cast in the ad and call it culture.
Find the trend and monetize it before someone else does.

The Question That Changes Everything

If culture really is the next unlock for relevance and growth, here is the challenge.

The next time someone in your organization says, “We need to be more cultural,” ask one simple question:

Are we trying to understand how people make decisions, or are we trying to exploit who they are?

The answer will tell you everything you need to know.

It will tell you whether you are building long term relevance, or manufacturing the next backlash.

If you want to see what culture looks like when it is treated as business intelligence, not a targeting layer, I am always happy to show how we approach it at Nichefire.

Big cultural insights, one signal at a time.

PS: Got a signal worth decoding? Hit reply or find me on LinkedIn or X.

Want the unfiltered version? Catch me live on Twitch.

👉 Want to dig deeper? Download the free 2025-26 Holiday report here and explore the full trends, verbatims, and forecasts.

Let’s explore the power of culture, one signal at a time.

Lil’ Surfing 🌊

Just interesting Things I find on “The Internets” 😜

You had to be at the sleep over cypher

Black Culture in china

💬 Your journey into the world of cultural insights starts here!

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