How to Embrace Cultural Listening in Market Research and Drive Relevance with Diverse Audiences

To maintain commercial relevance, brands must reach and engage diverse audiences effectively. This requires adapting market research practices, including creating diverse teams that provide greater depth of talent and experience and learning how to work together more effectively. But what are other ways to make our qualitative research sharper, smarter and more relevant when it comes to nurturing deep, culturally intelligent relationships with customers?

One tool is cultural listening.

Put simply, culture underlies every perception a respondent has and every decision they make. When we do not consider culture in our methodology and analysis, we find insights that are true right now but may not stand the test of time in changing communities and markets.

I work in healthcare, where the industry is becoming increasingly aware of how cultural gaps in understanding can have broad implications for brands and, above all, life and death implications for the people those brands serve. However, these same cultural gaps in understanding apply to all industries—from consumer goods to financial services to tech.

When we are proficient in cultural listening, we can adapt to changing communities and markets and gain rich understanding of individual and group decision-making and perceptions as they relate to the changes occurring. This means we offer our clients new and authentic insights as the world evolves.

The Steps to Apply Better Cultural Listening Skills in Market Research

To practice cultural listening, we can start by asking what is my own culture? How does it influence my perceptions, beliefs, and above all, my decisions? All of us make decisions, act certain ways and understand our world through our own, unique cultural lens.

The first step to learning cultural listening is to start by asking yourself these key questions:

1. What values and beliefs do you turn to for meaning and answers?
2. When you make an important decision in your life, who or what helps you?
3. What groups do you belong to, and how does your belonging influence how you live your life? (Even hobbies, if they’ve become a part of how you see yourself and how you make decisions about your life, can be a part of your culture.)
4. What preferences and dislikes are prominent in how you see the world, whether it’s choosing what coffee to drink, what to do when you get sick, or how you judge elected leaders.

Once we have a solid picture of our own lens, we can start applying those same questions to others. Starting with people we know well, we can ask ourselves how their cultural lenses make them different from us, and what we might share. As we expand the circle of who we are thinking about (a work colleague, the pest control guy, you name it!), we start to see that our own ignorance of those peoples’ lives makes it hard to get a good picture of their cultural lens.

So, if we struggle to understand strangers’ lenses, how could we possibly engage cultural listening in market research? The trick is to listen for clues. We all share ways we talk about culture:

• We talk about our past experiences: I grew up on a military base
• How and where we learned specific things: I learned that on TikTok
• What comforts us / makes us uncomfortable: Going on a hike relaxes me
• What is true and what is false: I don’t believe that ingredient is safe
• What is “good” and what is “bad”: I think eating pork is bad
• How we celebrate or commemorate: We jumped over a broom at our wedding
• What symbols we use: For me, it’s like constantly living on a rollercoaster

These are all clues that we can identify; they are flags that tell us “Oh, this might be cultural information.” When we are on alert for these flags and are open to hearing about a respondent’s unique lens, that’s when we engage in cultural listening.

At Escalent, we understand diverse audiences. How to reach them. How to engage them. How to translate their stories into insights that become sticky at companies. And how to help clients nurture deep, culturally intelligent and mutually beneficial relationships with them as the ultimate competitive advantage. Contact us to learn more.

Want to learn more? Let’s connect.