Why if you’re talking about ROI you’re not talking about culture

I have been giving this quite a bit of thought over the last few years since I live firmly in the “culture space”. As the curator of a global conference, I spend most of my time attempting to understand the role that culture plays in our collective world. My attempt to do goes hand in hand with my accepting that the definition of culture stands on constantly shifting ground. Culture can mean the art and creativity of a particular community or the social conventions of an organization as well as the larger societal behavioral trends. Each of these, and more, can be relevant when discussing culture. But for simplicity, I am going to focus on culture as defined as the groundswell of music, media, and art forms that people share in a particular place or time. Institutional players, often in the form of brands (notably but not exclusively CPGs), look to gain entry into the culture space, as they believe, rightly so, it will drive consumer loyalty and engagement. Facing a wide range of options, ROI (Return on Investment) is the chosen metric most often used to assign value to a potential project. The reliance on ROI, however, to determine the value of a project is commonplace and I would argue has no place in a conversation about culture.

In my prior life, I spent years working for Goldman, Sachs. I attended business school with a focus on Finance. I left the world of Wall Street, a world filled with all sorts of arcane financial measurement including ROI, only to find myself right back in the same type of conversation in the culture space. When ROI is mentioned more frequently in a music conversation than it is on a trading desk we have a problem. ROI can be a useful measure when comparing one investment alternative (or opportunity) to another but I find it less effective when measuring cultural impact. Ultimately, this is what makes culture so damn frustrating. We intrinsically know culture is important to us but we can’t quite put a finger on why. Brands know they must be in the culture space but very rarely know how to do so effectively. Hence the reliance on co-opting financial measurements for use in a space that is at its most basic human and emotional. Its very nature defies the type of measurement that financial models rely on. So why is ROI thrown about so frequently? The answer is because it’s easy and convenient. If you can assign a measurement (even a flawed one) to a variable it makes your decision making process somewhat justifiable. The dirty secret about ROI, whether in a financial setting or not, is that it is only as good as the inputs that make up the ratio. Additionally one can modify ROI to suit your specific purposes, it all depends on what is included as return and costs. So a measurement that is held up as unassailable it actually quite subjective. Is this the most effective way we have to gauge impact for something as vital as understanding culture and how we interact with it?

Culture is messy, hit & miss, alluring and intoxicating. Culture drives our conversations and often times our passions. It encompasses music, film, visual arts, fashion and beyond. It’s easy to understand why brands would want to play a role in these multiple worlds. What is the best way to accomplish that without being perceived as an interloper? That remains the central debate but whatever the answer I know it does not involve dissecting cultural opportunities with an arbitrary method like ROI.