For brands, culture has become harder to navigate. Something that looks unremarkable inside a conference room can carry a very different meaning once it reaches the people it was meant for. Target got a reminder of that this week.
The retailer pulled a children’s Halloween costume after customers said its design evoked offensive imagery. The incident is another example of how quickly a seemingly ordinary product decision can become a much bigger problem.
The natural question is how something like that makes it through the process.
But there is another question worth asking: Who might have recognized the problem earlier, and were they close enough to the decision to say so?
Companies have never had more ways to understand their customers: research, focus groups, social listening, demographic data and increasingly sophisticated AI. Yet cultural understanding isn't simply an information problem. It is also about proximity to people who have the context to interpret what that information means.
The Relationship Comes First
Ralph Lauren offers a different model.
In 2025, the brand launched a collection inspired by Oak Bluffs, the Martha's Vineyard town that has been a summer destination for Black families for generations.
Rather than simply researching the community, Ralph Lauren worked with people already connected to it. The brand partnered with The Cottagers, a nonprofit of Black women homeowners, featured Oak Bluffs residents in the campaign and released a documentary about the area's Black history. The collection also extended Ralph Lauren's existing relationship with Morehouse and Spelman, with HBCU alumni inside the company helping shape the work.
The relationships existed before there was a collection to sell.
That gave the brand something a research report can't easily provide: people with enough context and trust to help shape how the community was represented.
Presence Isn't Proximity
Starbucks Korea illustrates the opposite problem.
In May, the company promoted a tumbler as part of "Tank Day" on May 18, the anniversary of South Korea's 1980 Gwangju uprising, when military forces were used against pro-democracy protesters.
The campaign was pulled, the CEO of Starbucks Korea was dismissed, and the company announced additional historical-awareness measures.
Starbucks has operated in Korea since 1999 and has more than 2,000 stores. Its presence in the market is enormous.
But presence isn't the same as proximity. A company can have deep market knowledge and still miss context that someone with the right cultural understanding would recognize immediately.
The Knowledge Is Often Already There
Most companies already have people who understand the communities they want to reach. They're employees, members of ERGs, regional teams, creators, customers and community partners.
The problem is that having cultural knowledge somewhere inside an organization doesn't mean that knowledge has influence.
Someone can understand exactly why an idea won't land and still have no role in deciding whether it moves forward.
That's increasingly important as brands try to connect with the rising majority. Cultural context isn't a demographic checkbox. It comes from lived experience, relationships and participation.
Research still matters. Data can reveal patterns and help companies understand behavior at scale. But it can't always tell you what something means, or why it matters.
That understanding often lives with people.
The organizations that bridge the culture gap aren't necessarily the ones with the most information. They're the ones that know where their cultural knowledge lives—and create a path for that knowledge to reach the people making decisions.
Ralph Lauren's Oak Bluffs work shows the value of building those relationships before a commercial opportunity appears. Target and Starbucks show what can happen when cultural context doesn't reach the decision early enough.
The culture gap doesn't always exist between a brand and its audience. Sometimes, it exists inside the brand itself.
