The association of culture to brands and products is not new anymore. From Swinging London era to the contemporary time, it has been a customary consideration when planning and building up a brand, product concept, and marketing strategy. It is hard to build a brand without considering culture, for it is the heart of every business and the soul of the brand itself.

When Tomoaki Nagao—also known as Nigo in the International clothing industry— started his A Bathing Ape fashion line, he was certain about his goal of providing a new and non-traditional clothing option to the Japanese people. Deriving reference from the Japanese habit of bathing in lukewarm water, which he stated as the greatest symbolism of his people’s overindulgence to laziness and apathy, he came up with the annoyingly catchy phrase that would soon become a popular brand name in and outside his country. Like Nigo, the Philippine-based graphic design group Team Manila was also focused on their goal of answering their countries’ younger generations’ naivety towards the Philippine history and colloquial traditions. Their innovative approach to the incorporation of their country’s rich history to modern colloquialism soon became a fashion trend in their country and opened a vast competition among seasoned and forthcoming garment businesses.

Irrefutably, the strongest reason behind these two business successes is their deep knowledge of their target market’s culture.

Culture and Search Engine Optimization

Indeed, culture is an integral part of every marketing strategy. Yet in the Search engine Optimization industry, studying target market’s culture is becoming less and less important as years go by due to the ubiquity of keyword research tools on the market. Website owners skip the arduous studying of their target market’s culture and directly depend on these tools to provide “possible” high-ranking keyword phrases that may help them obtain presence on the Web.

Content is king, they say, and it is undoubtedly true. Nevertheless, because of people’s overreliance to keywords to boost and improve their search engine rankings, many have forgotten the reality that SEO is not just about rankings. Keyword tools disintegrated the entire marketing aspect of SEO. Website owners have forgotten to sell their websites and just completely rely on what these tools can offer.

However, website owners have to be reminded of their target market’s culture’s importance to every process involved in their optimization—from web design to keyword research to article and web content to link building to internal reputation.

Your Author Warner writes on discoveries and learning from online. He likes SEO and with Endless Rise who supplies Social Media Reseller Packges and White Label SEO services only for resellers.