It’s the time of the year when most marketers are thinking long and hard about how they’re going to turn up during the next 12 months.
While most planning is done around budgets with actual currencies, it is also important to think about how brands can earn cultural currency.
Multiple experts have expressed the same thoughts on panels, posts and in newsletters recently: think about the concept in a more practical way.
If we treat cultural currency like a real asset – something that can be earned, spent and exchanged – it stops being a fuzzy marketing concept and starts informing the choices we make in our 2026 planning. This too was the idea shared by experts at a recent session hosted by Frontify on the topic.
Barr Balamuth, founder of brand strategy agency Parallel Play, explained the concept as follows: "We define cultural currency as the ability to influence what people talk about, how they behave and what they come to see as valuable. Cultural currency is an asset that lets your brand set reference points in people's heads. What they talk about, how they behave, what they decide is worth their time, money and social capital."
