Brands Earn Cultural Relevance By Understanding How People Live Culture Through All Five Senses

Brands spend heavily to become part of local culture. They sponsor events, buy billboards, and build campaigns around moments like South Africa's Heritage Month. The people they want to reach live that culture every day through what they eat, the music they hear, how they travel, and where they gather on a Sunday. Earning a place in those routines takes a fuller picture of how people experience the world, built from time spent close to their lives and engaging all five senses.

Sibusiso Ndlovu is Co-Founder of Media Creative Hub, a South African agency that delivers marketing, digital, content, and brand work for clients across education, professional services, and small to mid-sized organizations. His career spans marketing, education, brand building, digital business, and entrepreneurship. Ndlovu grew up in Alexandra, a township in northern Johannesburg, where he encountered brands on the signs of spaza shops, the small neighborhood stores people buy from daily, long before he had the vocabulary of marketing. That early exposure became a lasting interest in how people live and what they value, and it shapes how he thinks brands should earn their place in a market.

"As human beings, we experience culture through the whole body. The future of brand experiences is not only omnichannel, but omnisensory," says Ndlovu. He calls his approach the Five Senses of Culture, a framework for how brands take part in culture through sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. It starts from the premise that culture lives in people's routines long before a marketing calendar marks the occasion.

Close your eyes

Most brand work centers on what people see. Logos, typography, photography, video, and outdoor placements absorb most of the budget, and all of them matter. Ndlovu starts with sight too, but his question is what a brand looks like inside the world of the person it wants to reach. Whether the identity has been applied correctly is a separate, narrower test.

Sound comes next. In South Africa, jazz, kwaito, and amapiano carry memories and mark generations, and the music drifting from homes and minibus taxis forms the backdrop of daily life. Sound has grown into a branding discipline of its own, with agencies building sonic identities for global brands. "South Africa is incredibly rich in sound, and that makes me ask a very simple question of brands. If I close my eyes, can I recognize you?" says Ndlovu.

A place at the table

Taste moves the framework into more intimate territory. In South Africa, food is rarely only consumption. A Sunday braai, a wedding meal, or a plate shared at a family gathering carries memory and belonging, and a brand can't buy its way to that table. It needs a credible reason to be invited.

Smell works on memory even faster, returning someone to a childhood home, a street, or a meal before they consciously register why. Brands are leaning into scent for that reason, as consumers look for experiences that cut through digital noise. Touch rounds out the framework, covering the physical encounters people have with products, packaging, spaces, and each other. "Can people smell your brand? Can the sense of smell occupy your media space? Can it occupy people's memory? Because culture is lived," notes Ndlovu.

Arriving too late

Amapiano shows why proximity matters. Calling it a South African music genre misses the ecosystem around it, which spans dance, language, fashion, and nightlife. The sound has traveled worldwide while staying rooted in the townships where it started, and it dominated local streaming again in 2025. A marketer can spot amapiano as a trend on a dashboard. Understanding what it means to the people who created it and live within it takes time spent in their world. "My advice to anyone trying to spend a marketing budget in a particular market is to immerse yourself in the actual lives of the people you want to reach. Culture is happening every day. If you only arrive when there is a campaign opportunity, you have probably arrived too late," warns Ndlovu.

Coca-Cola offers an example of a brand making room for participation. Its Share a Coke campaign printed South African names on bottles, and people responded by hunting for their own names, buying bottles for friends, and posting photos online. Personalization alone didn't make the campaign culturally relevant. Consumers brought their own relationships into it and became participants in the marketing. For Ndlovu, that shift is the point, since a brand earns relevance when it gives people room to bring their own lives into the work.

Marketers today have more information about their audiences than ever. Analytics track behavior, CRM systems map customer journeys, social listening surfaces conversations, and AI finds patterns across volumes of data no team could process by hand. Those capabilities show what people do, where they go, and sometimes what they'll do next. Knowing why something matters to them takes curiosity about the life behind each data point, including how people move, what makes them laugh, what reminds them of home, what frustrates them, and what gives them dignity. "I have always been fascinated by human beings and why we respond to things the way we do. Marketing gives us a remarkable window into that, but if we reduce people to demographics, impressions, and clicks, we miss much of what makes them human," Ndlovu adds.

Two trains, one city

That curiosity put Ndlovu on the streets of Johannesburg this July for the 702 Jozi My Jozi Walk the Talk, presented by Primedia's Radio 702 with Jozi My Jozi and the City of Johannesburg. For him, the experience started before the walking did. Registered walkers rode the Gautrain, the city's high-speed line, to Park Station, then transferred to a complimentary PRASA train bound for Ellis Park Stadium. The Gautrain is modern, quick, and comparatively premium. The older commuter rail sits much closer to the daily transport reality of many South Africans. Riding both in one trip exposed something market segmentation tends to smooth over. People in the same city can live very different versions of it, and that morning they were all headed to the same place. "That experience stayed with me because marketing spends so much time separating people into segments, income groups, and consumer categories. Yet there we were, different people from different realities, moving toward the same destination and experiencing the same city," says Ndlovu.

Once on foot, walkers took in the city with every sense. The three inner-city routes of 5km, 8km, and 15km passed landmarks like Mandela Bridge, with bands playing on Main Street and traders selling food, drinks, and souvenirs along the way. Walkers saw the city's buildings, murals, and businesses, heard its music and traffic, smelled a living city, imperfections included, and felt every kilometer underfoot. The day ended back at Ellis Park, where South African music and local vendors turned the stadium into one more expression of Johannesburg.

Ndlovu sums up the framework with a single question for brands. If the logo came off, would people still know the brand understands them? He traces that question back to the streets of Alexandra where he first noticed brands. Culture belongs to the people who live it, and the walk showed him what a city looks like when nobody filters it through a media plan. "It took you into the day-to-day life of an ordinary person living in Johannesburg, and if you paid attention, the city stimulated all five senses. Nobody needed to explain Johannesburg to you. For those few hours, you were experiencing it," Ndlovu concludes.