What is ‘Brat’ and Why Should You Care? The Outsized Implications of Pop Culture, and What It Can Teach Us About Marketing

TikTok is often regarded as a medium for content creators and regular people to share their day-to-day thoughts. Many people think of the content shared on TikTok or other social media platforms as somewhat trivial. But whether you love or hate it, the reality is that the pop culture propagated on these platforms has profound implications, and we might all have much to learn from it.

For the most part, no one video or creator is particularly revolutionary. Rather, pop culture evolves based on the power of the collective and the conversations of the masses. Social media trends can majorly influence and are often a response to popular culture. It's on social platforms that these trends churn out faster than anywhere. 

Through the process of something becoming widely popular, it also becomes increasingly abstracted from its origin. Trends start essentially through copying, until whatever’s trending has gained momentum. Eventually, no one person is copying another. Instead, when creators, public figures, or celebrities– or even your average Joe– participate in this aspect of pop culture, they are drawing on a collective anthology of references that is dynamically evolving. 

‍Influencers and the Art of Para-Social Relationships 

Influencers contribute to this trend cycle by posting their rendition of trends or helping create new ones. But they have also popularized new forms of communication. Influencers have a unique way of building parasocial relationships with their audiences such that their followers feel they really know them. Their causal forms of communication, as opposed to strategically scripted content, make their followers feel almost as though they’re friends. 

No more are the days of Instagram models posing next to photos of protein shakes and captioning the photo #ad. Viewers enjoy becoming familiar with the problems in their lives, and hearing about their everyday lives. When a piece of content is sponsored, viewers feel as though the product makes sense with their lives– maybe it's even a solution to a problem they’ve talked openly about before. 

Many influencers even engage with followers in comment sections, adding to the feeling that they’re just like us. Their authenticity helps foster loyalty from their followers, who view their favorite influencers as more relatable to and approachable than celebrities. 

Interestingly, in recent years, there has been an uptick in bigger-name celebrities taking to platforms such as TikTok, who are capitalizing off of these trends and causal forms of content creation. For celebrities, this opportunity to connect with audiences more directly and authentically is not foregone. 

Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner siblings, has nearly 400 million Instagram followers. But when she posted a video filming in her car as many influencers do, viewers called her out for trying to copy influencers. The causal form of communication didn’t seem genuine to her brand. 

‍Podcasting as a Way to Build Parasocial Relationships

There has also been a major increase in the amount of celebrities and public figures going on podcasts. The informality of podcasting can convey a sense of candor, and since the interviewer is usually a content creator, they often lack the celebrity of the interviewee. This can help celebrities facilitate those parasocial relationships and give the impression that they’re “just like you.” 

This is a powerful lesson when it comes to branding. Podcasts are a great way for someone to say “Hey, I’m just a normal person who can have a normal conversation with people outside my bubble,” without actually saying it. This lesson doesn’t just apply to celebrities, however. It applies to public figures of all sorts.

Pop Culture Influencing Political Campaigns 

In this election cycle, we’ve seen these tactics more than ever. Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, has been connecting with younger audiences by injecting pop culture into her campaign. When musical pop artist Charlie XCX endorsed Harris, she tweeted on her X account, “kamala IS brat.” The tweet references Charlie XCX’s new album, Brat, which has been hugely popular on TikTok and amongst younger listeners. While celebrity endorsements of politicians are nothing new, Ms. Harris’ team embraced the idea, making her campaign color the recognizable lime green of the album and using the same recognizable font. 

Ms. Harris’ team has also capitalized off of the widely trending audio of Harris’ famous coconut tree quote, which reads “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree. You exist in the context.” The audio has gone viral, with fans remixing the sound to house music beats and lip-syncing the words. Many were making fun of Ms. Harris for the nonsensical quote but she has since embraced the trend, making the bio of her TikTok account “providing the context.” The angle of Ms. Harris’ campaign strategically capitalizes off of young people’s enthusiasm for pop culture and, for many, injects a certain lightheartedness into politics that was previously absent.  

Ms. Harris also recently appeared on celebrity Drew Barrymore’s talk show. The notoriously casual atmosphere was unprecedented for political interviews, as the two sat cross-legged on a couch. The pair talked about Ms. Harris’ frequently criticized laugh, and it gave Kamala the opportunity to gain control over her narrative. “I want to have my mother’s laugh,” she said during the interview and mentioned that the undue criticism may be due to sexism. A casual interview forum was a great way for Ms. Harris to explain herself and gently challenge the beliefs of her critics while coming across as real, approachable, and non-defensive. 

Regardless of your feelings about Brat or coconut tree memes, this year’s entanglement of politics and popular culture highlights important trends and effective strategies for personal branding. 

Marketing and Personal Branding Takeaways from Pop Culture 

What’s important is to come across as authentic. Kamala Harris is a middle-aged woman, and it would be easy for her participation in these trends to feel disingenuous to her brand. So what makes Ms. Harris’ campaign so successful? 

In large part, it’s because Ms. Harris’ campaign has been distanced from her as a person, allowing her to maintain her professionalism while indirectly playing into such trends. Her official TikTok account, 

“Kamala HQ,” is currently viral, with 3.3 million followers, and posts fan edits from a third-party perspective. Frequent comments include: “The intern that made this needs a raise.” Harris’ campaign has evidently struck a balance between capitalizing off of opportune pop culture references while maintaining her distance from them.  

Though controversial, there are many lessons to be learned from pop culture when it comes to personal branding, and you don’t need to be a politician or celebrity to adopt these principles. For company leaders, interviews and podcast appearances can be a great way to establish competency and build their brand. Research shows that podcast appearances for CEOs can be an extremely worthwhile tactic. There is evidence to support the idea that CEO podcast appearances can mitigate the negative effects of bad news, increase customer loyalty and brand awareness, and bolster stock performance. 

Non-coincidentally, these benefits are hypothesized to be due to something the article calls the “friend zone,” in which CEOs are able to build parasocial relationships with their audiences. And yes, those are the same types of relationships influencers build with their audiences. 

The bottom line is that you don’t need to market yourself as ‘brat’ to harness the power of friend-zoning your audience, and in fact, you probably shouldn’t. A unique, thoughtful, and personalized approach can be used to capture the same effect. 

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