The Business of Fashion’s knowledge report on building cultural relevance on TikTok opens with a sentence that sums up the last few years: top-down brand marketing is fracturing. Influence has moved into digital subcultures, and the shift is from selling a lifestyle to building communities of fans.
Fandom at scale
Fandoms are old. What TikTok changed is their scale and speed. Creation tools, collaborative formats and algorithmic discovery let communities form, make and respond in real time. A fandom is no longer an audience. It is a group of co-authors.
Borrowing cultural capital
The report describes brands investing in fields that already carry cultural weight, film, pop music, books, and in ready-made communities: sports, Formula 1, running clubs, café culture. The point is not the sponsorship. It is what the association says about the brand.
I worked this way for Sol de Janeiro at a Formula 1 weekend in Madrid. The race gave the launch a setting with its own fans and rituals. Three creators cast from DACH turned it into Stories, Reels, TikToks and a vlog, and 19 posts reached around a million people.
Co-creation, not broadcast
Audiences are more discerning and their attention is spread across more screens. The brands that connect, the report argues, invite people in: they join conversations, collaborate with creators and ambassadors, and show up in shared cultural moments rather than talking over them.
In practice that means three things I build into a TikTok plan:
- Creators who belong to the community rather than visit it. Their voice is the brand’s way in.
- Formats that invite a response: duets, stitches, replies, trends with room for a personal twist.
- Replies as content. In The Intense Diaries, Aliona Gris answered comments with new videos, and those replies kept the series alive between episodes.
Always on
The report’s last section is about teams and tools: measuring beyond views, using the platform’s own creative and insight tools, and building teams that can move at the speed of the conversation. A trend has a short window. A brand that needs three weeks of approvals arrives when it is over.
For brands entering the German-speaking market, that is often the strongest argument for a local partner: someone who sees the moment and can brief a creator the same day.
The question to ask
Not “how do we get more followers?” but “which community do we want to be part of, and what can we add to it?” The answer shapes the creators, the formats and the moments. It is where my content strategy work starts.
Source: “Knowledge Report: Building Cultural Relevance on TikTok”, The Business of Fashion.
