Can Claude AI help with your cultural research?
There are many strategy frameworks under the sun, the question is which one is the right one for the job at hand. Same thing goes with AI tools. Sure, we can talk about what “the best tools” are. But the first logical follow up question is “for what?”.
Which leads me to talk about culture and Claude AI. Culture, because through my work at Droga5 i’ve re-acquainted myself with the 4 Cs brand strategy framework (Culture, Competition, Consumer, Company), after 6+ years practising the Truth Triangle (Market, Human, Brand) at VCCP. Different shapes, same sort of outcome. Triangulation as a strategic vehicle.
But recently, for a project i cannot disclose just yet, we started looking at the cultural narratives around topics such as money, wealth, savings and investing. And there are of course many ways we could look at this, one of which is understanding what creators are saying about these things. Enter, Claude.
Why Claude? Because i have neither the time or subscriptions to go through influencer platforms and produce a long list and itemise their follower counts or whatever. What i really want is to spot the patterns. So i found a neat little trick for doing this fast.
Download some sort of YouTube transcription plugin. You can search for “youtube transcription chrome extension” and you’ll get some good options. Choose what works for you.
Search for creators or specific videos around the topic you’re researching. Make a playlist, or open 176 tabs, whatever you feel comfortable with. With your plugin, go one by one and copy the video transcripts (you’ll get them in seconds).
Paste all those transcripts into a Google Doc, or something else you can PDF later. The important thing is they’re all in one place as your master repository of cultural narratives.
Now enters Claude AI. Load that PDF on there, and start asking questions. What are the most common topics? What is the tone of these videos? Who says what? In what way? If you had to plot this into a 2x2 matrix, what would you do? All the stuff we’d manually do as strategists, but now you have a hella fast digital intern to help you get there in record time.
And that’s about it. No rocket science, just practical applications of different AI tools without all the prompting bullshit. It’s gonna be a while before AI can do cultural analysis with the level of depth and understanding us humans can, but this helps.
The point isn’t that Claude can do all the work for you. It’s that it can remove mechanical steps from your own process so you can focus on the crafting of your own points of view. In this case, Claude saved me from watching hours of videos, so i could use that time to notice patterns without getting lost in the weeds.
Another possibly useful metaphor: AI as a strategy weed killer. It won’t make your garden prettier. But keeps the dull bits away.
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