This is not America

A great deal of our contemporary myopia in marketing, insights, and innovation is a direct derivative of our insistence on understanding the United States as the global culture’s North Star (or rather, from our perspective, the Southern Cross).

Articles discussing the growing influence of South Korea, China, and Latin America have abounded lately. What seems less discussed is exactly who’s losing, or at least, who’s no longer growing because of this. Cultural influence isn’t strictly a zero-sum game, but consuming culture involves the use of time, which is a finite and unrecoverable resource.

Despite all this, the expectation remains high that what happened there will happen here. The internet is flooded with people creating carousels based on articles from "smart-set” American media like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Vox as if they were major trends for Brazil. It is an absurd level of intellectual provincialism, a contemporary reprise of the old story about the women of the Portuguese court who arrived in Brazil wearing turbans to hide lice, which everyone then imitated because they thought it to be the latest fashion in Europe.

Major events over there still seem stuck in the paradigm of “the future starts here,” constantly treating highly specific American contexts as if they made total sense elsewhere in the world. Much of our corporate elite is a partner in this nonsense. The sheer size of the Brazilian delegations and the secondary market that exists around these events (guru parrots, tour organizers, etc.) is a testament to this, and in part, almost a neurosis: we refuse to understand the obvious, because doing so would require deconstructing our entire view of how the world works.

Everyone is following a formula from the last century, built upon abstractions that are increasingly less true and no longer account for the complexity of world transformations. Let me explain…

The cracks in the armor and increasingly less aspirational lifestyles

Yes, they are still the world's largest economy, though there are several signs of relative decline. Their peak share of global GDP was in the 1960s, reaching 40%, but since the 1980s it has hovered around a reasonably stable 20%.

The status of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, one of the pillars of U.S. economic power, peaked in the 90s, but in the last ten years, it has lost nearly 10% of its share. There is heated debate over whether this is transitory or a turning point.

More recently, economic concern has shifted toward an almost total dependence on consumer-focused AI, which circular investments, inflated expectations, and exaggerated promises suggest might not pay off and could end in a nasty fall. And this time, the criticisms regarding these signs of decline aren't coming from anti-establishment figures, but from the inside, from people like Ray Dalio, Daron Acemoglu, or Goldman Sachs itself.

But the central point here is different: we cannot treat economic preponderance as a synonym for cultural influence, nor for the aspirational nature of values and lifestyles. You know that story about preferring to be feared or loved? One doesn't guarantee the other, sometimes it’s exactly the opposite.

Exported models from the past are in decline

The pillar of the American lifestyle export in the 20th century was the enormous purchasing power of the American middle class, once described as the “world’s hedge fund.” This relative strength, which peaked in the 90s, hasn’t been a reality for at least a decade. And this decline is not only continuing but worsening: the top 10% of earners already concentrate half of all consumer spending.

The multi-room house. Two large cars in the garage. Hypermarkets. Vacations in resorts or theme parks. These major historical symbols of that lifestyle are in decline or stagnation, at least over there.

Other negative showcases are frequent highlights in the international press: the absurd state of the healthcare system, extreme gun violence compared to other wealthy nations (they have led in homicides per capita for years!), and a cost of living so heavy that even high salaries can’t compensate. The result is a culture where money, and with it, professional success, occupies such a central place in life that it subordinates everything else: relationships, friendships, time. It’s a balance that doesn’t add up for many people.

Europeans see the higher salaries and lower taxes but prefer their long paid vacations and quality of life. In wealthy Asia, there are pockets of influence, visible in things like the enormous interest in American vintage fashion and workwear, but neighboring countries seem to be more direct influences than the U.S. Global public opinion about the country is also moving in a negative direction, although this may be transitory and linked to political issues.

The consequence is that the lifestyles the U.S. sold to the world seem increasingly less desirable internationally. The cultural implications are immense. What happens when we no longer want to be like them?

The American cultural industry still has weight but it’s a shadow of its former self

For those who grew up at the height of the Cold War or in the 90s, it’s clear that this influence is now comparatively smaller. The manifestations are diverse, but in music, there is clear evidence.

Music: no longer the prima donna, just a choir singer who still sings loudly

American music was the global soundtrack for most of the 20th century, from 30s jazz to the explosion of rock in the 50s and 60s, and hip hop as a highly influential cultural export, especially from the 80s onward.

But today seems different. A recent study measured the proportion of the most-played songs on Spotify by origin in various countries over a year, showing the strength of local music in some of the world's most relevant markets, including Brazil.

Some things stand out: South Korea carries more weight than the U.S. in most countries from the Bosphorus Strait eastward, and U.S. influence is concentrated in English-speaking countries and, to a lesser extent, Northern Europe. China, though outside this study, also has a strong local market that is gaining international relevance.

Of course, Spotify isn’t the entire music market, which is much harder to measure today than in the era of physical media sales. But due to its universality, it’s a good proxy for how things work globally. In Brazil, data crossing other platforms places us as even more interested in our own music.

Now, if we could convert this metric into plays per dollar spent, the influence of countries like South Korea, Puerto Rico, and Colombia would be absolutely disproportionate. It’s a bit like comparing P&G with a smaller local chemical brand, the difference in the order of magnitude of investment is too large. This serves as proof that cultural relevance and influence are not strictly economic factors.

If it were possible to do a similar study in previous decades, especially pre-Napster, it is very likely that the Americans would be much more dominant than they are today, given the distribution power of a few major labels, radio payola, and the influence of MTV.

Audiovisual: Hollywood in a loop and growing interest in other stories formats and repertoires

Much of the audiovisual industry is stuck in a loop of superheroes, sequels, and prequels because creative daring is being besieged by financial results. Is it worth creating a new franchise or simply making another Avengers movie or another Superman remake?

In contrast, for those tired of repeated formulas, it’s easy to escape the romantic comedies, the high school teen dramas, and the reality shows built on the same old stereotypes.

Ironically, perhaps the American company that best understood this movement was Netflix, precisely because it produces a massive amount of local content in the countries where it operates and suggests this content to users around the world. Yes, there are countries like Brazil and France where there is a legal obligation for the production and broadcasting of national audiovisual content, but it is interesting to observe that this happens even in countries where this obligation does not exist!

This is so true that a growing portion of its major global hits are not American productions, such as: Squid Game (South Korea), Money Heist (Spain), Roma (Mexico), or Fauda (Israel) - even the roar of K-pop Demon Hunters, which is indeed an American production, is a crossover of Asian formats. They understood that entertainment based on other cultures, languages, and formats had much more potential for broad distribution than Hollywood imagined, even bypassing taboos like 'Americans won't watch anything with subtitles

Us and them: a conversation about data and self-esteem

Them: a self-referential culture obsessed with data

The American national baseball tournament is called the "World Series," even though the U.S. and Canada are the only participating countries. In the truly international tournament, the WBC, played by 20 countries, Japan is the nation with most wins. The U.S. is one of the wealthy countries with the fewest people traveling abroad. The American school curriculum is notoriously much more centered on their own History and Geography than on providing a global view.

This cultural navel-gazing (often framed as American Exceptionalism) is already a relic of the 20th century. Part of the inhospitable political climate there is precisely a war of narratives about their place in the world, with part of the country in denial facing a post-'End of History' decline that is increasingly apparent. It's a kind of midlife crisis of their national identity - part American Beauty, part the second half of Boogie Nights."

Still on the subject of sports, every athlete appearing in a sports broadcast has their history of passes, blocks, three-pointers, or whatever is relevant for that sport rigorously documented. Every career becomes a technical profile, almost like an RPG character sheet. They have a deep appreciation for data.

This appreciation appears in various other manifestations with practical market consequences: a few years ago, 53% of global spending on market research and insights was done in the U.S. Furthermore, major institutes like Pew Research and Gallup have various continuous studies on subjects like time use, values, etc., with decades of history.

This wide availability of data is wonderful. The problem is us using these data and observations that have nothing to do with our reality as if they were a beacon for our future or to cover our own gaps.

Us: the Streetlight Effect and underdog determinism

The "Streetlight Effect" is an observation bias: we look for answers where there is light and not where the problem or phenomenon actually is.

The massive volume of data on absolutely everything in the U.S. amplifies this effect. We give disproportionate importance to things that were actually absorbed or are happening there and, because of that, stop looking at the countless ones that never got here or that happened in a completely different way.

Practical example: broadband access in Brazil arrived on mobile before the home PC for most people: due to cost, purchasing power, infrastructure, context, we were mobile-first before they were!

Self-esteem: some with so much others with so little

A key aggravator for this condition is our tendency to believe that the legitimate origin of ideas is always elsewhere, which makes us buy their presumption of leadership and self-reference at face value, even when reality says otherwise.

Santos Dumont versus the Wright Brothers. Bossa Nova inspiring The Doors. Clube da Esquina as a fundamental inspiration for Genesis. Rod Stewart blatantly plagiarizing Jorge Ben Jor. Beyoncé sampling our funk. In countless instances, the creative spark is ours and the assimilator is the other. Not to mention so many things we only start to value after they are recognized abroad: Bebel Gilberto, for example.

People repeat on the internet that Brazilians are born marketers, but apparently, we are terrible at marketing our own legacy and culture.

Yes, there are indeed several businesses, brands, and products that are direct copies of what exists in the U.S. However, that space is opened exactly by our cultural particularities, economic barriers like import taxes, and because we aren't necessarily a super profitable market comparatively, despite these hurdles.

The fragility of the abstractions sustaining this worldview

We use frameworks and models to reduce the complexity of the world. The intention is good: to make things easier to understand and to systematize knowledge. The terrible side effect is what gets lost along the way for the sake of simplification.

The problem is reducing the study of emerging consumer behaviors and trends to the aspirations of modern youth in the cultural capitals of the Anglophone and/or wealthy West. This isn't an accident or coincidence: it’s the result of treating youth as the unquestionable protagonists of society and the sole holders of the "new," a stupidity of which we here in Brazil are partners and accomplices, and of which the obsession with the so-called Generation Z is an omnipresent symptom. It also stems from treating the Anglophone world as the epicenter of global aspirations, two things that were much closer to being true in the last century than they are today.

This idea of youth as the epicenter reflects the context of the emergence of youth culture in the 50s and 60s much more than it corresponds to today's reality. Yet, that same wealthy West we consider the center of humanity is getting older and living longer, as is most of Latin America, including ourselves.

Even this hierarchical notion that grants privileged status to youth is not something endemic to our own culture, our indigenous peoples, many of the African ethnicities brought here by force like the Nagôs and Bantus, or even the Southern Europeans who make up the most recent immigration in Brazil celebrate maturity and give it very important social roles. From whom did we learn that being older is to be a pariah, a second-class consumer and citizen?

The practical examples of these two flawed shortcuts are diverse:

1. Generations: based on their historical and economic context and not ours. They introduce a massive class bias (i.e. people who had Super Nintendos in the 90s were high income, not most of us) and echo foreign ethnocentrism when looking at less developed countries like Brazil. This silences more universal local influences and factors that most people remember, like Xuxa or the wave of pagode groups from that same period. It also ignores major local historical and economic events with immense weight, such as the re-democratization and the 2014-2016 recession.

2. The great wealth transfer being treated as something very relevant for Brazil. Those who truly accumulated wealth were the American middle class, and to a lesser extent, the European middle class. During the post-war Baby Boom, which demographers agree did not happen in a comparable way in Brazil, our birth rate was already high (~6 children/woman vs. their peak of 3.8), but we had a much higher infant mortality rate (160/1,000 vs. 29/1,000 in 1950). With the bulk of Brazilian assets concentrated in real estate, not in stocks or funds like in the US, and the high average of children per couple in that generation (3-4 children vs. 2-3), the ones who will truly make money from this transfer in Brazil, besides the few who will actually inherit wealth, are the probate attorneys, not the younger generation in general as will happen there.

We are in the middle of a dreadful wave of clickbait disguised as sociological analysis that ticks both boxes: using American data to talk about a supposedly Brazilian or global phenomenon and treating turning 30 or 40 as a kind of condemnation to irrelevance in countries where that is precisely the largest age block of the population.

The problem is that this type of content will appear as a source in your agency's strategy deck or will become a carousel and be taken as truth in a context of news and data consumption that is increasingly devoid of critical thinking and reading comprehension. So no, it is not harmless - if marketing, design, and product/service development are grounded in human understanding, this type of content isn't just "empty calories," it's trans fat, something that accumulates with deleterious long-term effects.

What we urgently need to leave behind

FIRST: stop treating youth as the epicenter of social influence.

Besides being an echo of a historical context that has passed, this reflects both a narcissistic fantasy of protagonism (with science to support it!) and a corporate bubble that is very different from the outside world. In that bubble, people over 40 are far less present, and when they are, they are almost always in positions of power as partners, owners, or bosses, and as such, they are the authority or the model to be challenged or deconstructed. Can you see where the stigma comes from?

This obsession blinds us to countless opportunities in audiences that are not only the population majority but also have more purchasing power. Countless studies show they don't feel represented and are neglected by brands and companies - are you guys really data-driven?

SECOND: stop treating the U.S. as a kind of contemporary Rome, but rather as an important global voice in a choir with several other rising stars.

The fragmentation brought by digital culture both closes the door to more universal phenomena and opens it to new voices. In culture, this is easy to see, not only with the increasing space occupied by other countries but with how some highly influential American exports also seem to be in decline or have already gone through a cycle of appropriation and derivation that has completely transformed them - in itself a sign of relevance!

Contrary to what it seems, the way out of our chronic "underdog-ism" is neither jingoism nor a third-worldist blaming of others. It’s trying to see our place in the world more objectively! A synthesis can exist that gives real weight to things without needing to idealize anything. Nothing is harder (but more strategic) than seeing oneself clearly from the outside.

THIRD: the notion that our corporate, urban, and higher income reality is aspirational for people other than ourselves.

Yes, advertising agencies and the fashion world are also corporations, increasingly consolidated in both sectors. The idea that people below us in the socioeconomic pyramid, in smaller cities, or not linked to creative industries necessarily aspire to be us is a relic from when e-commerce and social media didn't exist and there were significant information and distribution bottlenecks, not only financial ones. So much so that these same industries are constantly appropriating non-hegemonic or “alternative” aesthetics to sell “authenticity,” both inside and outside Brazil. It is much more vain (and pathetic) self-reference than a true understanding of these dynamics.

We insist on believing in things that have already been disproven in various fields of knowledge. Enough with influence pyramids, opaque segmentations, magical archetypes, and gross simplifications.

Things are much more case-by-case and context-dependent, rather than following the predictable flow of amateur and poorly evidenced trend reports. We treat dynamics that apply to fast-moving consumer goods as if they were generalizable to completely different categories and sectors. The “astrologization” of consumer behavior needs to die so that something more relevant and grounded can be born in its place, as happened with the rise of Astronomy during the Enlightenment.

One of the first steps for this is for us to abandon the paradigm of cultural influence as something centralized, hierarchical, monolithic, deterministic, and that fits into a little PowerPoint diagram or something that happens “automatically” - and the fault isn't just with those who propose it, but with those who accept it.

Thanks for reading and see you next edition!