Case Study
The Weather Channel: Gen Z growth strategy
A Cultural Brand Audit
In partnership with Brandwatch, a leading AI-enabled social listening tool.
What is a growth strategy through the lens of culture?
Brands, and media brands specifically, grow because they claim a unique role in their audience's lives.
A cultural growth strategy identifies an audience's needs, then develops a brand narrative that invites them to recall a single message: This is what we are for.
the Challenge
TWC, a legendary legacy brand, was looking for growth avenues in a Gen Z-dominant, social-first world.
How can a legacy broadcaster pivot into a present shaped by social platforms?
The Approach
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Clarifying brand identity and examining internal perspectives, legacy, and priorities to clarify this identity.
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Surfacing conversations, trends, and audience behavior with regard to all types of weather
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Prototyping the role of the brand in Gen Z lives, they are offering three scenarios.
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Moderating workshops. During workshops, the core TWC team worked these narratives up into an overarching growth strategy for the following year.
The Process
BrandBackstage crafted a growth strategy: where we are, where we want to be, and how we will get there.
As the company's future, we envisioned a world in which Gen Z engages with TWC serialized content on socials (we called them franchises). The main role of the franchise is not just to entertain, but to invite Gen Z to learns what the brand can offer them. So when the need arose, they opened their TWC app and shared in-app information for others to discover—a simple virtuous cycle of customer-amplified brand narrative.
A social anthropology audit revealed that TWC’s existing brand associations juxtaposed against Gen Z's weather content needs present a major opportunity for growth: The Weather Channel is the “Associated Press of Weather” during crises. Growth would come from an everyday narrative that looked beyond severe weather and spoke to people about weather in their own lives and social spheres.
After establishing the growth area, the team offered 3 potential brand narratives and how they can be expressed through the content and in the functionality of the app.
The Insight
Millennials turn to the Weather Channel mostly during severe weather, epitomised by the lore of Jim Cantore. (If Jim Cantore is here, it is time to evacuate.)
For Gen Z, the role of weather content depends on the weather. When it is raining, it is an excuse to stay cozy indoors; when it is sunny, you seek the great outdoors. It is also a calming rhythm in a ruthless 24/7 news cycle.
For Gen Z, depending on the severity of the weather and audience behavior, there were four major roles weather content played in Gen Z lives:
Risk preparation,
Mood setting,
Activity planning,
Ambient comfort
The Impact
The unified narrative became the backbone of The Weather Channel’s new growth strategy. First step? The team piloted three new content franchises across social platforms to see how the brand story translated into content.