Creative Brief, JUNE 2025

So your brand wants to be culturally relevant?

We are in a pivotal moment in the biggest transformation in history. My book, Culture Led Brands (written in 2024 and out in June 2025), arose from a volatile business landscape where traditional models of consumer engagement, branding, and internal organisation are being upended by political, societal, technological, and environmental changes.

Distilling my 30 year experience in 14 chapters, Culture Led Brands takes a broader view of ‘culture’ not just as a series of viral trending topics, but as a complex system that demands a sophisticated, systemic response from brands and businesses.

With the issues that are top of mind for modern marketers today, here are some excerpts from the book to get marketing leaders thinking differently about what it really means to be culturally relevant.

On the case for cultural relevance Today, transparency and authenticity are not buzzwords. They are what audiences judge your brand and business on through the lenses of their culture stacks. Audiences are monitoring your responses to monumental global events and major impactful cultural shifts and they are digging deeper to understand why your response is what it is, and how your brand, product or service is relevant to them. It starts with a deeper understanding of why, how and where the ever-shifting cultural landscape affects and influences their behaviours and attitudes – real-world insights through ongoing cultural intelligence.

To be relevant, it’s no longer about what the brand says about itself; it’s about how the brand impacts people positively and what they say about it to others. This is how I have always tried to work. The ideal outcome of a positive ‘Did you see what (the brand) did?’ is what you want people to think, feel and care enough to share – in fan cultures, on their channels and word of mouth with friends, work colleagues and families – driving that all-important attention for discoverability, and then keeping them engaged, interested and invested for loyalty. You will only get that crucial loyalty if your brand is relevant to that person.

That’s why all my work starts with what I call a cultural positioning.

The benefits are clear. Your cultural positioning can help to address your most pressing business critical challenges and keep you up to speed as audiences impacted by culture reshape how they can and want to be reached. This means a deeper understanding of how global shifts and local nuances impact all your audiences’ (internal and external) culture stacks, behaviours and demands, and determines what you need to do about it. This clarity of the role of your brand in culture will help with critical decision-making, meaning these expected and unexpected shifts and ever-changing debates and policies that impact your audiences – from technology to politics, music to film, DEI to ESG, AI to privacy issues and more – are efficiently and credibly identified and effectively addressed in the right way before they become a crisis or a missed growth opportunity.

On the integration of AI in organisations Now, in 2024 and probably for a few years yet, the pace of AI innovation is accelerating faster than the regulations, with deep fakes and virtual influencers already in the public domain. There are justified concerns around the worrying impacts on climate, ethical issues, compliance, data privacy, potential biases, and the overall transparency and effectiveness of AI systems.

For those pushing hard, it’s very much about accelerating the commercial side of the business and applying the analytics to consumer engagement, making smart choices about how to invest in growth, and lining that up with the supply team so that products get delivered to the right places at the right time. AI also presents a new way of supporting and helping front-line decision-makers across the business. We have an opportunity to develop operations and productivity with redesigned workflows and processes that can, and must, address the key challenge of the siloed way of working in big companies, many of which were set up in the 20th century as organizations built for category leadership and maximum profit.

These fundamental issues need to be prioritized and resolved by evolving rigid old-world processes to adaptable new-world ecosystems because cross-business challenges and opportunities are linked, and this way of working is not fit for purpose today. Ideally, new forms of synchronized efficiency can free us up and enhance the best of what only humans can do – seeing the bigger picture, empathetic creativity, emotional intelligence and ethical connection through critical thinking. We must focus on building softer skills like communication and collaboration to improve work and inspire teamwork, all the while learning, experimenting and evolving with new technologies. Without these sharp and smart human interactions, questions and inquiries, the output will be generic and the outcome non-transformative. Additionally, we should ensure ethical, human and cultural insight at the forefront, with a continuous skill–upskill–reskill infrastructure for talent built in.

If we don’t include those inherited culture-led human viewpoints, and if we don’t invite and empower people on all levels of the organization to be part of the transformation, we risk losing the trust, inspiration, empathy and energy needed for commitment to long-term and ongoing change. At this stage with AI, there may be resistance or inertia to change, with the prospect of potentially job losses and scepticism on a personal level. In my experience, how everyone in the organization responds to change, determines the success of it, so finding elements that truly resonate with people is essential.

On brand building through fandom Successful brands need to be able to credibly tap into cultural nuances to become and stay relevant and adapt for growth or even survival. This resonance happens if the brand positively impacts their audiences’ lives in the ways that matter to them, in the spaces and places they inhabit and with a deep understanding of their nuances, rituals and language (and no, I don’t mean their generational slang).

In fandom, a brand needs to make the same effort by immersing itself in the fans’ world. Fans connect deeply with brands, products and services that authentically add value to their communities and cultures, reflecting or adding to their identity, saying something about them and sharing their codes and values.

When brands engage in genuine exchanges and initiate real conversations with the cultures they are drawing from, it changes the dynamic entirely. This is the difference between the types of brands holding onto the past and those looking to the future – the former are about protection of their power through ownership and control, the latter are where resources are shifted to move things forward together.

In a world of relentless change and pervasive uncertainty, brands can no longer operate in a vacuum. Today, brands are active participants in a connected global dialogue that touches on everything; and can only thrive (and survive) if they become adept at reading and responding to cultural currents and signals that impact us all.