CREATIVE REVIEW, AUTUMN 2025 edition

Why brands need culture By Laura Havlin

In her new book, Leila Fataar explains how the most powerful engagements between brands and audiences happen through culture, requiring different approaches to marketing and comms.

The notion that brands need to infiltrate culture in order to engage audiences might seem a relatively recent concept, but Platform13 founder Leila Fataar has been working in this space for decades.

Platform13 was set up in 2017 to work with big brands, with Fataar curating a team for each project around the brand's category and the community and culture they are trying to be a part 0£ A perfect example of this was established while Fataar was working with Diageo on Guinness earlier in her career, in 2016-17.

Successfully marketed to rugby and pub audiences, the brand hadn't embraced the fact that they have a huge heritage audience among Black British communities from being exported to Africa and the West Indies since the 1800s. This insight led to a multi-platform global activation at Notting Hill Carnival with Boiler Room. It was a great success, "and it felt really natural for Guinness to be there because it's a huge part of Caribbean culture, even though it may not have been seen as that from the business strategy" says Fataar.

The activation led to wider work with the brand at Platform13, including a collaboration with food influencer brothers Original Flava. Channelling their Caribbean heritage, the duo also brought in their nan, and her very own recipe for Guinness punch. She became the star of the campaign, which resonated with the UK's Caribbean community.

__What might look like 'intuition' is in fact years of experience working this way and unravelling how a brand or product can engage the audience it's trying to speak to. __

"Unlocking that is what I call a cultural positioning, and that's the unique methodology I get from being able to understand what resonates, as well as understand the language of corporate and the language of cultural things;' says Fataar.

Fataar's career has been embedded in culture from the start. From the outside, her approach might seem "entrepreneurial", but throughout our conversation she says the trait of hers to which she owes her career is instead "opportunistic". Far from any cynical connotations the term may have in other contexts, she describes a mindset that is curious, seeking out new ideas and imagining the possibilities: what could happen if only you could combine 'X' with 'Y'?

Leaving apartheid South Africa for 90s London, the young science grad arrived in the city without a speck of knowledge about the commercial creative industries and marketing but found herself bang in the middle of the culture she had admired from afar. A fan of punk, rave and riot grrrl, Fataar paid homage to icon Vivienne Westwood with a trip to the King's Road, the site of the designer's original Sex shop.

While passing a hair salon en route, she heard the phone on the reception ringing non­stop. "So I walked in and was like, 'Your phone's been ringing, do you need someone to answer your phone?' In my head I was like, 'Cool, I can have my head shaved for free if I work here' says Fataar. She was hired on the spot to be the receptionist for a newly opened Toni&Guy hairdressing school. It wasn't long before she was looking for more interesting opportunities behind the scenes, particularly in the creative department, where they developed the photoshoots, crazy colours and cuts the salon was known for. "I was so cocky, I said "You're wasting me on reception. I'm sure I can do more things:"

She quickly became a runner, learning about the craft of communications, and starting Toni&Guy's first in-house bookings agency. Spotting an opportunity to break out of the beauty space and move into fashion, she began meeting with fashion magazines and booking the stylists for editorial jobs.

"I was sure we could get credits in the fashion part of the magazines, not only the beauty part. We've got these amazing hairdressers, so I created this in-house agency. I got the model shots, put them in a portfolio, and went out to all the magazines and booked our art directors to do hair in fashion magazines and shows:'

Looking back on the 30-year career that has followed, she can see that moments like this are emblematic of a common thread - a knack for identifying shifts in culture and behaviour, for making connections that others might not see, and making them into opportunities for brands.

Prior to Platform13, Fataar has run other businesses, including an online marketing company which experimented with what the fashion industry could do online in the early days of digital, and later the culture-led creative communications agency Spin.

"We just winged it;' she says. "We set it up how we wanted to do it, and we had amazing young brands that really had no idea either, so we learned together. We did everything from throwing up posters because we didn't have a media budget and did loads of events because we wanted to make sure we were making noise of some kind:'

After ten years of Spin - and successfully steering the company through the 2008 financial crash - Fataar started to wonder what it would be like to work for a big brand. She closed Spin and joined adidas to work on adidas Originals.

Her work on the relaunch of Stan Smith sneakers globally had a halo effect that reinvigorated the adidas Originals brand.

Fataar's first role in a senior leadership position came three years later with Diageo, heading up the culture and entertainment team. In order to bring her renegade approach to bear at a big, established brand, she needed a champion to support her and credits chief marketing and innovation officer Ed Pilkington as being that person at Diageo.

A leader like Fataar cannot happen without an infrastructure that allows new thinking and ways of working. "We were so different but he really went, 'This is not my area, she's got the expertise, I'm gonna give her cover', because it was so different from everything else, and I think it's hard to do what I do within big companies if you don't have that;' she says.

Pilkington was convinced of what Fataar has always insisted on - that cultural relevance is a growth driver, "not just a marketing nice to have". And though it was challenging - not only with it being a new leadership role but a new industry - Fataar says the leadership team were generous, explaining the fundamentals of the fast-moving consumer goods world while allowing her the space to bring in her own unique skills.

"It gave me these layers ofleadership skills that I don't think you can get anywhere else;' she says. "It was this new perspective but within the structure that has so much weight not only within industry but also the ear of the mass consumer"

With her experiences at adidas and Diageo, and a set of successful case studies under her belt, Fataar set up Platform13 to bring her ideas to wider sectors. She is now sharing her thinking via her book, Culture Led Brands. __"For me, it's about creating a narrative, it's about breaking a stereotype, it's about shifting something forward. That's also the point of creativity - but it must be culture-led to resonate:' __

Fataar says the secret is learning to speak the brand's language and understand how culture work can impact the business and not just the marketing. She sees her skills as a translator between the corporate and cultural worlds. "That's the bit I think I do well;' she says. "Understanding how to get that product to their audience in the ways they want it rather than through a traditional comms plan.