Brands are under pressure
We’re living in a time of radical transformation where brands and business leaders marketers need to innovate across the board just to survive, let alone thrive.
In Q2 of the 21st century, brands and businesses are operating in a multi-reality landscape: The Generational Shift: Managing workforces and consumers from Boomers to Gen Alpha, all at once. The Fandom Era: The pressure to achieve resonance across fragmented, cross-cultural fandoms. The Growth Gap: Missing challenger categories and emerging markets because legacy systems can’t see beyond precedent.
In this unpredictable era, success belongs to the brands that are both discovered and built within culture.
Creating and maintaining cultural relevance
Most organisations are still running on what we call The Corporate Algorithm - inherited internal systems built for the 20th century that reward risk aversion, predictability and familiarity, deciding what gets made, diluted or never made across products, marketing, innovation and creative.
And in Q1 of the 21st century these rigid processes started combining with data-and-AI oriented inputs narrowing judgement and perspective upstream even further. We’re all trapped in a feedback loop of sameness, powered by ever-expanding AI-filtered tools that all draw from the same data sets and trend reports increasingly… scraped, summarised and recycled by AI. By definition, they can only reflect what has already happened at scale. This isn’t an anti-data or anti-AI stance. It’s an intersection stance - its where the data meets real world cultural context and intelligence.
The result: Brands are becoming increasingly formulaic. Homogeneity is standard.
This algorithm isn’t just eroding differentiation and growth; it’s driving widespread burnout because it forces teams to operate in a state of permacrisis and/or risk-averse efficiency, while the world they serve has fundamentally changed.
Driving brand discoverability through credible cultural strategy is key for success. This means evolving the brand playbook to break the traditional formulas to attract & engage ALL your existing audiences - communities, fans and consumers - where they are and how they want.