Our Approach
For businesses, brands and organisations, Q2 of the 21st century is seeing traditional centres of cultural gravity shift like never before. Brands are expected to navigate and serve a culture led, mixed reality landscape and consumer base that has fundamentally changed.
Polarising geopolitics is once again reshaping culture(s), economies and markets, technology is once again transforming how and where we live and work, often faster than organisations can adapt; and information travels instantly across fragmented media and platforms shaped by power, algorithms and agendas.
At Platform13, we know how to read, decode and translate the right and ever changing cultural shifts relevant for our clients. We do this by embeding cultural intelligence upstream, shaping how organisations see, decide and act on an ongoing basis in real time. Our approach is built around designing adaptive cultural ecosystems - living systems that enable brands to stay relevant as culture, communities and audiences evolve.
This allows relevance to compound over time and through The Cultural Pipeline below, shifting how brands move from reacting to culture to operating within and being embedded in it.
Our Culture-Led approach is based on Leila Fataar's frameworks outlined in her book, Culture-Led Brands.
THE CORPORATE ALGORITHM
Traditional brand strategies are struggling because they are still running on what Leila calls The Corporate Algorithm: Inherited internal processes built for the 20th century, designed to reward predictability, efficiency and familiarity, deciding what work or product gets made, diluted or never made at all.
In the early 21st century, this decision logic and rigid processes merged with data-driven and AI-filtered inputs, creating a closed feedback loop of sameness.
The result: formulaic brands, homogenised output and burnout driven by permanent risk-averse efficiency. This is not just a creativity issue, it is a growth, relevance, resilience and organisational risk.
CULTURAL AGILITY HACKS THE CORPORATE ALGORITHM
To hack the Corporate Algorithm, brands, businesses and organisations must build Cultural Agility.
Cultural Agility is the ability to understand multiple cultural and local contexts, operate within them and deliver better brand output and business outcomes as a result. This is now a foundational and essential cultural fluency capability for both survival and growth for brand and marketing teams, innovation and creative leaders, organisations navigating category disruption and brands seeking relevance across fragmented audiences and markets.
Cultural Agility is not built through better decks or faster execution, it is built by rewiring how organisations think, decide and lead. This means evolving traditional processes into adaptive real world learning systems that creates curiosity instead of caution, possibility instead of precedent and innovation where audiences actually are.
THE CULTURAL PIPELINE > ONE OFF CAMPAIGN SPIKES
Culture is living, breathing and constantly evolving. Culture doesn’t move in campaign windows and brands shouldn’t either. Cultural relevance is achieved by understanding how culture (and its relevance to your brand) moves along the Cultural Pipeline. It is not achieved from isolated campaign spikes. As discoverability and promptability increasingly drive commerce, rigid processes must evolve into adaptive systems, because cultural shifts that impact the Culture Stack, organisational challenges like the Corporate Algorithm and new growth opportunities are now deeply interconnected.
So, we ALSO shift from delivering one off projects to adaptive systems building brands through the Cultural Pipeline: Cultural Branding and The Cultural Reset
CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE, POSITIONING & VOICES
All our work begins and is continually fed by intersecting, reading and translating your existing data through real-world cultural context, hand in hand with our global network of cultural voices and experts. We call this Cultural Intelligence.
In mainstream culture, this ensures relevant adaptation that cuts through the noise at the point of execution and delivery and in emerging culture, it feeds formaula breaking work as we move through through the Cultural Pipeline.