Helping big brands build their cultural competitive advantage
Helping big brands
build their cultural
competitive advantage
We’re living in a time of radical transformation where brands and business leaders need to innovate across the board just to survive, let alone thrive. Yet, most organisations haven’t challenged the system that decides what gets made, diluted or terminated.
I call this The Corporate Algorithm - inherited internal processes built for the 20th century, designed to reward predictability, efficiency and familiarity. And in Q1 of the 21st century these rigid processes started combining with data-and-AI filtered decision making narrowing judgement and perspective upstream even further. The result: brands are becoming increasingly formulaic and homogeneity is standard.
But, the Corporate Algorithm isn’t just eroding differentiation and growth.
It’s driving widespread burnout and exhaustion too by forcing leaders and teams to operate in both permacrisis and in a state of risk-averse efficiency, while the multi-reality world they’re expected to navigate and serve has fundamentally changed.
Q2 of the 21st century is the era of Culture-Led Brands:
_ The Generational Shift: Leadership & Brands managing both a workforce & consumers spanning Boomers to Gen Alpha at the same time, each with different mindsets, values, and behaviours...and expectations.
_The Fandom Era: Brands under pressure to earn relevance across multi & cross-cultural fandoms, layered codes and rituals with local nuance in multi-markets.
_The Growth Disconnect: Organisations underestimating category challengers and future growth markets because legacy systems can’t see beyond precedent or because the "data" simply hasn’t caught up yet.
This is a growth, relevance, resilience and organisational risk.
Making cultural relevance a business growth driver, an innovation catalyst and a brand output can transform your brand and reimagine your business.
We’re living in a time of radical transformation where brands and business leaders need to innovate across the board just to survive, let alone thrive. Yet, most organisations haven’t challenged the system that decides what gets made, diluted or terminated.
I call this The Corporate Algorithm - inherited internal processes built for the 20th century, designed to reward predictability, efficiency and familiarity. And in Q1 of the 21st century these rigid processes started combining with data-and-AI filtered decision making narrowing judgement and perspective upstream even further. The result: brands are becoming increasingly formulaic and homogeneity is standard.
But, the Corporate Algorithm isn’t just eroding differentiation and growth.
It’s driving widespread burnout and exhaustion too by forcing leaders and teams to operate in both permacrisis and in a state of risk-averse efficiency, while the multi-reality world they’re expected to navigate and serve has fundamentally changed.
Q2 of the 21st century is the era of Culture-Led Brands:
_ The Generational Shift: Leadership & Brands managing both a workforce & consumers spanning Boomers to Gen Alpha at the same time, each with different mindsets, values, and behaviours...and expectations.
_The Fandom Era: Brands under pressure to earn relevance across multi & cross-cultural fandoms, layered codes and rituals with local nuance in multi-markets.
_The Growth Disconnect: Organisations underestimating category challengers and future growth markets because legacy systems can’t see beyond precedent or because the "data" simply hasn’t caught up yet.
This is a growth, relevance, resilience and organisational risk.
Making cultural relevance a business growth driver, an innovation catalyst and a brand output can transform your brand and reimagine your business.
To change business outcomes and brand output, you have to change the inputs.
Culture-Led organisations and brands win because they are clearer and closer to cultural truth than anyone else. That comes from clarity and judgement, earlier and upstream, driven by culturally informed leaders, hand in hand with new-world agencies and partners. Operationally, adaptive business ecosystems with diverse teams build legacy, ensuring true resonance with audiences and, ultimately, sustainable business growth.
I work with Leadership (C-Suite, founders, VPs and transformation leaders) and Brand Teams (Marketing, Growth, Innovation, Product, Insight, and Creative) upstream to unlock cultural relevance from the inside out by cascading Cultural Agility through the business. This is the ability to understand multiple cultural and local contexts, operate within them and make better business decisions as a result - into business and brand behaviours. My role sits at the point where strategic direction is set, strengthening clarity and decisions around how and where to lead, not just what to optimise.
_ Senior Strategic Advisor: An embedded, ongoing partner providing an outsider-insider perspective to maintain your unique cultural edge by identifying and helping solve your specific business-critical challenges as they arise. I say the things others won’t, delivering cultural truth, commercial sharpness, and 30 years of hard-won experience.
_ Through The Reset: Initially, focused on the two critical engines of big organisations: Leadership and Brand. The Resets start with tailored structured offsite experiential interventions curated and designed to rewire decision making and judgement, RESETTING how people think, work and lead. But it's on the return, when this clarity becomes capability, that can drive both brand output and business outcomes.
Some organisations need one. Many need both.
To change business outcomes and brand output, you have to change the inputs.
Culture-Led organisations and brands win because they are clearer and closer to cultural truth than anyone else. That comes from clarity and judgement, earlier and upstream, driven by culturally informed leaders, hand in hand with new-world agencies and partners. Operationally, adaptive business ecosystems with diverse teams build legacy, ensuring true resonance with audiences and, ultimately, sustainable business growth.
I work with Leadership (C-Suite, founders, VPs and transformation leaders) and Brand Teams (Marketing, Growth, Innovation, Product, Insight, and Creative) upstream to unlock cultural relevance from the inside out by cascading Cultural Agility through the business. This is the ability to understand multiple cultural and local contexts, operate within them and make better business decisions as a result - into business and brand behaviours. My role sits at the point where strategic direction is set, strengthening clarity and decisions around how and where to lead, not just what to optimise.
_ Senior Strategic Advisor: An embedded, ongoing partner providing an outsider-insider perspective to maintain your unique cultural edge by identifying and helping solve your specific business-critical challenges as they arise. I say the things others won’t, delivering cultural truth, commercial sharpness, and 30 years of hard-won experience.
_ Through The Reset: Initially, focused on the two critical engines of big organisations: Leadership and Brand. The Resets start with tailored structured offsite experiential interventions curated and designed to rewire decision making and judgement, RESETTING how people think, work and lead. But it's on the return, when this clarity becomes capability, that can drive both brand output and business outcomes.
Some organisations need one. Many need both.
LEADERSHIP SUPPORT
01
Strategic Advisor
02
The Leadership Reset
01
Strategic Advisor
02
The Leadership Reset
01
Strategic Advisor
02
The Leadership Reset
BRAND TEAM SUPPORT
01
Strategic Advisor
01
Strategic Advisor
01
Strategic Advisor
02
The Cultural Reset
02
The Cultural Reset
02
The Cultural Reset
02
The Cultural Reset
AN OUTSIDER APPROACH WITH INSIDER KNOW-HOW
I bring over 30 years of global, hands-on experience working across lifestyle, FMCG and sportswear, both inside major global organisations and through building and leading my own independent companies.
My career has been shaped by operating at the intersection of corporate systems, cultural reality and entrepreneurial thinking and being able to translate between them when it matters most.
After founding and running one of the earliest integrated (traditional, digital social) boutique youth agencies, Spin for a decade, I was headhunted into senior leadership roles at adidas and Diageo. In both, I was brought in as an internal change agent: to help brands navigate cultural relevance externally, while reshaping internal thinking, processes and decision-making to support that ambition. In 2017, I recognised the need for a new type of big brand partner and founded Platform13.
Leaders usually ask HOW I work? The answer isn’t a single framework or model. It’s an ability to read what’s emerging before it becomes consensus, combined with lived experience of how decisions actually get made inside complex organisations.
All my work is grounded in a simple belief: Cultural relevance is not a marketing output. It's an organisational input, because when leaders change how decisions get made, everything downstream changes with it.
Across three decades, my work has consistently balanced commercial performance, long-term brand equity and cultural resonance across markets, categories and moments , particularly in periods of change.
That perspective has led to ongoing commentary, profiles and thought leadership in global industry and trend publications such as WARC, Business of Fashion, Digiday, Adweek, Highsnobiety, The Drum and Campaign. I’ve delivered main-stage keynotes at D&AD, Apple Today, Eurobest and Hyper Island, appeared as a challenger voice at Cannes Lions and Advertising Week, and served as a judge for D&AD New Blood and multiple industry awards.
In 2025, I authored Culture-Led Brands, which delves into the 'how' by empowering executives and professionals with a deeper understanding of the 'why’. This not only speaks to the unprecedented time we are living in, but how it can be shaped better for us all.
2025 also saw the launch of my POD on Youtube, Cultural Voices, exploring the perspectives and experiences that have shaped extraordinary careers, while sharing insights and expertise across corporate, cultural, and creative spaces.
Across three decades, my work has consistently balanced commercial performance, long-term brand equity and cultural resonance across markets, categories and moments , particularly in periods of change.
That perspective has led to ongoing commentary and thought leadership in global industry and trend publications such as Business of Fashion, Hurs, WARC, The Future Lab, High Snobiety, Vogue Business, Digiday, The Drum, adweek and Campaign amongst others, as Akeynote speaker at influential conferences such as D&AD, Apple Today, Eurobest, and more, a panelist at top conferences such as Cannes Lions, Advertising Week, YMS, and Social Media Week, a judge for D&AD New Blood, and the Webby Awards, amongst others and a guest lecturer at a variety of schools such as Hyper Island, The One School and the University of East London.
In 2025, I authored Culture-Led Brands, which delves into the 'how' by empowering executives and professionals with a deeper understanding of the 'why’. This not only speaks to the unprecedented time we are living in, but how it can be shaped better for us all.
2025 also saw the launch of my POD on Youtube, Cultural Voices, exploring the perspectives and experiences that have shaped extraordinary careers, while sharing insights and expertise across corporate, cultural, and creative spaces.
All my work is grounded in a simple belief: Cultural relevance is not a marketing output. It 's an organisational input, because when leaders change how decisions get made, everything downstream changes with it.