Culture is the stuff of life, a reflection of reality, a connector of communities. This has been my mantra since forever.
For businesses, brands and organisations, Q2 of the 21st century is seeing traditional cultural centres of gravity shift like never before. Leaders and teams are expected to navigate and serve a multi-reality landscape that has fundamentally changed.
As polarising geopolitics and technology once again reshapes culture(s), economies and markets, these Culture-Led realities include:
- The Generational Shift: Managing a global, more conscious workforce and consumer base from Boomers to Gen Alpha, all with different expectations, needs, values…and even shopping journeys, at the same time.
- The Fandom Era: A struggle for brand relevance across noisy cross-cultural fandoms, across a fragmented media landscape and platforms shaped by power, algorithms and agendas, whilst navigating multi-country contexts and nuances, both in the country and with the diaspora.
- The Growth Opportunity: Organisations missing challenger categories, ignoring challenger brands and not prioritising or understanding how to land in emerging - I call them growth - markets.
In this time of radical transformation, brands and organisations will need to evolve and innovate across the board just to survive, let alone thrive. Yet, most organisations haven’t challenged the decision filters and processes that decide what gets made, diluted or terminated in your business and/or brand.
I call this The Corporate Algorithm - inherited internal processes built for the product led 20th century that reward caution, process, and familiarity and decide what gets made, not made or diluted when it comes to products, marketing, innovation and creative. And in Q1 of the 21st century these rigid processes started combining with consumer focused data and now AI-filtered decision-making narrowing strategic judgement and perspective upstream even further.
The result is that brands are becoming increasingly formulaic making homogeneity standard. This isn't just hurting the bottom line, it’s driving widespread burnout and exhaustion, because it forces leaders and teams to operate in a state of permacrisis and risk-averse efficiency.
Culture is the stuff of life, a reflection of reality, a connector of communities. This has been my mantra since forever.
For businesses, brands and organisations, Q2 of the 21st century is seeing traditional cultural centres of gravity shift like never before. Leaders and teams are expected to navigate and serve a multi-reality landscape that has fundamentally changed.
As polarising geopolitics and technology once again reshapes culture(s), economies and markets, these Culture-Led realities include:
- The Generational Shift: Managing a global, more conscious workforce and consumer base from Boomers to Gen Alpha, all with different expectations, needs, values…and even shopping journeys, at the same time.
- The Fandom Era: A struggle for brand relevance across noisy cross-cultural fandoms, across a fragmented media landscape and platforms shaped by power, algorithms and agendas, whilst navigating multi-country contexts and nuances, both in the country and with the diaspora.
- The Growth Opportunity: Organisations missing challenger categories, ignoring challenger brands and not prioritising or understanding how to land in emerging - I call them growth - markets.
In this time of radical transformation, brands and organisations will need to evolve and innovate across the board just to survive, let alone thrive. Yet, most organisations haven’t challenged the decision filters and processes that decide what gets made, diluted or terminated in your business and/or brand.
I call this The Corporate Algorithm - inherited internal processes built for the product led 20th century that reward caution, process, and familiarity and decide what gets made, not made or diluted when it comes to products, marketing, innovation and creative. And in Q1 of the 21st century these rigid processes started combining with consumer focused data and now AI-filtered decision-making narrowing strategic judgement and perspective upstream even further.
The result is that brands are becoming increasingly formulaic making homogeneity standard. This isn't just hurting the bottom line, it’s driving widespread burnout and exhaustion, because it forces leaders and teams to operate in a state of permacrisis and risk-averse efficiency.
In this Culture-Led era, staying static is a growth, relevance, resilience and organisational risk. Cultural relevance doesn’t come from better optimisation or because brands move faster, but because decision makers see more clearly earlier and make different decisions upstream that remove the internal outdated blockages stopping formula-breaking work from happening in the first place.
This needs to be driven by culturally informed leaders using updated adaptive resilient business ecosystems with diverse high performing teams. This ensures true resonance with audiences (internal & external) and, ultimately, sustainable and long term business growth.
Alongside Platform13, I separately and confidentially support Leaders and Brand Teams upstream to unlock cultural relevance as a business growth engine and innovation catalyst. This is designed to bring Cultural Agility - the essential cultural fluency capability for brands to survive and thrive in an uncertain, complex, and transformational era by understanding multiple global and local cultural contexts and how to operate successfully within them - into business and brand behaviours and operations.
_ Senior Strategic Advisory: Embedded, ongoing support for brand and business leaders. At business-critical decision making cycles and strategic direction-setting, I strengthen judgement and leadership presence, internally and externally. I say the things others won’t, delivering cultural truth, commercial sharpness, and 30 years of hard-won experience.
_ The Reset: By evolving traditional offsites or away days to active culturally grounded learning experiences tailored to answer your unique challenge(s), leaders and brand teams are exposed to new ways of seeing, sensing, deciding and responding in this era. Because when curiosity and alternative perspectives through real world cultural encounters become practice, culture-led judgement and decision making sharpens, clarity becomes capability and that powerful combination unlocks possibility, resilience, innovation and business growth. This intervention is designed to shift how leadership makes decisions and how brand teams build relevance, for today and tomorrow. This is where personal growth drives business and performance growth. But it's on the return when reality hits, as an embedded strategic advisor, I continue to support this clarity that can drive both brand output and business outcomes.
