I AM RANKED #1 — BUT HERE’S WHAT ACTUALLY GOT ME THERE

It wasn’t my strategy. It wasn’t even the work. But a realisation that took me years to see; and it happened through my own brand.

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I started as an entrepreneur before I was ever a strategist. Building from scratch, in a market that rarely sees people like me at the front of it. My most successful brand wasn’t built on a marketing plan. Looking back, I wasn’t even conscious of what I was doing right. But people were buying: consistently, emotionally, repeatedly.

It took me years to understand why.

They weren’t buying the product. They were buying who they became when they wore it. A feeling. A version of themselves. An aspiration they couldn’t quite name but immediately recognised.

When I finally audited the brand, really interrogated it, the pattern became undeniable. I started looking at other brands, at consumer behaviour, at why people watch, click, buy, follow. And what I found was this: people are not here for you. They are here for themselves. Every piece of content consumed, every brand followed, every purchase made runs through one filter: what is this doing for me?

That isn’t cynicism. It’s just the truth of how identity and aspiration work.

And once you see it, you can’t build the same way again.

When I moved into marketing properly, I wanted to understand the underlying logic of what I had stumbled into. What made certain brands resonate beyond the point of transaction. Why some brands get bought once, and others get worn like identity.

What became clear is that most marketing failures are not failures of execution. They are failures of depth.

Traditional marketing leans on demographics: age, gender, income, location. Useful, but insufficient.

Same data. Different reactions. Same audience. Different meaning.

Two people can share the same profile and respond to entirely different things. What drives resonance sits closer to psychographics: identity, values, belief systems, cultural reference points.

But even that is incomplete.

The strongest brands don’t just align with who people are. They position themselves within who people are becoming. They operate at the site of transformation, bridging the gap between current identity and aspirational self.

This is where culture becomes central.

Culture holds the codes of that transformation: how people express themselves, what they aspire to, what they reject, what they’re moving toward. Brands that understand this don’t merely communicate value. They construct meaning. They build emotional connection by embedding themselves within that shift.

This is not a new dynamic. The relationship between identity, aspiration, and consumption has long been understood, operationalised, and in many cases, exploited.

And I am not describing this from a distance.

What exploitation looks like in practice: a luxury brand borrows the visual language of a subculture, its typography, its silhouettes, its references, without engaging the community that built it. The aesthetic is lifted. The context is discarded. The product is sold at a price point that excludes the very people who generated its cultural value. The stories, the symbols, the codes of cultures like mine — taken, refined, and sold back at a price we were never meant to afford.

The signal remains. The substance and the people are removed.

The problem is not engaging with culture. It’s engaging without cultural literacy.

Cultural literacy requires more than recognition. It demands context: historical, social, political. Without it, brands default to imitation rather than insight, and participation becomes extraction.

At the same time, many of the brands with the deepest proximity to that culture, brands built by people like me, often lack the strategic frameworks to translate that closeness into positioning. The authenticity is there. The lived understanding is there. They know the culture because they are the culture. What’s missing is a framework to turn that into positioning.

That is the gap I work within. Not as an outsider looking in, but as someone who has been on every side of this dynamic: the builder, the consumer, the community, and the one left trying to name what kept going wrong.

Cultural Brand Strategy is my attempt to formalise that space. In practice, it means building brand positioning from cultural context outward, starting with a rigorous reading of the codes, histories, and tensions a brand is operating within, before making a single creative decision. It means asking not just what does this audience want, but what does this moment mean to them, and what role does a brand earn the right to play in it. It treats culture not as an aesthetic layer to borrow from, but as a strategic asset to be understood, respected, and where possible, returned to.

It extends beyond demographics into psychographics, and beyond psychographics into cultural understanding. It situates brands within transformation, not just identity.

Branding and positioning is, at its core, about location. Where does this brand sit in the market? In the mind? In the life of the person it is trying to reach? Most practitioners answer that question with data. Cultural Brand Strategy answers it with understanding. That distinction is not subtle. It is the difference between a brand that occupies space and a brand that holds meaning. And it is the most direct explanation I can give for why the work lands the way it does.

Because the question is never only who the audience is.

It’s who they are becoming, and what a brand is doing when it chooses to meet them there.

That’s the framework. That’s what the ranking reflects. And it’s the difference between brands that sell, and brands that matter.

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