Your dashboard won't tell you the brand stopped mattering. Tshiamo Maremela on cultural intelligence

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What this episode is about

We set this one up as a fight: the data and reporting side of marketing against the cultural and creative side, and how on earth you report on culture. Tshiamo Maremela declined the fight. He is a strategist and the founder of A Very Cool Studio, a cultural intelligence and creative advisory, and his answer is that the two belong together — data gives you a signal, culture gives you the context, and strategy is what you do with both.

From there we got into the part that should worry marketers: not the brand that misreads a moment and gets cancelled, but the one that quietly stops mattering while every dashboard still looks healthy. He explains why that happens inside the organisation rather than in the work, which brands he thinks are getting it right, including an artist residency he built as strategist for Don Julio, and the four-part practice he gives clients to do something about it.

Three things we took away

• Culture is measurable, just not as one number. "Culture isn't something that you can reduce to a single KPI," he says, but you can measure cultural signals: changes in behaviour, conversations, changes in language, the movement of ideas. The split he draws is between what and why. "Data just tells you what is growing, what is changing, but culture is around understanding the why behind it all" — and the contextualising is done by humans, out of gut, intuition and experience. His own version runs in three parts: what is changing, why it is changing, and what both of those could change for the business.
• Lived intelligence, and the system that puts it to work. This is his term, and it is the most useful thing in the episode. "On every street, there's just that guy who knows, who knows the guy, who knows the lady, if you ever need a connection. They know why things are happening, who to go to." His point is that everybody has it, so the problem is never the talent — it is that organisations have no system for using it. The fix he recommends is unglamorous: a weekly or fortnightly session with marketing, the commercial teams and HR in the same room, working out what is changing in the world rather than only in your category, and then deciding what it means. Perhaps you need different content creators. "Or even perhaps this means our sales team needs to operate differently because consumers are changing as well."
• The real risk is quiet, and it is structural. "The biggest cultural risk isn't necessarily being cancelled because you got culture wrong. It's becoming irrelevant, and becoming irrelevant so quietly that your dashboard can't even tell you that information." Campaigns still perform, media still runs, and the brand matters less to people every month. Left long enough, a comms problem becomes a business problem — and then the panic response arrives: "now we need to throw in an African proverb or an African print or an African song," which leaves a field of brands you cannot tell apart, using the same language and the same creators. The cause, he argues, is organisational rather than creative. Organisations exist to manage risk, so an interesting idea goes through ten layers of approval and comes out safe, "and safe is the problem when it comes to culture." Leadership sits furthest from culture and closest to the dashboards. His relief valve for the speed panic: "not every cultural moment actually needs a brand response."

Our guest: Tshiamo Maremela, founder of A Very Cool Studio.