There's a role missing from almost every company on earth. It isn't Chief Marketing Officer. It isn't VP of Brand. It isn't Head of Partnerships or Director of Communications or whatever new title someone invented last quarter to justify another seat at the leadership table. The role that's missing is Head of Culture. And the fact that it doesn't exist in most organisations tells you everything about why most brands feel disconnected from the world they're supposed to be part of.
I'm not talking about internal culture - the ping pong tables and values posters and employee engagement surveys. I'm talking about external culture. The living, shifting, unpredictable world of taste, aesthetics, music, fashion, sport, design, food, and everything else that determines whether a brand feels alive or feels like it's operating from a strategy deck that was written three years ago. Someone needs to own that relationship. Someone needs to wake up every morning and ask: where does our brand sit in culture right now, and is that where we want it to be?
Almost nobody is asking that question. And it shows.
What Pharrell understood
When Pharrell Williams became creative director of menswear at Louis Vuitton, the fashion industry treated it like a celebrity stunt. Another famous person lending their name to a luxury house. But what Pharrell actually did was something far more interesting. He didn't just design clothes. He connected the brand to culture - to music, to streetwear, to art, to Black creativity, to the communities and subcultures that actually shape what people want to wear and how they want to feel. He turned the runway into a cultural event. He made Louis Vuitton feel like it was part of something, not just selling something.
That isn't a creative director's job in the traditional sense. That's a Head of Culture's job. Pharrell was reading the room - all the rooms, simultaneously - and translating what he found into product, experience, and narrative. He wasn't following trends. He was identifying the cultural currents that mattered and pulling the brand into alignment with them. The result wasn't just commercial success. It was relevance. Louis Vuitton felt like it belonged in the conversation, not like it was trying to buy its way in.
The W+K era - when brands got it instinctively
There was a period - roughly the late 1990s through the 2000s - when the best brands understood this instinctively. And most of that understanding ran through one agency: Wieden+Kennedy. What W+K did for Nike during that era wasn't advertising in the way we think about it now. It was cultural positioning. Every campaign was a statement about where Nike stood in relation to sport, music, city life, ambition, creativity, and identity. "Write the Future." "Take It to the Next Level." The Joga Bonito films. These weren't ads that happened to reference culture. They were culture that happened to be funded by a brand.
Nike in the 2000s didn't have a Head of Culture on the org chart. But the function existed. It lived in the relationship between the brand team in Beaverton and the creative team in Portland. It lived in the instinct to sign athletes who meant something beyond their sport, to collaborate with designers who were shaping streetwear, to sponsor events that created communities rather than just impressions. The cultural intelligence was baked into how the company operated. It wasn't a department. It was the DNA.
The problem is that DNA doesn't scale. It doesn't survive leadership changes, agency reviews, or the relentless pressure to optimise for short-term performance metrics. When you rely on instinct rather than structure, you lose the instinct the moment the people who had it move on. Which is exactly what happened. Nike in the 2020s is a different company. The cultural fluency that defined its golden era has been replaced by DTC metrics and inventory management. The instinct left when the people left. A Head of Culture would have made it structural rather than personal.
What the role actually does
So what does a Head of Culture actually do, day to day? They sit at the intersection of brand strategy, product development, creative direction, and partnerships. They're the person who knows which emerging designers the brand should be collaborating with before every other brand has the same idea. They're the person who sees a shift in how a subculture is dressing, or what music is scoring the right TikToks, or which independent magazines are worth paying attention to, and translates that into actionable intelligence for the teams that make things.
They aren't a trend forecaster. Trend forecasting is a backward-looking exercise dressed up in forward-looking language - it tells you what already happened in niche circles and predicts it'll happen more broadly. A Head of Culture is different. They have taste. They have conviction. They aren't just identifying what is happening. They're making a judgment about what matters and what doesn't, what the brand should lean into and what it should ignore. That requires a point of view, not just a spreadsheet.
Look at Flowers for Society - a sneaker brand built entirely on cultural conviction. Every collaboration, every material choice, every design decision comes from a clear perspective on where sneaker culture should go, not where it has been. There's no trend report driving those decisions. There is taste. There's a point of view about what matters. That's what a Head of Culture brings to a larger organisation - the same clarity of vision, applied at scale.
Why it doesn't exist yet
The reason this role doesn't exist on most org charts is simple: culture is hard to measure. Every other leadership role can point to a number. The CFO has revenue. The CMO has awareness metrics and conversion rates. The CPO has NPS scores and feature adoption. But the Head of Culture? What's the KPI for cultural relevance? How do you put a number on whether your brand feels alive?
This is the same reason companies under-invest in brand and over-invest in performance marketing. The things that are easy to measure get funded. The things that are hard to measure get cut. But cultural relevance is the foundation that everything else is built on. No amount of performance marketing can save a brand that feels culturally irrelevant. You can optimise your funnel to perfection and still lose because nobody cares about you. The brands that win - the ones people actually want to be associated with - are the ones that feel like they belong in culture, not outside it looking in.
I've spent my career in advertising watching this gap from the strategy side. Sitting in briefing rooms where the brand team knows something is off but can't articulate what. Running workshops where the real problem isn't the brief or the creative or the media plan - the real problem is that the brand has lost its cultural footing and nobody has been tasked with finding it again. That gap between brand and culture isn't a creative problem. It's a structural one. And structural problems need structural solutions.
What I've been building toward
Everything I've built over the past year has been, in one way or another, a tool for this role. CultureTerminal is a cultural feed - a way to surface what's happening across design, fashion, music, tech, and food in real time. Taste OS is a scoring system - a framework for measuring how brands sit relative to culture across five dimensions. Modern Retro is a creative exercise in brand recontextualisation - taking modern brands and imagining them through a different cultural lens to reveal something about their identity that a standard brand audit never would.
None of these projects were built as job applications. They were built because I saw a gap and wanted to fill it. But taken together, they're a toolkit for exactly the role I'm describing. A Head of Culture needs to monitor the landscape - CultureTerminal does that. They need a framework for evaluating cultural positioning - Taste OS does that. They need creative provocation tools that challenge how a brand sees itself - Modern Retro does that. The projects are the proof of concept. The role is the product.
Why I want this job
I've spent fifteen years in strategy at independent and creative agencies - the shops where cultural fluency wasn't a nice-to-have but the entire value proposition. I have sat in the rooms where brands figured out who they were. I've written the decks that connected business objectives to cultural opportunities. And I have watched, again and again, as that cultural thinking got diluted the moment it left the agency and entered the client organisation, because there was nobody on the other side whose job it was to keep it alive.
I don't want to keep writing decks that die in someone's inbox. I want to be on the inside, where the decisions get made and the products get built. I want to be the person who wakes up every morning and asks: where does this brand sit in culture today, and what are we going to do about it? Not as a consultant. Not as an agency partner with a quarterly check-in. As a permanent fixture in the leadership team, with the authority to shape how the brand shows up in the world.
The companies that figure this out first will have an enormous advantage. While everyone else is optimising for clicks and conversions, they'll be building something that actually matters - a brand that people want to be part of, not just buy from. A brand that shapes culture rather than chasing it. A brand where every product, every collaboration, every campaign feels like it comes from the same place, because someone is making sure it does.
That someone should be me. And that role should exist everywhere.
