Q&A – Cross industry strategies, cities and national identity, and revenue driven by cultural storytelling
Your Ideas, Examined
YOUR IDEAS, EXAMINED are your direct line for inquiry. A Q&A series where your questions are explored as case studies, stress-tested through cultural and strategic lenses to reveal sharper ways of seeing.
Few brands would argue against the economic value of building loyal communities around what they do. Few cities would overlook the power of civic vibrancy and engagement. We all want cultural relevance, but what makes it so elusive to even name, let alone address? This roundup of Q&As circle a common tension: why relevance can be hard to build, and what the implications are for a brand or organisation to even have that kind of presence.
Q – Why do strategies that work in one industry often fail in another, even when the problems seem identical?
A – The context is different. Each industry operates within distinct ecosystems of culture, incentives, constraints, and interactions. Think of each like an individual person with their own personality. If you were to ask for a story or recollection from them, each would come up with something distinctly different. Strategy, therefore, is context-dependent on a few things:
Different value drivers — what creates success in one industry may be irrelevant in another. (E.g. consider the importance of social media influencer marketing in fashion versus industrial tech.)
Organisational culture and capabilities — a strategy assumes certain behaviours, skills, and structures. Execution is everything. Even a brilliant strategy cannot save weak implementation.
Regulatory and market constraints — industries differ in rules, norms, and customer expectations. A brand or marketing strategy that works in one legal or cultural environment may backfire elsewhere.
Interdependencies and feedback loops — industries have different networks and supply chains. A tactic that works in a linear supply chain might fail in a highly interconnected one.
Hidden assumptions —every strategy relies on assumptions about timing, incentives, risk tolerance, and customer behaviour. Seemingly identical problems often hide subtle differences that invalidate those assumptions.
Q – What common mistakes are brands, cities, and cultural institutions all making in trying to engage people today?
A – I think there’s a lot of talk on community, connection, and (the big one) authenticity but, if you were to press, many strategists and operators alike won’t know what that tangibly means. We see larger brands gain visibility with experiential design stunts. I typically see this in larger brands who have enough market presence to leverage that brand equity. It’s tougher for more localised brands to play on in this way. Regardless, any brand of any size can still focus on this question: what move will make us more societally relevant? This inevitably translates into your bottom-line.
Q – Both the sports and arts industries rely heavily on sponsorships as a major revenue stream. What can either party learn from each other?
A – The sports sector, in many ways, is still leaps and bounds ahead of arts in how they approach sponsorship revenue. The arts, particularly on a global front, do however show quite strong opportunity to deliver deep cultural resonance through pop-culture collaborations.
In sports, there is typically more commercial clarity around sponsorship assets. Those properties are defined — naming rights, broadcast inventory, talent access, hospitality, content bundles — and arts companies will likely expand their revenue if they adopt this level of clarity.
That said, when I look at the globally-leading arts organisations — the Louvre, Sundance Film Festival, Tate Modern, the Met — they are the ones who truly excel at harnessing cultural storytelling for economic gain. We’re now sports shift in this direction too, with individual athletes deepening their personal narratives and using that storytelling to secure brand deals that leverage their image.
The arts sector enormous storytelling potential to work with, but it hasn’t quite slipped into the cultural zeitgeist the way sports has. In Australia, for example, sport is part of the national identity. (There are exceptions, as I do speak generally. In France, for example, the arts are woven into its national philosophy — museums, cinema, fashion, architecture.) When a sector reaches that level of cultural relevance, the economic leverage that follows is huge.
Got a question or idea worth examining? Share it and see that it might be chosen for an upcoming edition of YOUR IDEAS, EXAMINED.