Quantifying the value of culture

Brands that don’t understand the true value of culture are missing out — and the latest research from M+C Saatchi Consulting and Oxford University explains how much.

“We wanted to get to something empirical and new to this industry, which is quantifying and understanding the physics of culture. How do we really decode how people behave?” M+C Saatchi Consulting’s global CEO Rhonda Hiatt told Lions Daily News.

“Brands traditionally have always put messages out. Culture then does things with those messages, but we’ve never been able to figure out what the influence return back is. That’s ultimately what we did with this work."

“Essentially about a third of brands’ equity is being left on the table by not understanding that dynamic of culture. It’s a huge finding: a metric that is fit for CFO, fit for boardroom.”

Hiatt thinks that ‘culture’ might just be the word of this year’s Cannes Lions, although she accepted that ‘AI’ and ‘creator’ might run it close.

“We’re not going to get to a point where the whole industry is just all AI. We won’t let that happen, because at the end of the day, you’re still going to connect with people."

"Brands still serve a purpose in people’s lives, and so you have to be able to have that connection,” she added.

“The biggest challenge is going to be that we will not just be marketing to humans: we’ll also be marketing to (AI) agents,’ she said, noting that creators provide an early window into that future.