Why Cultural Power Is Becoming a Boardroom Metric

For years, marketers have measured brands through relatively stable indicators: awareness, consideration, sentiment, salience and share of voice. Those metrics were built for a slower era — one where brands evolved gradually, media cycles were predictable and cultural influence moved at a manageable pace.

That world no longer exists.

Today, brands can gain or lose relevance in weeks. Communities can propel a product into mainstream demand overnight, while a poorly judged cultural moment can erase years of carefully built equity almost instantly. In an environment shaped by algorithms, creators, fragmented audiences and always-on participation, brand performance increasingly behaves less like a long-term annual tracker and more like a live market signal.

Culture has become one of the most influential forces shaping commercial outcomes — but also one of the least consistently measured.

Ahead of Cannes Lions, new research from M+C Saatchi Consulting in partnership with Oxford Saïd Business School argues that marketers may be missing a significant part of the growth equation. Their joint study used a structural equation model to test how cultural dynamics interact with established brand metrics across a sample of brands and categories. The study finds that 32.8 per cent of the variance in brand equity can be explained by cultural structure and dynamics — evidence, drawn from this methodology and this sample, that a brand's ability to participate in, shape and sustain itself in culture is a measurable contributor to commercial performance, alongside the traditional drivers brand equity models already capture.

The implication is significant. Traditional brand metrics still matter, but they largely measure what brands say about themselves or what individuals say about brands. What they often fail to capture is the collective effect of culture itself: the speed at which influence spreads, the durability of relevance, and the compounding commercial impact of community participation.

That shift is forcing marketers to rethink the way brand value is assessed.

Increasingly, the challenge for CMOs is not simply creating visibility, but understanding when and how to participate in culture credibly — and how to measure whether that participation is creating long-term enterprise value rather than short-term attention.

The research introduces the idea of "Cultural Power”: a brand’s ability to shape what people think, feel and do through shared participation, influence and community dynamics. It proposes that this kind of cultural influence can now be modelled, quantified and connected directly to commercial performance.

The full methodology and operating model will be unveiled at Cannes Lions next week. Ahead of that reveal, Creative Salon spoke to Karen Boswell, global CEO M+C Saatchi consulting, experience, and media/ group lead for AI and IP Development, and Rhonda Hiatt, CEO of M+C Saatchi Consulting, about why traditional measurement frameworks are no longer enough, why culture now behaves more like a leading business indicator than a marketing byproduct, and why brands may need a new growth metric for the next decade.

CS: In the simplest possible terms, how would you define “Return on Cultural Power” to a CEO or CFO who may be sceptical of its value?

Karen Boswell: Very simply, a lot of the work we’ve been making has influence in culture, but we’ve never been able to measure it beyond reach, awareness, engagement, and sentiment. There’s a gap between those measures that we can now map, measure, and quantify—returning that back to your brand, both top-line brand and bottom-line business.

Think of it as a bridge between long-term brand saliency and short-term performance. Long-term measures are often lagging - we look retrospectively at how a brand has performed over time. Short-term measures are also lagging - quarterly boardroom reporting and financial results. What we don’t understand is what happens in between those KPIs. Return on Cultural Power allows you to understand what’s happening around your brand in culture as it happens.

Familiarity alone isn’t the same as cultural power, and it can even mask stagnation if a brand stops earning fresh relevance. The framework lets us quantify how a single product moment or campaign contributes to cultural uplift and brand value in a way we couldn’t before.

These are not specific examples related to the study, however in my mind’s eye I think of brands like Budweiser where familiarity over time runs the risk of stagnation. Marks & Spencer is another example. It’s highly familiar, but we can now quantify how something like Percy Pig contributes to cultural uplift and brand value in a way we couldn’t before?

CS: Can you explain how you arrived at the 32.8 per cent figure?

Rhonda Hiatt: We used a structural equation model to understand how cultural dynamics interact with brand equity. We analysed long-term brand metrics, cultural response, engagement, and message shelf life across our sample. The 32.8 per cent is the share of variance in brand equity that this model attributes to cultural structure and dynamics, once the established drivers are accounted for.

It means that a meaningful share of what builds or erodes a brand isn’t being captured by the metrics most businesses currently track. That represents a significant opportunity to reduce risk and improve decision-making by understanding cultural impact more clearly. We’ll be publishing the full methodology, sample and model specification alongside the launch, so the figure can be properly scrutinised rather than taken on faith.

We used three layers of data:

•       Traditional brand saliency metrics

•       Large-scale cultural data across social platforms, Reddit, Discord, and others

•       A proprietary interaction layer combining both

We also model outcomes against sales performance and search behaviour.

CS: Why do you think this gap in measurement has become so urgent for marketers and businesses?

Rhonda Hiatt: Culture is the word of the year. Everyone is talking about it. The question is whether to enter a partnership, show up in a moment, invest in an activation, or attach your brand to something - and what the risk and reward is. Previously, we couldn’t measure that. Now we can understand both cultural return and commercial return from those actions.

There’s no debate that culture is important. The difference is that I sit in rooms with CEOs and CMOs who are operating on instinct and lagging information. This removes instinct and quantifies the value of their efforts, ensuring they understand it’s delivering return to the business. It removes guesswork and de-risks decision-making.

CS: Why has the conversation around cultural power accelerated so significantly across the industry?

Karen Boswell: There’s a line often attributed to the department store pioneer John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”

As an industry, we’ve become very good at measuring what’s easy whilst ignoring the more amorphous connections in culture. That’s why people defend brands like Nike over a generic trainer, or why people emotionally defend brands in conversation. We haven’t been able to quantify that until now.

Rhonda Hiatt: Separate from the study, when we look at brands that do this well, it’s because they balance slow-moving enduring brand building with participation in culture in the right moments.

Brands like Nike do this well because they are deeply embedded in understanding the communities that are core to and surrounding their brand.

CS: Would it be fair to say that most established brands are effectively managing cultural power today?

Rhonda Hiatt: Not consistently, no.

Most big brands are genuinely good at the slow-moving side of brand building — the long-term equity work. Where we see the bigger gap is on the culture side: many get the timing or the entry point wrong, and that has led to erosion not just of brand equity but commercial value. It’s not that CMOs lack sophistication — it’s that they’ve been making real-time decisions with backward-looking data.

This study provides that missing insight and allows brands to participate in culture with confidence.

CS: How is cultural power currently being understood and applied within the industry?

Rhonda Hiatt: The industry has talked about culture for a long time, but often in an ambiguous way. What we’re doing is defining the physics of culture—how it operates, moves, and influences behaviour, and how it returns value.

This makes it systematic rather than abstract, and therefore more actionable.

Karen Boswell: Knowing when to enter culture and when to exit is key to maximising disproportionate value. We can see where cultural attention is emerging and when it will erode, which helps optimise media spend and creative deployment. And it’s definitely not static. We’ve introduced causation and correlation metrics, which allow us to understand cultural movement dynamically rather than as a linear “if this, then that” model.

CS: What happens when a brand has high cultural power but weak commercial performance?

Karen Boswell: It often means they are entering culture at the wrong time, in the wrong way, or with the wrong message. We focus on signal before noise - helping brands avoid over-spending and instead ride cultural waves effectively, then exit at the right moment. We’ve developed a diagnostic model with Oxford Saïd and attributed this 6C framework that helps brands close the gap between potential and actual cultural return;

•       Conviction

•       Connection

•       Credibility

•       Coherency

•       Collaborators

•       Cut-through

CS: How does Return on Cultural Power relate to the work measurement firms like Kantar are already doing in this space?

Rhonda Hiatt: It’s a fair question, and we expect it. Kantar’s own research has shown that culturally vibrant brands grow significantly faster than their peers, and we don’t dispute that culture matters — the industry is increasingly aligned on that point. Where we think Return on Cultural Power is different is the unit of analysis. Most existing frameworks, including Kantar’s, still start with the individual: what does this person think, feel, or intend to buy. We start with the collective — what is a community doing with a brand, independent of what any one person in it says in a survey. That’s a structural difference in the model, not just a rebrand of the same idea, and it’s one we expect to be tested by exactly the audience you’d expect: rival measurement firms, and academics outside our own partnership.

Creative Salon: Can this approach be used to predict future brand performance?

Karen Boswell: Predictive capability is in active development, not yet proven at scale — it’s important to be precise about that distinction. What’s established today is the 6C diagnostic and the 32.8 per cent finding. What’s still pilot-stage is the forward-looking work: we’re running pilots on audience modelling to identify next audiences using cultural signals, and once the regression modelling behind that is validated, we’ll be able to talk about prediction with the same confidence we now have in measurement.