Sophie Doyle
Cultural Strategy Consultancy

About · How I work · Work · Writing · CV

A brand can't claim a position. It can only occupy one the audience is willing to grant it. Most of what gets sold as cultural strategy is a brand renting a moment it has no standing in.

— — —

Four moves. Same four every time, whatever the sector.

1 — Take the problem as briefed. Then demote it.

What a client complains about is almost never the cause. It's the most visible symptom, and it's visible because it's downstream. Solving it as stated buys about six months.

2 — Find where the cause actually sits.

Sometimes it's authority: who holds the decision, at what point, and what they know when they make it. Sometimes it's the ask itself — a brief that couldn't be answered by anyone, written for a behaviour that doesn't exist in the market. Either way it's structural, and clients rarely have language for it, because the fault is in a process nobody designed on purpose.

3 — Anchor it in evidence from culture.

Specific, current, checkable. Not a trend deck. A real behaviour with a real shape, that either supports the strategy or kills it — including when it kills something the organisation has already committed to.

4 — Resolve toward the audience, not the institution.

Every organisation has something it wants to say. The audience decides what it will accept. Where those disagree, the audience is right, and the strategy has to be built from their side of the table.

— — —

The diagnosis I give you isn't softened. What flexes is the prescription — what I ask you to do about it is calibrated to what your organisation can actually execute, and to whose relationships have to survive the recommendation. There's no value in a correct answer nobody in the room can act on.

What I don't publish: how the cultural evidence gets found — the sources, the verticals, the method for reading a weak signal early. That's the proprietary part and it stays behind the door.

— — —

What that looks like as an engagement

Before the brief. What's actually moving, what you can credibly enter, and how long the window is. Two to six weeks.

Positioning that holds. What the brand is allowed to own, and whether it survives contact with channels and executions. Four to eight weeks.

When the strategy is right and the organisation can't act on it. Team shape, decision rights, operating model, how to hire for it. Four to eight weeks.

Scoped before it starts. Project-based, or ongoing advisory on retainer.

— — —

Background: agency and client side. Strategist on a Nordic McDonald's employer campaign, built to fix a talent pipeline young people had stopped entering — the campaign was Effie-awarded for effectiveness.

To discuss a project: hello@sophiedoyle.work