THE COST OF GETTING CULTURE WRONG

There is no external force more influential to human behavior than culture, full stop. The lion’s share of my work has rested on this thesis. This is critical for marketers because brands, by definition, are vessels of meaning, and meaning is negotiated within culture, making consumption itself a cultural act. When marketers understand this critical truth, they can conjure meaning in people’s minds and move the market. As such, I’ve spent years evangelizing the upside of getting it right. What I don’t talk about nearly enough is the cost of getting it wrong.

Arturo Nunez spent three decades getting it right—leading marketing at the NBA, Nike, Apple, and the Brazilian digital bank Nubank before founding his own firm, AIE Creative. So, when we invited him onto the latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast, I expected a kindred spirit. What I got was the other half of my own sermon: a man who could, story by story, name exactly what happens when culture gets fumbled. If I’ve been preaching the gospel of culture’s promise to the church door, Nunez has been proselytizing its warning.

His fluency isn’t theoretical. Nunez grew up above 96th Street in Harlem, in what he lovingly calls the land of the misfit toys: African American, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban, all in close proximity. On weekends, young Arturo experienced a world where the grown folks danced to salsa and merengue in one room while his cousins grooved to Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire in another. And he absorbed it all, which provided him a level of cultural proximity that most don’t experience.

That’s the whole ballgame for Nunez: intimacy. Cultural intimacy is what enables a marketer to decipher meaning and discern the nuances that are invisible to the eye of an outsider, the final boss for AI’s quest for world domination, if you will. However, as nuanced as culture may be, the challenge is that when brands miss the mark, the error is seemingly obvious to everyone.

In our conversation, Nunez pointed to brand campaigns that seem so tone-deaf that they border bigotry. Still, he goes further, noting that this turns it from merely a marketing deficiency into an organizational culture problem: 200 people saw that work before it shipped, and nobody said, “Yo, that’s crazy.” Which means one of two things. Either you have no one in the room with the necessary cultural intimacy to catch it, or—worse—you have those people, and they don’t feel safe enough to speak. So they say nothing in the meeting, then text each other afterward: “Did you see that?” The tone-deaf ad, in other words, isn’t just a creative failure; it’s an organizational one that collapses the wall between the marketplace and the workplace. The campaign and the culture of silence are the same disease with two symptoms: regardless of who’s in the room, they have been rendered voiceless.

Nunez sees brand storytelling and leadership as one and the same: a vehicle through which people feel seen. For instance, he has a standing grievance with the word aspirational because, too often, it doesn’t include who the customer actually is, holding them at arm’s length as a fantasy rather than a face of who they actually are. As a rule of thumb, he refuses and instead puts real people and their real lives on screen because when people feel seen, magic happens. This is supported by the brand-love scholarship, including the work of Michigan’s own Aaron Ahuvia, which underscores how emotional connection drives people to tattoo brand marks on their bodies or stick logos on their cars. It’s irrational behavior, rationally produced by meaning—cultural meaning—that consistently catalyzes consumption.

The reason this matters for every leader, not just marketers, is that the internal customer works exactly like the external one. When people feel engaged at work, the company becomes theirs—they wear the merch, they defend the brand, they treat it as an extension of who they are, the same way a kid in Detroit had to have a fresh pair of Air Force Ones. And the failure mode is identical: design from the ivory tower, exclude the people your decisions impact, and you get an organization full of employees nudging each other in the hallway about a call they were never empowered to question. Nunez is building the opposite—rooms, restaurants, listening bars, and whole companies where people are invited to show up whole.

Nunez and I come from the same congregation, if you will. However, his focus is on ensuring that culture is not only seen as an asset to be harnessed but also as a liability to be respected. It will cost you when you fumble it, arrive late, or remove the people who actually produce it. The bill always comes due, whether you like it or not. The only question is whether you pay a little now, through the practice of cultural intimacy, or a great deal later, through the very public price of getting it wrong. The choice is yours.

Check out our full conversation with Arturo Nunez on the latest episode of FROM THE CULTURE here.