In 2010, while at Ogilvy, a team of change agents created the marketing and communications industry’s first cultural agency.  It was called OgilvyCULTURE.  I had the good fortune of leading it in partnership with John Seifert (Former Ogilvy CEO) and Donna Pedro (Former Ogilvy Chief Diversity Officer).

The ambition was to build an agency practice that went from leading with mono and multi-cultural consumer insights to cross-cultural and poly-cultural.  At the time it was innovative thought leadership and a hypothesis for how to modernize a brand’s marketplace growth approach and workplace change approach. To validate the hypothesis, a client had to be willing to buy it, test it and the job to be done was operationalize it at scale.  

After presenting and launching OgilvyCULTURE at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference, IKEA was the first brand to test the innovative cross-cultural led go-to-market approach.  After winning the new business opportunity, the team was set to go and prove how using cross-cultural insights accelerated growth.  Then something changed!

The OgilvyCULTURE team was met with internal structural and systems barriers that had nothing to do with the job to be done.  Internal barriers limited and at times halted the change required in proving the cross-cultural approach worked.  This is when we found out culture alone does not solve the growth problem.  

OgilvyCULTURE continued to make an impact and within three years generated a book of business value of $7M using a new method for cultural insights and go-to-market approach. Value was created, the practice scaled and the hypothesis was validated.  

After leaving Ogilvy to launch Reframe Consulting Services, additional barriers for cross-cultural and poly-cultural growth engagements showed up in the form of strategic misalignment, lack of first party data to build customer segments and solution partners resistant to change. 

The learnings from 50+ F500 customer engagements?   When leading with cross-cultural and poly-cultural insights and go-to-market approach it requires a change management toolkit, not only marketing services.

Since launching the industry’s first cultural agency, the focus and demand for culturally led go-to-market services has exploded.  Why?  THE PEOPLE ARE CHANGING!  

With the use of technology, marketers and organizations now have the opportunity to access more first party data and personalize experiences using deep cultural insights.  To scale and sustain external customer growth, it starts with internal growth.  

For internal growth, this requires a level of cultural maturity.  Cultural maturity is different from cultural fluency. Cultural fluency seeks to enhance an organization’s ability to understand, and effectively navigate across diverse cultural contexts, norms and non-verbal cues with through education./ 

A maturity model is a tool that helps organizations assess the current level of effectiveness for an organization, person or group with capabilities they need to acquire in order to improve their performance.  Cultural maturity seeks to assess and measure an organization’s cultural gaps and level of change readiness within their Strategy, Structure, Segments, Systems and Solutions (5Ss).

Reframe Consulting Services developed the industry’s first cultural maturity model and assessment tool to understand an organization’s level of change readiness across their 5Ss.

After testing and validating the model and tool with F500 organizations via 1 on 1 interviews, they developed an algorithm to replicate the off-line assessment, made software to scale it and began testing it with F500 organizations. Culture alone does not solve your growth problem.  

The ambition of the content series is to raise awareness and consideration for a modern approach to growth acceleration that reflects the total addressable and serviceable markets.  

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