Mastering Brand Marketing: Ana Andjelic’s Do’s and Don’ts
Unfiltered interview series featuring the visionary minds behind the world’s most innovative brands and culture projects.
Ana Andjelic is many things.
She’s the writer of one of Substack’s most popular newsletters The Sociology of Business in which she dissects how the shifting status symbols of consumers are impacting the strategies of brands in real time. She’s also an author, a public speaker, and a friend of SOTA.
Most of all, she’s a brand executive whose career took her from Belgrade, Serbia to New York in the early 2000s where she started working for various agencies like Razorfish, Droga5, and Havas, before venturing in-house. Over the years, she’s held Chief Brand Officer and Chief Marketing Officer roles at brands ranging from Rebecca Minkoff to Banana Republic, and most recently at ESPRIT, breathing new relevance into the storied brands. It earned her a spot on the Forbes best CMO list three times.
We discussed it all, and more, over a glass of wine in a gym hallway at a Snapchat conference in the British countryside where both Ana and I were speaking.
6:16PM, Thursday May 23rd
Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Hallway sofa, Soho Farmhouse
Christopher Morency: Ana, you just got off stage at the Snap gathering. I had to miss the first half of the talk so bring me up to speed. What did I miss?
Ana Andjelic: The name of the talk was Culture GPT. It’s about how you can create cultural influence. Like Chat GPT which gives you generative predictive answers, I talked about how you can participate in culture in the same way. Why is cultural influence strategy relevant for brands and why has brand marketing become about a cultural influence strategy? I always talk from experience, so this talk was about my Banana Republic and ESPRIT experience.
People never make decisions in isolation, we all influence each other. Brands need to figure out who they need to influence. Not just people but also what products they need to create to influence culture which will then influence people who consume that culture.
Culture is such a buzz word, what do we actually mean when we say culture?
AA: For me, it’s pop culture. But, the word culture is deceiving because it should be ‘cultures.’ It’s about niches, taste communities, and subcultures. For example, you have these aesthetical trends. ‘Tomato Girl’ last summer, then ‘High Academia,’ etc. Something emerges from the bottom up, and it’s adopted by a certain group of people. Some people have never heard of it, or don’t care about it but it’s still legit for others. But it’s temporary and fragmented.
So there’s no longer one cultural moment, there are many. It’s the same with product, there isn’t one cultural product, there are many. The idea is that brands need to release ideas into the world, test and learn, and then amplify those that have potential.
It reminds me of that skincare brand The Ordinary whose mother company Deciem launched 10 brands but only The Ordinary really popped off.
AA: Exactly. My favourite example is Jeremy Allen White with Calvin Klein. They lucked out. They got millions of views on YouTube. Some came before, and then came Idris Elba and he didn’t get that same engagement. What this shows me is that the cultural moment needs to be right. I don’t think you can predict that stuff, you can only amplify [and test] it. And then you have to figure out how to measure it. And to do that is to say, ‘In a year, if we do X, Y, and Z, we’ll prove it, not now.’ In the Jeremy Allen White case, they were up double digits in terms of engagement but down in sales. But brands need to understand that comparing the two metrics is like comparing apples and oranges.
Read the rest of this conversation on The Sociology of Business.
