Brand strategists need to understand people. We look at their behaviors, motivations, challenges, goals, and the cultures they are part of. Our job is to figure out what matters to them, what is changing, and how brands can play a real role in their lives.
But there is a paradox in our field. Even though we need to understand many different audiences, the teams doing this work are often still very similar to each other.
This is about both representation and the quality of our thinking.
When people with similar backgrounds, careers, and experiences work together, they often agree easily. But agreement does not always lead to new insights. In brand strategy, where standing out is important, everyone reaching the same conclusion can actually be a problem.
As brands try to stay relevant in a world with many different cultures, cognitive and cultural diversity should be seen as a key strategic skill, not just an HR issue.
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Table of Contents
The paradox of modern brand strategy
Brand strategy has always been shaped by culture. But now, the range and complexity of audiences that brands need to understand has grown a lot.
People move between cultures, identities, communities and digital worlds. Cultural trends can emerge from anywhere and travel globally within hours. What feels obvious to one group can be completely invisible to another.
And yet the industry can still recruit from relatively narrow networks.
We often hire from the same universities, the same agencies, the same professional circles and, increasingly, through networks that resemble our own. Even when teams are diverse on paper, there can still be significant similarities in how people have been trained to think.
This creates an uncomfortable question for strategists:
How can we expect to find perspectives that are genuinely different from the perspectives we already have if we keep building teams in our own image?
Research can help us understand audiences, but research is always interpreted by someone. A focus group can tell you what people said. Data can tell you what people did. But deciding what it means requires interpretation. And interpretation is formed by perspective.
A person who has experienced a certain cultural tension might spot a point in an interview that another strategist misses. A person coming from a different field may question the assumptions on which the brief is based. Someone who was brought up outside the main cultural background of a team might ask why something is regarded as ‘normal’ to begin with.
Diversity can therefore change not only who is represented in the room, but what the room is capable of seeing.
When everyone thinks alike, brands start to sound alike
Homogeneous thinking rarely announces itself. There is no meeting where everyone decides, “Let’s produce a predictable strategy.” It happens more subtly. A familiar framework is used. A familiar cultural tension emerges. A familiar consumer insight follows. The strategy is polished, coherent and defensible, but somehow feels like something you have seen before.
This is partly because strategic thinking has become increasingly standardised. Frameworks, methodologies, trend reports and case studies are widely accessible. The industry has developed a shared strategic vocabulary, which is useful, but can also create a shared way of seeing.
When everyone draws from the same sources and evaluates ideas through the same lenses, difference becomes harder to produce.
The irony is that brands are constantly being told to differentiate, while the strategic processes behind them can encourage convergence. This is where cognitive diversity becomes particularly valuable.
Cognitive diversity refers to differences in how people perceive, process and solve problems. It can come from different disciplines, educational backgrounds, professional experiences, personalities, and ways of approaching uncertainty. Cultural diversity adds another layer: the different experiences, references, values and assumptions people bring from the cultures and communities they have lived in.
Neither guarantees better thinking on its own. Diversity can create disagreement, friction and slower consensus. But that friction can be productive. The goal is not to have a room where everyone agrees quickly. The goal is to have a room where better questions are possible.
Diversity as a strategic capability
If diversity affects the quality of strategic thinking, then it needs to be treated as something we actively design for.
That starts with who gets into the room. Hiring is one of the most obvious places to intervene. Instead of repeatedly recruiting from the same schools, agencies and networks, teams can deliberately widen their talent pools. That might mean recruiting strategists from other disciplines, different profiles than the ones in-house already, or looking beyond the traditional advertising career path altogether.
A person does not need to have followed the “correct” strategic career path to be a good strategic thinker.
It also means looking beyond diversity that is immediately visible. Cultural background, nationality or gender are important, but so are professional experience, education, language, geography and lived experience.
Build teams with differences that are relevant to the problems they need to solve.
But recruitment is only the beginning. A diverse team can still produce homogeneous thinking if everyone is expected to behave, communicate and think in the same way.
This is where leadership matters. Leaders can set up ways to encourage disagreement. For example, they can ask someone to challenge the group’s main idea, rotate who leads workshops, gather ideas from each person before group discussions, or invite people from outside the team to join important meetings. Even something as simple as asking “What are we not seeing?” (and giving people enough psychological safety to answer honestly) can change a conversation.
Another practical step is to audit where ideas come from. Look at the references, examples, experts, creators, cultural sources and communities that regularly inform strategic work. Are they drawn from the same publications, voices and markets? Are teams mostly looking at culture from the outside, or are they also learning from people who participate in it?
And finally, make diversity part of the strategic process rather than something checked at the end. Before approving a strategy, teams can ask:
- Whose perspective shaped this thinking?
- Which assumptions are we making about the audience?
- Who might interpret this differently?
- What perspectives are missing from the room?
- Are we confusing our own cultural norms with universal human behaviour?
These questions are not bureaucratic additions to strategy. They are tools for stress-testing the strategy itself.
The strategist as a connector of perspectives
This is where the role of the strategist becomes particularly interesting.
A strategist’s job is often described as connecting business, brand, consumer and culture. But perhaps we should also think of strategists as connectors of difference. The strongest strategic teams are not necessarily those where everyone brings the same level of expertise. They are those where different forms of expertise can collide and connect.
A cultural researcher may see something a data analyst does not. A creative may challenge a strategic assumption. Someone who has lived within the culture being discussed may question an interpretation that otherwise feels perfectly logical.
The strategist’s role is not necessarily to resolve those differences immediately, but to make them useful. That requires a shift from seeing disagreement as inefficiency to seeing productive disagreement as part of the strategic process. It also requires humility. Awareness of one’s own biases.
The strategist cannot be the person who knows every culture, every community and every audience. No individual can. Instead, the he or she needs to become increasingly good at knowing whose perspective is needed.
That might mean bringing a different person into the room. It might mean speaking to communities directly rather than relying exclusively on secondary research. It might mean partnering with people who have lived experience. Or simply recognising when an assumption deserves to be challenged.
In other words, strategic leadership is not about having all the answers. A strategic leader’s role is to create the conditions in which better answers can emerge.
Looking ahead: when everyone has access to the same intelligence
Another reason this matters now is this: AI is quickly changing how we do strategy. It can pull together information, spot patterns, analyze audiences, suggest ideas, and make strategic tools easier to use than ever before. This will definitely make some parts of strategy faster and more efficient.
But it also raises a question: if everyone has increasingly similar access to information and strategic tools, what will make one strategy meaningfully different from another?
Perhaps the answer will increasingly be perspective. AI can help us work with what is already known. But a strategist’s real value may be in knowing what to question, what to connect, what matters in culture, and what others have missed. In that environment, cognitive and cultural diversity becomes more than an ethical ambition. It becomes a competitive advantage.
The future of brand strategy may depend less on who has access to information and more on who is interpreting it, and what they are able to see that others cannot.
For brands, that means building teams that do not simply reflect the world they are trying to understand, but teams capable of seeing that world from genuinely different angles.
For agencies and brand organisations, it means widening where talent comes from, creating room for dissent, bringing lived experience into strategic conversations and deliberately designing teams around difference rather than similarity.
And for brand strategists themselves, it means becoming comfortable with a simple but uncomfortable idea:
Sometimes the most valuable person in the room is the one who sees things differently from everyone else.
