The timeline is clean enough to trace. In the 1950s, you hired a designer to make the thing look good. A logo, a package, a print ad with a woman smiling at a refrigerator. By the 1990s, you hired a strategist to make the thing mean something: brand positioning, mission statements, the era of "we don't sell shoes, we sell the aspiration of movement." The 2010s brought the community manager, hired to make the thing spread. Retweets as proof of relevance, engagement rates as proxy for affection.

Now we've reached the final abstraction. Brands are hiring people to make the thing belong. Feel inevitable. Feel like it was always here. The deliverable is no longer an artifact or a position or a post. The deliverable is a feeling. Feelings are hard to put on a quarterly report.

Every other competitive advantage has been neutralized. Impressions are cheap. Clicks are gameable. AI has commoditized execution to the point where any startup with a Midjourney subscription can look like a billion-dollar company by Tuesday. Tom Scott, writing for Verified Insider in early 2025, noted that brand and visual design hiring is accelerating, but the demand has migrated from people who ship clean interfaces to people who bring identity and edge. The stuff machines cannot replicate.

Open ten direct-to-consumer brand websites in ten tabs and try to tell them apart. The same geometric sans-serif. The same muted pastels. The same lifestyle photography of someone holding a product in golden-hour light. The democratization of design tools created a homogeneity crisis so total it became invisible. Everyone looks good. Nobody looks like anything.

So the differentiator moved from craft to cultural fluency, from execution to taste, from what you make to what you seem to understand. Brands started posting listings for Vibe Architects and Heads of Cultural Relevance, titles that sound like parodies but come with stock options.

Figma's research on design culture found that companies known for exceptional creative output spent years building environments where intuition and taste could flourish. Years. Not quarters. The culture had to be grown. But the companies writing those job listings don't want to grow anything. They want to acquire it, hire it, onboard it by Q3.

Pepsi tried exactly that in 2017. The inputs were immaculate: protest culture was trending, Kendall Jenner had massive reach, the sentiment was unity and togetherness. Every line item on the brief checked out. The result was the most ridiculed advertisement of the decade, a woman solving police brutality with a can of soda, pulled within twenty-four hours. The strategy was correct. Nobody in the room belonged to the culture they were referencing. Proximity without participation.

Compare that to Corteiz, the London streetwear label that built one of the most hyped brands in Europe by doing everything strategists warn against. A private Instagram account. Drops with no notice. The Bolo Exchange, where people traded their North Face puffers for Corteiz pieces in the middle of the street. No media buys, no influencer partnerships, no dashboards. You cannot put "be mysterious and slightly hostile" into a brand guidelines document.

Or Jacquemus, where Simon Porte Jacquemus's obsession with Mediterranean warmth, surreal scale, and saturated color became a shared aesthetic language. Giant handbags on Parisian streets. Inflatable bags floating in lakes. These are cultural objects that happen to sell things. He didn't hire a cultural strategist. He is one.

Red Bull got close to systematizing it, building an entire media empire around extreme sports, music, and Formula One that doesn't feel like marketing. But Red Bull started as a culture company. The culture was the business model, not a layer of paint applied in year seven by a new CMO chasing relevance.

The honest answer, the one the industry cannot afford to say aloud, is that a brand which didn't begin with culture probably can't get there through hiring alone. Culture is emergent. It arises from communities, friction, shared experience, genuine risk. The moment you put "cultural relevance" on a dashboard, you turn a living thing into a dead metric. Measuring culture changes culture. Optimizing for authenticity produces its opposite. The KPI-to-culture pipeline is a paradox dressed in a job listing.

The sharpest critique of the authenticity argument is that every brand is manufactured. Nike's 2018 Kaepernick campaign went through layers of approval before it became a symbol of corporate courage. The difference between culture and marketing is conviction. It is taste. It is the willingness to be wrong in a way no committee would ever approve.

An art director who understands a subculture and can translate it into a typeface, a texture, a rhythm of images, that person is a cultural strategist. They just used to be called a designer. The industry now pays six figures to name a function it used to embed in the work itself. It extracted the soul, gave it a title, and asked it to report to the VP of Marketing. The results will look correct. The correctness will be the entire problem.

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Watch the video essay, Why Brands Now Hire "Cultural Strategists" Instead of Designers, on YouTube.