Digiday's 3 Questions with sparks & honey CMO Kristin Molinari Cohen

sparks & honey is a cultural intelligence consultancy. Tell us how you guys are thinking about culture at the moment, given things move so quickly?

In the last two years, people now are truly understanding what accelerated change in the market looks like. It’s been dramatic, the shifts that I’ve seen. We’re looking at cultural shifts in the market, trends, if you will. We’ve seen crazy acceleration of some of those trends that we have been tracking over a long course of time, and then deceleration of plenty of them. So many new types of clients are coming to us and asking for help in a lot of different ways. They’re realizing that culture, because it’s moving 24/7, is something that they need to be considering on an ongoing basis. 

How do you define culture and how is it used in today’s marketing landscape?

We talk about it as a kind of a network of ideas and beliefs and behaviors of any kind of — essentially — a manifestation of human achievement. It’s everything. And we are challenged with that a lot, because there’s pop culture, and there’s multicultural references. It’s really about everything around human behavior that we use as the basis for culture. And for us, it’s adding bias into our system as opposed to taking it out. We take that pretty seriously because you can’t understand culture if you aren’t thinking about things from a diverse perspective.

Culture is incredibly finicky and today’s generation is quick to call out anything that doesn’t nail it. How do you talk to your clients about approaching that?

This is often a place that we start with clients, which is they need an outside in perspective. Often, it’s very easy over time to start to become very insular and just look at what’s happening internally in our organizations, or making decisions based on things like sales data, which we know obviously shouldn’t be a sole indicator of where obviously things are going. And it’s really about understanding more broadly, where they sit within culture, what are the conversations that are happening around them, and what are the potential disruptors to their business?

This article was originally publish by Kimeko McCoy at Digiday on Tuesday, March 29, 2022.