Marketing Is the Culture Now
- May 5
- 6 min read
Franklin Ozekhome on why the next wave of brand growth will not come from campaigns. It will come from culture.
Franklin Ozekhome | Executive Vice President, Chain Reactions Africa | Guest Faculty, MMP 2.0 by Aim One Company
There is a version of marketing that most of us were trained to execute. Set the objective. Define the target audience. Build the creative. Buy the media. Measure the return. Repeat. It is a clean system: precise, defensible, and deeply familiar. It is also becoming obsolete.
In his Guest Faculty session at the Marketing Mentorship Programme 2.0 (MMP 2.0) convened by Aim One Company, Franklin Ozekhome, one of Africa's most respected brand strategists and Executive Vice President at Chain Reactions Africa, made an argument that is as urgent as it is uncomfortable: the brands that win from here will not win on the back of better campaigns. They will win because they understand and operate inside culture.
“Culture is no longer the seasoning. It is the fire.”
That line sits with you. Not because it is provocative, but because the evidence is already in front of us: in the brands we love, the ones we ignore, and the ones we can no longer explain why we trusted in the first place.
The Shift Nobody Can Afford to Miss
Ozekhome opened with a provocation: the next wave of business growth in Nigeria will not come from boardrooms. It will come from culture. Creators are already building new systems. Communities are moving with purpose. Language is evolving faster than most brand manuals can track. The companies that design around these shifts will win. Those that ignore them are not standing still; they are falling behind.
This is not a call to chase trends. Ozekhome is explicit about that distinction. Trend-chasing without authenticity is a trap that costs brands more than relevance; it costs them trust. What he is describing is something more structural: a fundamental reorientation of where brand power actually lives.
It lives in culture. In the tensions people carry. In the tribes they belong to. In the triggers that move them to act.
Four Forces. One Engine.
To decode this, Ozekhome introduced what he calls the culture engine: a framework built around four forces: tensions, tribes, trends, and triggers.
Tensions are the emotional friction points where opportunity hides. In Nigeria today, young people are caught between the relentless grind of survival and a deep hunger for pleasure, peace, and joy. That paradox is not a problem to solve; it is cultural electricity. Forward-looking brands are building rituals, language, and moments that plug directly into this reality, not around it.
Tribes are not what they used to be. They no longer form around demographics or product categories. They form around codes: shared sensibilities expressed inside WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, and TikTok subcultures. The most powerful symbols are not coming from creative departments. They are coming from these communities. The question is whether brands are paying attention.
Trends, he cautions, must be read early, not chased late. By the time a cultural moment becomes a hashtag campaign, it has already passed through the hands of the people who built it. The brands that benefit from trends are the ones already embedded in the culture that produced them.
Triggers are the specific moments (a phrase, a visual, a sound) that spark collective motion. They are not manufactured in brainstorming sessions. They are identified by paying close attention to how people already communicate, what makes them move, and what signals shared identity. The job of the marketer is to understand those triggers well enough to design around them.
“Brands that will win and thrive are those who leverage cultural tribes, and design triggers that spark collective motion.”
From Campaigns to Ecosystems
One of Ozekhome's most insistent arguments is that the campaign model (discrete, time-bound, media-driven) is no longer sufficient as the primary unit of brand building. What is needed instead are living ecosystems: brand systems that evolve, self-grow, and deepen loyalty over time, shaped by emotional context, community co-creation, and perpetual relevance.
He is not dismissing media. He is reframing its role. Media spend without cultural fluency is noise. Cultural fluency without presence is invisible. The strongest brands operate at the intersection; they are embedded in the culture and visible within it.
To illustrate, he pointed to Heinz and the Deadpool and Wolverine campaign: ketchup and mustard bottles reimagined as collectible cosplay items. The campaign did not force participation; it created a surface on which people could play. User-generated content, DIY hacks, and meme culture followed organically, because the brand met people inside a cultural moment they already owned.
He referenced Jameson Whiskey's Yard events and music partnerships as another example: a brand that understood community as currency long before that framing became fashionable. And closer to home, he pointed to AfroDroids, the NFT project by artist Owo Anietie, which wove together design, Afro-futurism, and social good to fund girls' education while building a thriving digital community. Each of these represents the same insight: when a brand serves culture rather than just targeting it, the culture works for the brand.
The AI Dimension
Ozekhome added a sharp observation that deserves its own pause: artificial intelligence is now learning from the same cultural streams that marketers should be fluent in, including memes, voice notes, Afrobeats samples, Gen Z slang, low-res aesthetics, and vintage moodboards. AI does not invent culture. It ingests and reflects it.
This means two things. First, marketers who are not tuned into these cultural streams are falling behind both their competitors and their tools. Second, the cultural intelligence that separates strong brand thinking from generic brand thinking is not something that can be outsourced to an algorithm. It requires human presence inside communities, genuine curiosity about how people live, and the discipline to observe before acting.
What This Means for the Next Generation of Marketers
Ozekhome delivered this session to MMP 2.0 participants: a cohort of 30 emerging marketing professionals drawn from six African countries, mentored by 26 industry leaders, and challenged to solve a live brand brief. The timing matters. These are the practitioners who will define how African brands grow over the next decade.
His message to them was direct: stop optimising for virality. Start building for velocity. The difference is not just semantic. Virality is accidental, episodic, and self-consuming. Velocity is intentional: brands that move like culture, fast, fluid, and full of feeling.
He challenged participants to decode the culture engine in their own categories. Where are the tensions? Which tribes are forming? What trends are still underground? What triggers are already in the hands of the community? These are not questions that require a research brief and a six-week timeline. They require attention, curiosity, and the willingness to be inside culture rather than commentating on it from the outside.
“Participation, not just presence, now defines brand relevance.”
The Takeaway
What Franklin Ozekhome brought to MMP 2.0 was not a new framework dressed up in exciting language. He brought a genuine reckoning with how brand value is actually built in a market like Nigeria, one that is exporting sound, style, slang, and social rituals at global scale, while too many of its brands are still thinking in thirty-second spots and awareness metrics.
Culture is the fire. The brands that understand this are not waiting for permission to operate inside it. They are already there, learning the language, mapping the tensions, earning the trust of the tribes that matter. The rest are planning their next campaign.
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This article captures the highlights, but the full session goes deeper. Watch Franklin Ozekhome's complete Guest Faculty session from MMP 2.0 on the Aim One Company YouTube channel and get the unedited thinking behind every argument.
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This article is adapted from Franklin Ozekhome's Guest Faculty session at the Marketing Mentorship Programme 2.0 (MMP 2.0), convened by Aim One Company.
About Franklin Ozekhome
Franklin Ozekhome is a strategic planner, brand communications specialist, culture futurist, and Executive Vice President at Chain Reactions Africa. He is the co-founder of brand innovation studio Maskvrade and founder of TINK Africa, a consumer intelligence hub. Recognised as one of Africa's leading authorities on brand strategy, digital platforms, and youth culture, Ozekhome has built integrated marketing solutions for global brands across diverse industries and authored features for publications including Marketing Edge, Brand Communicator, and BizCommunity.
About MMP by Aim One Company
The Marketing Mentorship Programme (MMP) is a platform convened by Aim One Company to develop the next generation of marketing and business talent across Africa. MMP 2.0 ran from January to April 2026, matching 30 selected participants from six African countries with 26 industry mentors across an intensive eight-week curriculum combining structured mentorship, executive knowledge sessions, and a live brand challenge powered by Imperio Cosmetics Limited.
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