Ana Andjelic spent a decade in C-suite brand roles, at Banana Republic, Esprit, Mansur Gavriel, and Rebecca Minkoff, while simultaneously building a body of intellectual work that explains why most brand strategy fails. The result is a perspective with unusual commercial credibility: she has made the argument at board level and then delivered the numbers.
Her central thesis, developed in The Business of Aspiration (Routledge), is that modern consumers no longer signal status through wealth or possessions but through taste, curation, and values – what she calls social, cultural, and environmental capital. The organisations that understand this are not running better advertising. They are restructuring brand strategy around cultural influence: collaborations, creative communities, content, and what she identifies in her second book, Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture, as the systematic production of cultural hits.
At Banana Republic, she translated this framework into a full brand repositioning that delivered a 27% year-on-year comparable sales increase. At Esprit, she oversaw the brand’s repositioning across Europe and its re-entry into North American and Asia-Pacific markets. Both assignments required her to make cultural arguments in commercial terms and to redesign the marketing function to deliver them.
Andjelic holds a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and a Masters in Media Studies. Her Sociology of Business newsletter is among Substack’s top 15 business publications. She contributes to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Advertising Age, and Adweek, and is a frequent expert source for the Wall Street Journal, the Business of Fashion, Financial Times, and Vogue Business.
Ana joined The WIE Suite for a masterclass on the concept she has built her thinking around: cultural capital, what it is, how brands build it, and why it is the only durable competitive advantage in a market where everything else can be copied.
Ana opened with the observation that frames everything else in her work. In a landscape where algorithms are the primary sorting mechanism and culture is moving faster than any single trend cycle, the brands that endure are not the ones with the biggest media budgets. They are the ones that have accumulated cultural capital: the intangible accumulation of knowledge, taste, connoisseurship, belonging, and identity that makes one brand meaningfully preferred over another.
"When you have a brand like Ralph Lauren, which had a record year of 8.1 billion dollars, you can charge for a polo shirt many multiples of what it costs to make. That is where the margin protection comes in. That is what cultural capital does."
She used Nike as the counterexample. Nike lost significant brand equity in recent years, and that loss showed up directly on its balance sheet in the form of eroded margins and pricing power. Cultural capital is not soft. It is financial. The brands that understand this treat it accordingly.
Ana identified five specific levers through which brands build and signal cultural capital, each one operating differently but all working toward the same goal: creating something that cannot be easily replicated or displaced.
Scarcity is the first and most foundational. Supreme understood decades ago that dropping limited quantities of specific items creates desire that scales without diluting the brand. The product pyramid, foundational items supporting limited hero items creating halo effects, is the structural expression of this principle.
Deliberate opacity is the second. The if-you-know-you-know factor: secret menus, understated branding, lexicon and aesthetic that require initiation. Brunello Cucinelli built an entire world around this. His clothes carry no visible logo. If you are not already a connoisseur, you simply do not know.
Aesthetic innovation is the third. In a synchronized visual landscape where Zara, H&M, and luxury brands are using the same photographers, the same models, and the same lighting, the brands that stand out are the ones that move before the copies arrive. Prada and Miu Miu do this consistently. The brands that have lost this capacity, including several historic luxury houses, are discovering that heritage alone does not protect equity.
Fandom is the fourth. Not the broad audience-building of the mass media era, but the deep, specific, connoisseur-level devotion that niche communities develop. The headphones brand Nothing investing in a nightlife fund to support emerging club culture globally is a precise example: music is their category, and nightlife is where their specific fandom lives.
Identity is the fifth. The ability of a brand to function as a social signal, to tell something about the person who chooses it. Erewhon in Los Angeles is the example Ana returned to: quintessentially Californian, deliberately without New York outposts, a place you go to see and be seen within a very specific subculture of longevity-obsessed, health-forward Los Angeles life.
One of the session's sharpest distinctions came when Ana was asked to separate what is merely trendy from what is genuinely cultural. Her answer turned on the concept of context.
"Understanding cultural context is way more important than understanding the properties of the spark. If the wood is dense and the wind is blowing in the right direction, the fire is going to be massive. That is how you know when you have something cultural."
She used the contrast between Midsommar and Backrooms as her proof point. Midsommar had an estimated $60 to $70 million marketing budget, celebrity partnerships, Airbnb integrations, and an omnipresent press campaign. Backrooms was made for $10 million with none of that. But Backrooms had context: the image had been circulating on Reddit for years, building a devoted fan community before the film even existed. By the time it reached theaters, its audience had already found it. Midsommar was a top-down campaign. Backrooms was bottom-up cultural ignition.
The implication for brands is practical: the question to ask before any activation is not what is trending but what context already exists in the community you are trying to reach. Entering a context that already has momentum is categorically different from trying to create one from scratch.
Ana pushed back, gently but firmly, on the way most marketers talk about brand world building. It is not about aesthetic consistency or matching luggage. It is about operating logic: the if-then principle that governs what belongs in the world and what does not.
"Ralph Lauren's world has a prep logic. Everything needs to make sense within east coast, Ivy League, WASP lifestyle. That is why Vineyard Vines, while they have polos, does not belong there. Different worlds have different centers of gravity."
She gave three distinct models of how that center of gravity can be defined. Hermès built an entire brand world around the halo of a single hero product, the Birkin, and has not needed to launch a genuinely new product in 40 years because the mythology of that product sustains everything else. Brunello Cucinelli centered his world not on his clothes but on his humanistic capitalism philosophy and the village of Solomeo, where everyone lunches together and he funds the local library. A24 built its world around taste itself: their restaurant, their theater, their book and music publishing arms, and their merchandise all express the same curatorial point of view, telling their audience not just what to watch but what to read, wear, listen to, and buy.
In each case, world building is not a creative exercise. It is a business structure. It requires operations, financial commitment, and repeatable programming. Miu Miu's jazz club in Tokyo is not a one-time activation. It is a program, built on the insight that Japan has more jazz clubs than almost any country in the world and that the Japanese relationship with jazz is one of genuine connoisseurship. Cultural fluency made that insight possible. Operational infrastructure made it a business.
When the conversation turned to early-stage founders with limited capital, Ana's advice was direct: the budget question is the wrong question. The right question is what role your brand plays in culture, and whether you have the clarity to occupy that role with conviction.
"It is not about the budget. It is about knowing your taste community, knowing your point of view, and knowing how you connect those two things. You still can have a role in culture even if you have no money."
She pointed to AGR Villancher, who built a globally recognized brand from a very clear aesthetic premise: a queer identity in dialogue with a specific Mexican macho subculture, expressed through a distinctive silhouette. He did not have money for major collaborations. He had unambiguous clarity about what he stood for and who he was speaking to. That clarity attracted its audience.
Her closing instruction was equally applicable to founders and established brand leaders alike: before seeking inspiration, know what you are about. A point of view that is genuinely yours will attract and filter the right inputs. Without it, inspiration becomes distraction, and the brand becomes indistinguishable from everything else chasing the same cultural moment.
