Marketers trust their instincts. In many cases, we have to. Teams are making fast decisions with incomplete information, competing opinions, tight timelines, and signals coming from every direction.

So we rely on our intuition. What we believe to be true and what feels right in the moment. But our intuition has a point of view.It is shaped by what we have seen, experienced, or been exposed to. It reflects our own lens and the uncomfortable truth most marketers need to hear:

Your gaze is not the market. In culture, that gap shows up in the work.

The real skill is sharpening intuition

There is a phrase I come back to often in this work: Sharpen your intuition. Not because instinct alone is enough. Because moving at the speed of culture asks marketers to make smart calls in motion, and those calls are only as good as the depth behind them. The New York Times opinion columnist and podcast host, Ezra Klein once described intuition as an “ability to make quick judgments based on deep knowledge.” That definition has always stuck with me. Because quick judgment without depth is just reflex. Cultural intuition worth trusting is built through exposure, pattern recognition, and the discipline to keep learning. It also requires the willingness to admit when you need another perspective.

Marketing decisions rarely come with full context. That pressure holds across the discipline, and it intensifies when the work touches identity, community, subculture, representation, or cultural expression. In those moments, we are trying to read what feels resonant, what feels off, what needs more thought, and what deserves a pause before it goes any further. That is the difference between work that lands and work that misses.

Culture is not received. It is interpreted.

Yet too many marketers move through culture as observers of difference rather than students of perspective. They know culture matters in the abstract. But they still evaluate the work through a narrow gaze and assume that gaze is neutral. They mistake familiarity for universality. Behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman describes a related tendency as “what you see is all there is” or WYSIATI in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. We build confident conclusions from the limited information in front of us. Marketing rooms are not immune to this bias.

I often explain this dynamic using an art gallery. An artist creates a piece for the person standing directly in front of it, the person they imagine while making it. But that is never the only person in the room. Other people are taking it in from the side, from the back of the room, or from the doorway. Each person is bringing a different lived experience and a different frame of reference. The same work lands differently depending on where you stand.

As Dr. Marcus Collins, professor and author of For The Culture, explains meaning is not fixed. It is socially constructed through our cultural lenses. We build around a target with precision but once the work enters the world, it lives in a shared social environment. People beyond the target audience will still see it, interpret it, discuss it, remix it, reject it, celebrate it, and attach their own meaning to it. It’s important to understand that the audience you design for is not the only audience interpreting your work.

The real challenge in modern marketing

Let’s be real, the challenge we face as marketers today is rarely access to content. It is access to context. Most organizations already have the basics: brand guidelines, comms frameworks, and experienced teams. Even with all of that, blind spots still happen. Because culture is dynamic and meanings are constantly shifting. Anthropologist Clifford Geertzdescribed culture as a “web of significance” people themselves have spun. When marketers interact with culture, they step into that web. A symbol that feels neutral to one audience can carry decades of meaning for another. A phrase that reads as clever in a creative review can read as careless to someone who has lived the nuance behind it. This is where many marketers freeze. Or worse, move forward too confidently. One of the most important skills a marketer can build is the ability to recognize when their perspective is incomplete.

The smartest sentence in cultural marketing is “I don’t know…”

Knowing when to ask a better question is a strength. So is slowing down long enough to test an assumption or seeking context before making a call. The teams that do this well are not the ones pretending to know everything. They are the ones building the muscle to learn fast, think clearly, and move with intention.

Marketers already know how to do this. They just do not always apply the same discipline to all aspects of culture. When Gen. Alpha confused us all with “skibidi,” we didn’t rely on our own logic to decode it. Instead we listened, asked questions, and tried to understand why it mattered to them. We built familiarity where lived experience did not already exist. We should seek to apply that same discipline to all aspects of culture.

Curiosity first. Assumption second. Context always.

Why we built Cultural Compass

This belief is what led my team to build Cultural Compass. It is a self-service app designed to help marketers review their work through a broader cultural lens earlier in the process. The tool can review draft imagery and written content in real time and surface potential considerations around cultural context, stereotyping, bias, racial prejudice, and the framing and assumptions shaping the work. It generates provocations meant to help teams pressure test their thinking, and we have applied it across work including casting and production, product innovation, packaging, naming, and creative execution. The goal is not to create fear around creative work. The goal is to create better judgment around it.

Cultural Awareness + Context = Cultural Comprehension

What AI can and cannot do

While Cultural Compass is powered by AI, it is also grounded in principles our team created through the Inclusive Marketing Toolkit. That foundation matters because technology should accelerate analysis, not supply judgment on its own. Frameworks improve decision quality by helping teams challenge assumptions and widen the perspectives they consider. Tools can help scale perspective, but they still need strong principles underneath them. A tool that speeds up output while flattening nuance is not doing much for the work but a tool that helps marketers widen perspective and sharpen judgment is far more useful.

We launched Cultural Compass last year across Kraft Heinz North America marketing teams, piloted it with our global Heinz team, and shared it with our North America agency partners. Over the same period, we saw a 21% YOY lift in internal marketer cultural confidence in our annual IMPACT survey.

While no single tool creates culture change on its own; confidence grows when people have clearer principles, better tools, and stronger support systems. And that is what we are trying to build. Or rather cultivate – the environment for strategic bravery to exist.

Expanding the gaze starts with a mindset shift

For years, inclusive and cultural marketing work has too often been treated as a checkpoint, a specialist function, or a rescue operation brought in late in the process. That model is exhausting. It is inefficient. It also limits the organization’s ability to grow its own instincts.

Marketing will always involve risk. Culture will always move faster than the deck, the brief, the approval process, and the comfort level of the room. The goal is not to eliminate risk, it’s to build better instincts for navigating it. And that takes fewer declarations of certainty, more disciplined curiosity, and a deeper commitment to building intuition you can stand behind.