Dive Brief:

• New consulting firm Currency Advisory Group positions culture as a value center for companies and offers a proprietary method for elevating culture from marketing layer to business infrastructure, according to information shared with Marketing Dive.
• A significant focus for the group will be private equity firms that have acquired portfolios based on underlying financials and need help harnessing culture as a strategic asset. At launch, it has engagements with C-suite executives from Fortune 500 players in telecom, retail, gaming and sports apparel retail, per press details.
• The group was launched on Nov. 19 by several executives previously from Cashmere, an agency with a reputation for its expertise at activating culture in brand marketing that was acquired by S4 Capital in 2021. Much of Cashmere’s leadership abruptly left the agency last November. 

Dive Insight:

Effectively leveraging culture remains a key goal for marketers as a way to break through and build lasting relationships with target audiences. Currency Advisory Group takes this idea a step beyond activation and positions itself as helping businesses operationalize culture using its proprietary Culture Capital Engineering methodology. 

The methodology was designed to analyze companies’ untapped cultural equity, identify cultural risks and then create a cross-functional plan to pinpoint opportunities for growth and pitfalls to avoid. The plan will be applied to marketing, product development, talent retention and partnership ecosystems.

“Currency equips management leadership teams to harness culture as a strategic asset, aligning strategy, talent, and innovation to drive measurable business results and long-term impact,” said Ted Chung, co-founder and senior partner, in a statement. 

Prior to forming Currency Advisory Group, Ted Chung, Ryan Ford and Cameron Crane were top executives at Cashmere, which called itself the industry’s first dedicated culture agency. Chung was the agency’s founder and chairman; Ford was president and chief creative officer; and Crane was chief growth officer. Cashmere was acquired by S4 Capital and merged into its Media.Monks unit in 2021. Among Cashmere’s clients were Dave & Busters, Marriott Bonvoy, Budweiser and Taco Bell. 

Currency Advisory Group sees culture as an underleveraged source of enterprise value, in part because companies treat it as something that is temporary, tactical and separate from operations. There’s a gap in the marketplace for senior strategic partners who can build infrastructure around cultural intelligence so that it becomes integrated into operations and provides a sustainable competitive advantage, per the group.

“[Culture] is a a $1.1 trillion growth economy and one of the most underleveraged sources of enterprise value today,” Ryan Ford, co-founder and senior partner, in a statement.