Festival Speakers

Douglas Holt
Founding Partner
The Cultural Strategy Group

Formerly a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School and then Oxford, Doug has recently returned to the USA to launch a new brand and innovation consultancy, the Cultural Strategy Group.

Holt established cultural branding as a pioneering new strategy tool in his international best-selling book, "How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding" in 2004. Since then, he's developed cultural strategies for a wide range of leading companies and brands around the world, including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Ben & Jerry's, Sprite, Jack Daniel's, MINI, MasterCard, Fat Tire beer, Qdoba, Georgia Coffee, Hyundai, Cazadores, Mountain Dew, Planet Green, and Mike's Hard Lemonade.

In his new book, "Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands," Holt and co-author Doug Cameron push these ideas much farther, detailing their six-stage cultural strategy model and supporting research framework, with a particular focus on brand innovation.

Holt holds degrees from Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern, and is the editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture.