2023 Tinder 2018 L'Oréal Garnier 2016 Becca Cosmetics 2014 Maybelline NY 2011 Samsung
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Cases 2023 · Tinder 2018 · L'Oréal Garnier 2016 · Becca Cosmetics 2014 · Maybelline NY 2011 · Samsung
Cultural & Creative Direction

Does your brand
still belong?

Creative consultant and cultural strategist helping CMOs, founders and agency leaders identify cultural disconnects before they become growth problems.

For Founders · CMOs · CEOs · ECDs · MDs

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What you get from WMUH

WMUH enters before the brief. Using creativity not as a production tool but as a reading instrument. Films, narratives, cultural observations that make visible what strategy documents rarely surface. The kind of clarity that comes not from more data, but from someone who knows how to look.

You leave with two things: a precise understanding of what has changed, and a creative direction your teams can act on immediately.

“Fabien helped us see a cultural shift we could feel but couldn't yet articulate. The insight became the foundation of the platform and shaped how we thought about Tinder's role in people's lives.”

Marketing Team, Tinder UK See the case →

In 2023, Tinder UK was positioned around a simple insight: dating had become less about finding someone and more about understanding yourself. Two years later, Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff publicly called for a cultural reset to address the same shift.

The value of the work wasn't in predicting the future. It was in recognising a cultural change while it was still taking shape, and turning that understanding into a direction the business could act on before the industry had found the language to describe it.

The problem
Brands keep talking. But many no longer truly understand the people they're addressing.

For years, companies learned to optimise their communication. Produce faster. Measure more precisely. Occupy more space. But something has slowly deteriorated. The connection between brands and the human reality of the cultures they speak to.

Culture changes much faster than the systems built to analyse it. So brands compensate. More content, more platforms, more presence. But the more they produce to stay visible, the more they become invisible.

Artificial intelligence didn't create this problem. It accelerated a system already incapable of slowing down.

The problem is no longer visibility. The problem is that many brands are speaking from a version of the world that no longer fully exists.
Creativity was never meant to be optimised.
It was meant to explore.

Culture is read before anything is decided. When creativity operates upstream, it doesn't decorate strategy. It predicts it.

How I arrived at that conclusion is what the rest of this site is about.

Why What Makes Us Human

I grew up in Paris thinking culture belonged to those who had learned to talk about it. London proved the opposite. Moving countries, languages, social codes forced me to observe differently. Listen differently. Understand environments that weren't expecting me.

That's where I began to see something I can no longer ignore: organisations often become blind to the cultures they're addressing. Not from lack of intelligence. From proximity. When you're inside your own systems long enough, you stop seeing what's actually changing around you.

Creativity should have maintained that connection. But it progressively became a production machine, when originally it served something else entirely: understanding humans, creating meaning, making visible what wasn't yet.

What Makes Us Human was born from that rupture. Using creativity to understand before communicating.

The framework
Cultural Coherence. The alignment between what a brand believes it is, what people actually experience, and what the culture around it now demands. This work doesn't begin with an audit. It begins with a conversation. With listening to what is said and what is no longer said.
01
Cultural
Diagnosis
Identifying invisible tensions
  • Working sessions with teams. Observation, listening, identifying blind spots.
  • Deliverable: a clear diagnosis of the gap between what the organisation is and how it is perceived.
02
Creative
Translation
Giving form to what has been revealed
  • The diagnosis becomes a direction. Territory, narrative, moodboard.
  • And if the project requires it, an exploratory film before any strategic decision.
03
Strategic
Realignment
Coherence before communication
  • We align what you are with what you say, not the other way around.
  • We help communication feel earned, rather than imposed.
What I deliver is not a report. It's a direction.
The founder
Fabien Pons

Fabien Pons

Creative Director & Cultural Strategist · Founder

Twenty years between London, New York and Paris, at the intersection of creativity, culture and brand. Samsung, Maybelline New York, Becca Cosmetics, L'Oréal Garnier, Tinder, Adobe, Mondelez.

But what brought me here isn't a professional trajectory. It's having had to rebuild my place each time. The outsider develops a particular form of attention. They notice what others have stopped seeing.

I used that sensitivity first to understand cultures that weren't mine. Then to help brands understand why they were becoming strangers to the people they were addressing.

What I'm trying to do is ultimately simple: help organisations become true again. Not more visible. Not louder. More humanly coherent.

"Precision before performance. Connection before visibility."

LinkedIn →
The genesis
These projects are not here to illustrate a career. They are here because each one built something — an understanding, a way of reading, another layer of what became Cultural Coherence.

Each case builds on the previous one. Reading them in order, from 2011 to 2023, is the only way to follow how the thinking developed.

2011 · London Samsung · The outsider. 2013 · New York Maybelline · The method takes shape. 2016 · New York Becca · The signal before the brief. 2018 · Paris Garnier · The stranger at home. 2023 · London Tinder · The convergence.
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2023 · London · Paris · Tinder
The convergence.

For the first time, all the pieces came together. The subject was no longer just communication. Creativity was no longer an execution tool. It was becoming a diagnostic instrument. And it's precisely at that point that What Makes Us Human was born.

Read the full case →
Read the case
2018 · Paris · L'Oréal Garnier
The stranger at home.

Garnier taught me what happens when a brand grows faster than its capacity to listen to the cultures it addresses. Coherence is not about speaking everywhere in the same way. It is about remaining culturally relevant everywhere you speak.

Read the full case →
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2016 · New York · Becca Cosmetics
The signal before the brief.

After learning to observe a city, I started observing a country. Becca taught me that cultural shifts become visible long before organisations have the language to describe them. That is where observation became interpretation.

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2013 · New York · Maybelline New York
The method takes shape.

New York taught me that cultures shape the people who live inside them. Behind the New York Attitude was a cultural reality far more complex than the brand's own discourse. That is where observation became a method of work.

Read the full case →
Read the case
2011 · London · Samsung
The outsider.

Arriving in London without knowing the language or the codes forced me to develop a particular form of attention. Samsung taught me that a brand follows exactly the same path as a person arriving somewhere new: you don't join a culture by trying to change it. You start by observing it, then you learn to contribute.

Read the full case →
Why do this work Most conversations I have with leaders, founders or marketing teams begin with an attempt at explanation. Something seems to have changed, but it's still difficult to understand precisely what.

Gen Z is different. The market has become harder. Consumers are less loyal than before. Competition is more aggressive. The economy is more uncertain. These explanations are sometimes right. But they often have one thing in common: they locate the problem outside the organisation.

Over time, I have noticed that the most significant shifts often appear elsewhere. They emerge when organisations become so close to their own systems that they end up reading the world through them.

This work tends to become useful when:

01 You feel something is shifting around your brand, but you can't quite name it yet.
02 Your campaigns still work, but they seem to produce less resonance than before.
03 You keep investing in communication while your intuition tells you the problem may lie elsewhere.
04 You observe new behaviours without being certain what they really mean.
05 You have the sense your audience has evolved faster than your organisation.
06 You change platforms, agencies or formats without regaining the closeness you once had with the people you address.
07 You're not looking for a new campaign. You're trying to understand what is changing.

It's usually at that point that our conversations begin.

This is not
a pitch.
It's a conversation.

Most projects begin when a question becomes too important to ignore. Let's talk.

UK  +44 7585 366 217

FR  +33 648 817 248

fabien@whatmakesushuman.co LinkedIn → Fabien Pons