- USA
Ana Andjelic Keynote Speaker
- Author of 'Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture' and The Business of Aspiration: How Social, Cultural, and Environmental Capital Changes Brands'
- Acclaimed Chief Brand Officer at Esprit and Banana Republic
- Recognized three times by Forbes for her CMO work.
Ana Andjelic's Biography
Dr. Ana Andjelic is a global brand executive and writer of one of the Top Business newsletters on Substack, The Sociology of Business. She is passionate about connecting brands and business through culture and specializes in brand strategy, retail innovation and holistic brand management.
Ana is author of two books, “Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture” and “The Business of Aspiration.”
She specializes in building brand-driven businesses. Most recently, Ana was the global Chief Brand Officer at ESPRIT, tasked with the revival of this iconic brand. Prior to Esprit, Ana was the Chief Brand Officer at Banana Republic, where she set the new creative and design direction for the brand that led to the widely-lauded brand turnaround resulting in 27% comparable sales increase. Ana also held positions as the Chief Marketing Officer at Mansur Gavriel, interim CMO at David Yurman, and the Chief Brand Officer at Rebecca Minkoff, where she launched the Female Founder Collective.
Earlier in her career, Ana introduced the luxury practice in the global Havas network, and held senior brand strategy positions at Spring Studios and Droga5. She worked with brands as Sotheby’s, Sergio Rossi, Belvedere, Moet Hennessy, PUMA, Tom Ford and MCM, among others.
In 2024, Ana was recognized by Forbes as one of their Most Entrepreneurial CMOs, and in 2020, Forbes listed her as one of The World’s Most Influential CMOs. In 2018, she was named as one of Forbes’ top 50 CMOs who serve as models of a new, emerging and disruptive chief marketer. She was also named as one of the Luxury Women to Watch by Luxury Daily and was listed among the top 10 digital strategists globally by The Guardian.
Ana has given keynotes globally and contributed to publications including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, The Guardian, Advertising Age, Adweek, Form Design Magazine, Frame Magazine, Luxury Daily, Lean Luxe, Glossy, and Campaign. She is a frequent expert correspondent for Financial Times, British Vogue, FT’s “How to Spend It,” and Vogue Business, and is an expert source for trend forecasting companies like The Future Laboratory, Red Scout, and WSGN. She holds Ph.D. in Sociology and M.A. in Media Studies.
Ana Andjelic's Speaking Topics
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Cultural Intelligence
The boundaries between creative industries have dissolved, with culture becoming the shared language that makes ideas travel, stick, and scale across categories. This session explores how established and emerging brands build relevance now by creating cultural gravity—through collaborations, communities, and experiences—not just campaigns.
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Legibility Economy
Attention is abundant; legibility is scarce. Brands win not by going viral, but by building distinctive meaning over time: coherent products, consistent codes, and lived experiences that people can learn to name, trust, and choose without being reminded or retargeted.
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Culture GPT
Modern brand strategy lays out practical levers for companies participating in culture: through entertainment, hero products, brand codes, capsules, merch, collaborations, fandom management, content … to build desirability and recognition.
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AI and the new rules of retail
AI shifts retail from distribution to decision-making: AI compresses search, discovery, and comparison into a few recommendations, so brands have to win upstream, through distinctiveness, proof and preference, before the moment of purchase.
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Brand World-Building
The strongest brands don’t just sell products, they build coherent universes of meaning that people can enter, reorganize, and belong to. It breaks down the tools of of world-building: icons, rituals, environments, narrative rules, community signals, and a consistent point of view—and shows how to translate them into product, retail experiences, content, collaborations and partnerships so the brand feels inevitable across every touchpoint.
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How brands influence culture
Brands used to influence culture through advertising and public relations. Now they influence culture through cultural products they make: collaborations, merch, content, product portfolios, fan management, experiences, events, brand codes and iconography.
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Collaborations and Merch Playbook
Collaborations and merch turn borrowed equity—from taste-makers, subcultures, and brand partners—into cultural products that people wear, collect, and keep. Learn how to choose collaborators, design the right object (a hero piece, a ritual artifact, a uniform) and run the release like a system of drops, access tiers, scarcity rules and distribution so collaborations and merch drops build halo, community, and repeatable recognition.
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Cultural Programming
Cultural programming is a brand operating system that combines a cultural narrative, cultural product strategy, cultural calendar, and media amplification plan—to help brands participate in culture with intention and build durable legibility. It offers a practical framework for turning ideas into cultural products and moments, then seeding them into the right contexts to compound cultural currency and commercial impact over time.
Why Book Ana Andjelic as a speaker?
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She has led brand transformations at global retailers including Esprit and Banana Republic, bringing board-level perspective on how brand strategy translates into commercial growth.
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She connects culture, consumer behaviour and business strategy to help leaders build brands that earn relevance, pricing power and loyalty in fast-changing markets.
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She equips organisations to modernise retail for the next era, showing how data, new technologies and service design can reshape the customer experience and unlock new revenue streams.
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She brings a rare blend of executive practice and academic rigour as a PhD sociologist, translating social and cultural shifts into clear implications for brand, positioning and growth.
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She helps leaders pressure-test ambition and differentiation through the frameworks behind her books and The Sociology of Business, clarifying how brands create value beyond product.
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