Key Learnings from a Summer Internship at Brand Culture

Before starting my internship at Brand Culture, I had a rough idea of what agency life might look like. I thought it would be fast-paced, creative, a lot of meetings, maybe some coffee runs. What I did not expect was the range of work I would get stuck into: spending time researching competitor brand activations, building banks of case studies and deep diving into the audience profiles, existing partnerships and potential promotional mechanics of IPs to help support the team’s work for a range of clients.  

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I am a second-year Biochemistry student at King's College London, which is about as far from marketing as you can get academically, but I have always been drawn to brands, culture and the way companies communicate with people. Brand Culture felt like the right place to figure out whether that interest could become a career, and it did not disappoint.  

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One of my favorite projects was contributing to a brand partnership evaluation project, writing up assessments of six major 2026 partnerships including Gymshark x Bratz, Liquid I.V. x Spider-Man and DASH x Pink Lady, covering everything from partner fit to commercial model.

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I also worked on a World Cup brand activation analysis with senior people at the agency, researching how brands like Coca-Cola, Adidas, Walkers and more had activated around the tournament to help build an infographic mapping different activation types by categorisation.

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The biggest thing I have learnt during my time at Brand Culture is that the best brand partnerships are not built on opportunity, they are built on insight, research and recognising patterns. The partnerships that worked all had a genuine truth at their centre about the consumer, the culture or the product that made the collaboration feel inevitable rather than convenient.  

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I also learned a huge amount about how a marketing agency actually operates day to day. Briefs, tissue sessions, decks, client relationships, none of these were concepts I really understood before starting. Now I feel like I have a working vocabulary for the industry and an understanding of how ideas move from research to strategy to creative to client. That is genuinely invaluable coming from an academic background with no formal marketing training.

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I was surprised by how much of marketing is about culture rather than commerce. Before starting I thought marketing was primarily about selling things. What I found is that the best marketing is about understanding people, what they care about, what they are moving toward, what tensions exist in their lives, and finding ways for a brand to be genuinely relevant to that. The commercial outcomes follow the cultural intelligence, not the other way around.

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I was also surprised by how data-driven marketing is at Brand Culture and beyond. Underneath every strong campaign I found a foundation of consumer research, market data and behavioural insight that has to be gathered and interpreted before a single creative idea is formed. For me this was a welcome discovery! The analytical and research skills I had built through Biochemistry transferred into a marketing context more naturally than I expected, and bridging something as scientific as data analysis with something as creative as brand strategy turned out to be one of the most satisfying parts of the internship.

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Social media also played a much bigger role in professional research than I anticipated. Scrolling TikTok and Instagram turned out to be legitimate and valuable work, once you knew what to spot - tracking how consumers were responding to brand activations in real time, spotting trends before they appeared in formal reports, and understanding which partnerships were generating genuine organic conversation. I was also surprised by how much I enjoyed it! I came in unsure whether marketing was really for me or whether I was just interested in it from the outside. Leaving, I am certain this is a career I could want to pursue.

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This summer has given me a much clearer sense of direction. I came in curious about marketing and I am leaving with a working understanding of brand strategy, partnership mechanics and cultural analysis.  

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The one piece of advice I would give to someone starting an agency internship is this: do not wait to be asked for your opinion. The most valuable thing you bring as a young person in a room full of experienced marketers is a genuine, unfiltered perspective on culture. When you notice something – a trend, a reaction, a moment on social media that feels significant – say so. That instinct is worth more than you think, and it is the one thing in the room that cannot be Googled.