AuthorPart and Sum
DateSep 10, 2026
Reading time5 min read
We believe if you invest in culture, your brand should see returns.
Share of Culture was inspired by a collaboration between Part and Sum, and our sister company, OK COOL, a social-first agency that connects brands to subcultures. Through our proprietary lens (and industry best practices), we use the Share of Culture metric to prove how your brand’s investment in culture is moving the needle.
How can we measure conversation about your brand?
Share of Culture (SoC) is Part and Sum's measurement framework for CMOs, VPs, and other marketing leaders to read their brand equity amongst their competitors. Instead of counting likes and calling it a strategy, SoC scores your brand's cultural equity — the volume, engagement, resonance, sentiment, and creator amplification behind everything people say about you — against those same measures for your competitive set.
Equity alone tells you if you're growing. Context tells you if you're winning. Share of Culture gives you both.
How can we measure your brand's impact compared to your competitors?
We built Share of Culture around a simple idea: your brand's Cultural Equity, read against your category's Cultural Context, is a weighted composite of real, sentiment-coded measures — calibrated to your business during onboarding.
Our approach allows measurement that is focused purely on sentiment and growth for your brand. It can be expanded to benchmark against your competition.
Which metrics help us better understand your brand's place in culture?
- Conversation. How much of the category conversation mentions your brand, owned and earned.
- Engagement. The saves, shares, and interactions that show people actually cared — weighted well above a like.
- Resonance. How fast a moment is catching on, and whether people are remixing it as their own.
- Sentiment. The share of that conversation that's actually working in your favor.
- Creator Amplification. How much of the trusted, creator-driven conversation in your category is about you.
What tools are provided?
- A real-time dashboard and weekly scorecard aligned with the metrics above.
- Competitive benchmarking against the brands that actually matter in your category.
- Insights – we’ll use our expertise to optimize organic based on engagement metrics and sentiment.
- Actionable solutions - we’ll help you understand the numbers and what you can do with them.
A stylized recreation of the SoC client dashboard. Client data anonymized.
Share of Culture In Practice
Here’s a brief example from the beauty world. Earlier this year, we ran Share of Culture on e.l.f. Beauty and five direct competitors in the space — NYX, ColourPop, wet n wild Beauty, Makeup Revolution, and Milani. The result: e.l.f. holds a 30% Share of Culture, the single largest in the set, on the strength of 122K mentions in the measured window — more than double its next-closest competitor.
After this, our strategists looked deeper into the "why" behind the brand’s large presence, leading us to see that the brand indexed higher in Conversation, Creator Amplification and Engagement, but left opportunity when it came to Resonance and Sentiment.
Here’s what we found: most of the category competes for the same pop-culture tie-ins, but e.l.f. picked a lane nobody else was in — women's football — and kept showing up there. This year, they were the presenting sponsor of the 2026 NWSL Challenge Cup, and they appeared as the back-of-shirt sponsor for Tottenham Hotspurs football club.
e.l.f. also turns single moments into annual traditions, then widens its footprint through smart portfolio moves: making themsevles visible for four straight years during the Super Bowl, and making headlines by becoming H&M’s first-ever outside beauty partner. Read more about our beauty deep dive here.
There’s a lot of noise when assessing the power of a brand. Being able to surface that tension is what allowed our teams to advise on where the brand's cultural position is durable and where they can optimize, turning the measurement into a roadmap for growth.
Share of Culture is a repeatable methodology. Part and Sum can run the same diagnostic on any category — showing where a brand leads, where competitors hold territory it hasn't claimed, and what a twelve-month plan to close that gap looks like.
“OK COOL is proud to have partnered with Part + Sum on building Share of Culture, a truly industry-leading, tool-agnostic way of tracking not just social performance, but actual business impact.”
Benjamin Arnold
CEO, OK COOL
About OK COOL
Share of Culture can be run as a direct-to-client offering, or in partnership with our sister company, OK COOL, a social agency that builds brands through culture. Their starting point is creative strategy - an integrated role that creates, contextualizes, packages, and propagates ideas to establish new cultural associations between brands and their audience.
Want to learn more about case studies and pricing? Get in touch: hello@partandsum.com (mailto:hello@partandsum.com).
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