What happens when a brand strategist stops asking what audiences want to see and starts asking what they already understand, speak, value and live? For Linathi Makanda, that question has become the foundation of a career built at the intersection of culture, storytelling, design and strategic communication.
A multidisciplinary designer, strategist and author, Makanda has spent nearly a decade working across digital marketing, social media, editorial strategy and communications. Her portfolio includes work connected to brands and organisations such as Netflix, Canva, Momentum, Sasol, African Bank, AWARE.org, Edge Growth, MPL Hair and Lonely Planet. Her work has consistently been concerned with more than making brands visible. It is about making them culturally relevant.
That distinction has become central to the business she is building today. Makanda is the founder and Head of Strategy at LM BRAND STUDIO, a culture intelligence studio that helps brands and organisations understand audiences through the cultural contexts in which people actually live. The studio has evolved significantly from its earlier incarnation as a conventional creative services business, a transformation that reflects Makanda’s own growing understanding of where her greatest value lies.
At the centre of the studio is Urban On My Tongue (UOMT), an in-house cultural insights methodology that tracks the ways language and urban culture carry meaning across African youth markets. Rather than treating African audiences as a collection of demographic segments, Makanda is interested in the cultural logic underneath the numbers – the language, references, behaviours and social codes that influence how people interpret the world around them.
It is a perspective that has become increasingly important as global and African brands compete for attention across increasingly complex markets. Makanda argues that cultural relevance cannot be manufactured simply by adding local references to a campaign. It requires understanding the communities a brand wants to enter and recognising that culture shapes everything from communication to product experience.
Her own recent work demonstrates that approach. In 2026, she contributed to an AUDA-NEPAD engagement in Gaborone focused on the development and communication of CAADP Nutrition Country Profiles and activities linked to African Day of School Feeding. Working across communications and visual knowledge products, she used design not simply as decoration, but as a way of making complex information more accessible and actionable.
That ability to move between strategic thinking and creative execution is one of Makanda’s defining strengths. She has worked as a copywriter, editorial strategist, creative strategist, designer and consultant, building a career that does not fit neatly into one professional category. Her multidisciplinary background has also included writing and visual storytelling, with her photography and creative work receiving international exposure through platforms including Vogue’s PhotoVogue.
Her relationship with culture extends into her work as an author and storyteller. She contributed to the Lonely Planet South Africa, Lesotho & Eswatini guidebook and has written and produced work exploring identity, memory, place and representation. Her creative practice has also been recognised through platforms including the Mail & Guardian’s Power of Women, where she was recognised in the Networking category in 2023.
More recently, Makanda has added another dimension to that work through her role as a Canva Africa Community Ambassador. The position allows her to take her belief in accessible communication beyond corporate strategy and into communities, where she facilitates workshops, shares digital skills and helps entrepreneurs, students and creatives strengthen their visual communication capabilities. Her current work with Canva includes community events and training designed to help people use digital tools more confidently and strategically.
For Makanda, accessibility and cultural specificity are not competing ideas. They reinforce one another. A powerful design tool becomes more meaningful when people have the skills to use it, and communication becomes more effective when it reflects the cultural realities of the people receiving it.
Her leadership journey, however, is also deeply personal. Makanda grew up in a province where opportunities could feel limited, an environment that taught her to think within the boundaries of what seemed realistic. As her career has expanded, she has had to consciously unlearn that instinct.
Today, some of her most important work happens internally. She is intentionally affirming that there is space for her – particularly in rooms and industries where people from her background were not always expected to occupy positions of influence. She is learning to recognise when she is shrinking an idea, softening an ask or waiting for permission that she does not need.
That process has changed the way she approaches ambition. Instead of minimising where she comes from, she is learning to see it as part of the perspective she brings into the room. Her cultural grounding is not an obstacle to global relevance. It is part of what gives her work its relevance.
Her five-year vision is to establish UOMT’s culture intelligence methodology as a trusted reference point for organisations seeking to understand African audiences. She wants its insights to influence real decisions – from campaigns and product design to editorial choices and investment strategies – so that African consumers and communities are understood on their own terms rather than through assumptions imported from elsewhere.
The foundation for that ambition is already being built through LM BRAND STUDIO. Makanda is applying UOMT’s insights directly to client strategy work, demonstrating the commercial value of culturally grounded thinking. At the same time, her work as a Canva Ambassador gives her a grassroots platform through which she can build digital and creative capacity among the people who are themselves shaping Africa’s next generation of brands and businesses.
Her approach to entrepreneurship has also required her to confront an uncomfortable truth: sometimes the business that is working is not the business you are ultimately meant to build.
LM BRAND STUDIO originally operated as a more conventional creative services studio, delivering the brand and design work clients expected. It was successful. But Makanda eventually recognised that the deeper value of the business was not simply in the deliverables. It was in the cultural intelligence informing them.
So she rebuilt it.
That decision required her to disrupt something that was already functioning in order to pursue something she believed was more valuable. It is a lesson that has become central to her message to other women: success at one stage does not have to become a permanent definition of who you are.
The permission to evolve, she believes, applies to businesses, careers and identities alike. If a woman discovers that there is a more meaningful or valuable version of her work underneath what she has already built, she is allowed to pursue it, even if doing so means starting again.
That philosophy is particularly powerful in a career that has always resisted neat categories. Makanda is not simply a designer or strategist, author or creative, entrepreneur or communicator. Her work draws from all of these identities, using each to better understand how culture shapes the way people communicate, consume, create and connect.
Her recognition reflects that breadth. She has been recognised as a Mail & Guardian Power of Women alumna, nominated for FortyUnder40 SA in Digital and Media, and featured among Crest Africa’s Leaders Shaping Africa. Her growing influence also includes her work with Canva Africa, where she is helping make digital design and communication skills more accessible across communities.
Ultimately, Makanda is building more than a strategy practice. She is building an argument for African culture to be treated as intelligence, not decoration – as something that should inform how brands communicate, how products are designed and how organisations make decisions.
And perhaps that is the most important evolution in her own journey. She began by creating the work clients expected. She is now building the systems, insights and intellectual property that can change what they expect in the first place.
Linathi Makanda is an honouree in the 2026 Future 54 Leading Women Cohort, recognising women shaping Africa through leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship and meaningful impact.
