By lbrowning@hubspot.com (Laura M. Browning)

It’s a marketer’s dream: Hosting a sold-out event for 10k attendees. That brands are begging to be a part of. Oh, and that was headlined this year by none other than Taraji P. Henson, Kerry Washington, and Jennifer Hudson.

That’s Shareese Bembury-Coakley’s reality as one of the driving forces behind CultureCon, the world’s largest festival for Black creatives and entrepreneurs.

Here’s how she makes the magic happen.

Meet the Master

Shareese Bembury-Coakley

Vice President, Business development and partnerships at CultureCon

Claim to fame: Successfully sold a partnership between the TV show Killing Eve and buy-now-pay-later service Klarna; deliverables included an in-app experience that sourced pieces from Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh’s (truly incredible) wardrobes. (Lesson 0: Look for audience behavior that you can amplify. Bembury-Coakley had noted that viewers were asking questions on social media about designers.)

Lesson 1: It’s not “Why this?”, it’s “Why you?”.

At CultureCon, Bembury-Coakley tells me, people make a run for Activation Alley as soon as it opens.

It’s not just that the activations are amazing or that a particular brand is there — it’s that CultureCon’s attendees have high expectations, because they trust that this year’s activations will be as good as the last. (More on this in a minute.)

With events and experiential spaces becoming ever more saturated, I ask Bembury-Coakley how she stands out in a crowd. Her answer is deceptively simple: Instead of answering the question, “Why do this idea?” answer the question, “Why do this idea with me?”

“It’s not just about it being a unique idea,” she says. “Oftentimes, people can’t answer the ‘with me’ question.” To answer it, evaluate your cultural relevancy, your community, and your consistency.

And think of it as a lens. When you focus your ideas through “why me,” you can frame your deliverables in a way that makes it “as easy as possible to get buy-in.”

Lesson 2: Build trust before opening wallets.

Trust was a through-line in our conversation, both interpersonally and between brands and audience. Bembury-Coakley credits much of her success to having had amazing advocates throughout her career — but “it‘s double-sided,” she says. “It comes with the very heavy responsibility of making sure that you’re also fulfilling your promises on the back end.”

In other words: Trust is not something that Shareese Bembury-Coakley takes lightly.

She carries this responsibility into her work with brands and partnerships. I ask her what makes her say “no” to a CultureCon partnership, and she immediately says, “anything that would betray the trust we’ve built with our community.”

Trust is the underlying reason that Activation Alley is so popular — brand activations “aren’t a necessary evil that you’re connecting with for a free water bottle,” Bembury-Coakley says. They’re “a testament to how authentically our partners have showed up in the past.”

<img src="https://53.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/53/shareese-bembury-coakley-masters-in-marketing-2-20251007-4990861.webp" style="margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;display: block;width: 650px;height: auto;max-width: 100%" title="" alt="“brand activations aren’t a necessary evil that you’re connecting with for a free water bottle. they’re …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog