Example strengthens strategy leadership with promotion of Chris Loukakis to CSO; Ash Stapleton joins as Strategy Director

Example, the cultural creative and communications agency behind some of the world’s most recognised luxury hotel, destination and hospitality brands, has made two senior appointments to its strategy leadership team. Chris Loukakis has been promoted to Chief Strategy Officer and Ash Stapleton joins as Strategy Director.

The appointments reflect growing demand for Example’s Earned-First approach across its APAC and Middle East markets with work that spans brand strategy, destination positioning, concept and experience development, and the cultural campaigns that make all of it real in market.

Loukakis has spent three years at Example leading the strategy behind its Earned-First methodology across hospitality and spirit brands. Before joining, he held senior roles at AnalogFolk, working with Afterpay, Pernod Ricard and Diageo. As CSO, he leads strategy across Example’s full portfolio and all three markets.

Says Loukakis: “It’s an exciting time working with brands that have an ambitious quest to be at the bleeding edge of culture while balancing effectiveness and impact. Underlying the briefs we’re getting is a question about the role of distinct brand assets in environments where DBAs are often contextually wrong and can harm a brand’s story by clobbering its prospective customers with over the top branding.

“We’re solving this by working with brands to make a specific feeling a distinct asset so that potential buyers see a brand and feel something that makes sense for them, makes sense for the brand and makes sense in culture. It’s an exciting challenge that I’m proud to spend my time working on.”

Part of Example’s extended network for the past three years, Stapleton joins from Verve, where she was the lead brand strategist and acting CMO, and previously held senior roles at Interbrand and Landor. Her work includes the Australian Open rebrand and the Sydney Fish Market repositioning. Her experience across agency and client-side gives her a direct view of how brand thinking does and doesn’t translate into business performance.

Says Stapleton: “I’ve spent my career defining and building iconic brands, and what drew me to Example was the focus on earning a distinct place in culture. Not through comms strategy applied after the fact, but woven into the product, the place, the whole experience itself. In a market where the noise is getting louder and consumers are more discerning, that’s easier said than done. But it’s the only way to build a brand that actually sticks and that’s exactly why I’m here”.

Says Rebecca Jarvie-Gibbs, Co-founder and COO, Example: “Chris has a rare combination of intellectual rigour and genuine humanity – he leads with conviction, believes in simplicity as a discipline, and has a deep love of what hospitality means in people’s lives. Ash brings a calm, level-headed brilliance that makes the most complex thinking feel clear and inevitable.

“We’ve spent nine years proving that cultural strategy drives commercial outcomes across hotel brands, destination operators, dining groups and drinks companies. The leadership of Chris and Ash gives us the strategic depth to do that at greater scale and to do it consistently across every client and market.

Example’s Earned-First methodology functions as an operating system for brand growth. Rather than building awareness through paid media alone, it builds genuine consumer permission – the kind that drives commercial performance and compounds over time. Applied at brand level, it informs every brief, every campaign, every product and experience decision that follows.

For place-led clients – hotels, precincts, destinations – that means starting with a defining cultural strategy and building it into every facet of the physical and lived experience: architecture and interiors, food and beverage programming, art and music curation, customer experience design, cultural events and activations. All of it is shaped by the same foundation, so the place holds together and becomes genuinely distinct.

For global food and beverage brands, the methodology sees a single cultural idea developed, then held in cultural context across regions, and activated with specificity at market level. The same principle in both cases: earn relevance before you spend into it.

With offices in Sydney and Dubai, Example works across the world’s most dynamic markets for hospitality, luxury, and food and beverage – and its dual-market structure is built on understanding that cultural permission looks different depending on where you’re operating. Brands that try to export one market’s positioning wholesale into another rarely succeed. Example has been built to create for that nuance. It’s what makes the difference between work that’s placed in culture and work that shapes it.

Says Andy El-Bayeh, Co-founder and CEO, Example: “The question we hear most isn’t how to make a campaign. It’s how to build something that compounds – across markets, across seasons, across the noise. That’s what Earned-First is designed to do. And it’s the reason this level of strategic leadership is so significant for where we want to take the agency.”

Pictured (L-R): Ash Stapleton, Andy El-Bayeh, Rebecca Jarvie-Gibbs, Chris Loukakis

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