Business and brand strategy

We’re consultants with a deep background in marketing. We embrace a human-centered design approach to business strategy, prioritizing consumer and stakeholder needs to help brands reach and engage consumers effectively. Guided by our Participation framework, we help our clients organize their businesses to best serve end consumers.

Purpose-driven brands outperform peers, attract the best talent, and provide a real point of differentiation for consumers. We help brands uncover and define the difference they want to make in the world.

Then we help translate that purpose into action, aligning stakeholders around a shared commitment to the brand's purpose and values.

A brand platform delivers strategic principles that serve as a foundational blueprint for the brand. We help businesses define the unique, authentic, and timeless components of their DNA.

This platform guides a brand's behavior and influences communications, product development, recruiting, and more.

The working agreement a company makes with its employees is part of an ecosystem of purpose-driven support, values, opportunity, and recognition that an employer provides to employees in order to achieve their highest potential at work.

We help brands develop EVPs to build trust and loyalty with employees.

Learn more about our culture and employee activation capabilities.

To facilitate real connection with your audience, you must first intimately understand who they are, how they behave, and what motivates them. We use transactional, behavioral, demographic, and psychographic data to build key representations of your brand’s ideal audiences.

These personas unify internal teams, humanize your market segments, and direct experience, product, and campaign decisions.

To identify new opportunities to connect with consumers and build the brand experience, look to stakeholder journey mapping. This exercise helps illuminate interdependencies between internal processes and external experiences.

Our approach provides a holistic view of interactions, helping brands understand how emotions, actions, and perceptions change at each stage of the journey.

A clear brand architecture articulates the relationship that brands within a portfolio have with one another and identifies how they are understood by stakeholders. It also influences customer behavior by maximizing the transfer of brand equity between each of your brands and sub-brands.

We design brand architectures that help our clients manage perceptions of each brand and optimize market efficiency and performance.

To execute a brand strategy, organizations must communicate clearly and consistently across stakeholders, businesses, and channels—while tailoring their messages to different audience segments.

We design and develop messaging frameworks to create consistency in how the brand communicates both internally and externally.

Audits provide a thorough measurement of a brand’s internal and external expressions, strategies, and actions. A brand audit helps benchmark a brand’s strengths and weaknesses against its competitors and results in actionable insights and KPIs to guide it towards its goals.

We provide qualitative and quantitative first-party measurement and research services, trend research and analysis, and competitive research.