WEEK 3 · THE WORK ON THE WALL, STRATEGY AND CREATIVE TOGETHER
WEEK 1 · THE STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS
WEEK 2 · THE COMPETITIVE SET, IN PLACE
WEEK 2 · THE FOUR SECONDS THE BRAND ACTUALLY GETS
WHERE MOST BRANDS START · A NAME THAT DESCRIBES A CATALOGUE
Not a workshop in the two-day sense. A four-week programme that starts inside your own leadership team, goes out into the market, brings strategy and creative into the same room, and lands the result across every touchpoint the brand has to live on. Almost every engagement in the index below started here.
A company with a positioning problem usually has three positions running at once, each held sincerely by a different part of the leadership team, none of them written down. No amount of design resolves that. It has to be decided, in a room, by the people who can decide it.
The workshop is where that gets settled. Week one we listen. Week two we go and find out what is actually true in the market. Week three strategy and creative build the answer together rather than in sequence. Week four it lands on everything the brand touches.
Does the word survive contact with the furthest corner of the business?
Each week produces something the next week depends on. Nothing is presented until the end, because a half-formed direction shown early becomes a debate about taste rather than a decision about the business.
We start inside the business, not outside it. One to one interviews with the stakeholders who hold a piece of the brand: founders, leadership, sales, operations, the people closest to the customer. Everyone is asked the same questions and almost nobody gives the same answer, which is the finding. Week one ends with the internal picture written down and the disagreements named rather than smoothed over.
The market, the industry, the category and the competitive set, read end to end. Pack, site, social, retail, pricing, search and answer-engine language. For Made for Living that was seven competitors audited in full. For Panolini it was eleven brands mapped on price against protection. You cannot find the position that is open without proving which ones are already taken.
The week that makes the difference. Strategy and creative work in the same room rather than handing over: business direction, position, differentiation and the factors that actually move a choice get conceptualised straight into brand identity and brand architecture. Not a strategy document that creative later interprets. One argument, built by both, so the identity is the position rather than a dressing of it.
The direction is taken across the touchpoints and the deliverables the business actually needs: identity system, architecture, packaging, environment, digital, campaign, whatever the brand has to live on. This is where a direction stops being a concept and gets tested against the furthest corner of the business.
One session, the whole thing. The internal picture, the market read, the strategic position, the identity and architecture, and the creative landed across every touchpoint. It is the first time the leadership team sees the work assembled, and it is deliberately the first time, because the point of the session is not approval of a logo. You see the future of your brand.
A master brand, its expertise lines, its markets and its products, arranged so the business can grow without buying a new brand each time. This is the page clients photograph.
Identity, architecture, packaging, print, environment and digital, taken far enough that a person who has never met us can produce against them. These are real ones, from real engagements.
Everything presented at the end of week four is written down, so it is a decision the business can be held to rather than a suggestion it can quietly ignore.
One sentence, high enough that unrelated businesses and multiple markets can inherit from it without needing a brand of their own. See it working across two businesses and five markets at Moss.
Where you stand and the axis you stand on, evidenced by the week two investigation rather than asserted. See the audit that found an entire category standing in one place.
Master brand, lines, products and extensions, arranged so growth does not require a new brand every time. See a family rice business given a structure that took line extensions without strain.
The idea in language that can be produced against: campaign, pack, film, site. See a phrase that carried a whole market entry against two category giants.
Unmatched creativity, passion and charisma.
Each of these engagements began as four weeks and became years of work.