Marketing

Brand transition after acquisition is one of the highest-stakes decisions a marketing team will face, and most companies handle it badly. The failure mode is almost always the same: the acquiring company moves too fast, underestimates what the acquired brand means to its customers, and ends up destroying value that took years to build. Done…

Brand evaluation is the process of systematically assessing how well your brand is performing against the commercial and strategic goals it was built to support. It goes beyond tracking awareness metrics or counting social followers. Done properly, it tells you whether your brand is doing real work in the market, or just occupying space. Most…

Brand licensing is an arrangement where a brand owner grants another company the right to produce and sell products or services under their brand name, in exchange for a royalty fee or other agreed compensation. Done well, it extends brand reach into new categories and markets without the capital investment of building those capabilities in-house….

A brand purpose workshop is a structured session that helps leadership teams articulate why their organisation exists beyond making money, and translate that into something strategically useful. Done well, it produces a clear, defensible purpose statement that shapes positioning, messaging, and culture. Done badly, it produces a laminated poster nobody reads. Most fall into the…

Branded smell, also called olfactory branding or scent marketing, is the deliberate use of a signature fragrance to reinforce brand identity, influence customer behaviour, and build emotional memory. It works because smell is the only sense that connects directly to the brain’s limbic system, the region responsible for emotion and memory, which means a scent…

FedEx brand architecture is a branded house model built around a single master brand, with each service division carrying the FedEx name as a prefix. FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight and FedEx Office all trade on the same corporate identity, allowing the parent brand to carry trust and recognition across every customer touchpoint. It…

Branding Starbucks is one of the most studied exercises in modern marketing, and most of the analysis misses the point. The brand’s success isn’t really about coffee. It’s about selling a place, a ritual, and a feeling of belonging to something slightly aspirational, at a price that feels considered rather than extravagant. Strip away the…

A brand strategy is the documented logic that explains how a business wants to be perceived, by whom, and why that perception should translate into commercial advantage. Done properly, it connects business objectives to audience insight to market positioning, and it gives everyone in the organisation, from the CEO to the copywriter, a shared framework…

Employer brand activation works better when it starts internally. Not because external campaigns lack value, but because an employer brand that hasn’t been tested against the reality of working somewhere will eventually contradict itself, and that contradiction is far more damaging than no campaign at all. Most organisations get this backwards. They invest in external…