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Work out where the money should go before spending it.

Deciding what to say, who to say it to and where the money goes, before any of it is spent.

Chess pieces on a board, one pawn sharp in the foreground.
Services
Two
Typical length
Four to eight weeks
Ends with
A written plan
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What this group does

It answers three questions before anybody buys media or writes a word of copy. Who is the buyer, what will move them, and where should the budget go first.

This is the smallest group here and the one that changes the cost of everything else. A campaign aimed at the wrong buyer is not a cheap mistake corrected later. It is the whole budget.

Work here ends with something written down: a positioning statement, a plan with an order to it, and a measurement baseline everybody has agreed to before the spending starts.

The reason it goes first is arithmetic. Six weeks of research costs a fraction of a quarter of media aimed at the wrong buyer, and the second mistake stays invisible until the money has already gone. Companies that skip this stage tend to pay for it twice: once in the spend itself, and again in the months it takes to work out which part of the plan was wrong. Doing it first is the cheapest part of the whole programme.

Two services

What is in this group

How it runs

  1. Weeks one and two

    We interview your team, your sales people and five to ten of your customers. Most of what changes the plan comes out of the customer calls, which is why we will not start without access to them.

  2. Weeks three to five

    Category and competitor analysis, search demand mapping, and a first read on positioning that we bring back to you before it is finished. You argue with it at this stage, while changing it is still cheap.

  3. Weeks six to eight

    The written plan: positioning, priorities, channel split, budget order and the measurement baseline. Presented once to the people who have to act on it, then handed over.

Questions we get asked

How long does a strategy engagement take?

Four to eight weeks, depending on how many people we need to interview and how much data already exists. We tell you which end of that range you are at after the first conversation, before any billing starts.

Do we have to buy execution from you afterwards?

No. The plan is yours and it is written so another agency or your own team can run it. We would rather you ran it well elsewhere than badly with us.

What do we actually receive?

A positioning statement, a prioritised plan with an order and a budget split, the research it rests on including the interview quotes, and the measurement baseline. All written, all yours.

Who do you need from our side?

Time with whoever owns the commercial number, access to your sales team, and permission to speak to five to ten customers. Without customer access the work is opinion, and we will say so.

What if the research says our current plan is right?

Then you spend the rest of the budget with more confidence and we say so plainly in the report. We are paid to find out, and finding out that you were already correct is a legitimate answer.

Can you do this while campaigns are already running?

Yes, and it is the usual case. We work with what is already committed, say plainly which of those commitments we would not have made, and build the sequence forward from where you actually are. Pausing everything for six weeks is rarely the right trade, and a plan written as though your current spending does not exist is a plan nobody can act on.

How is this different from hiring a consultancy?

A consultancy hands over the plan and leaves. We can do that too, and often do. The difference is that the people writing it are the people who would run it, so it is written to be executed by a team on a real budget rather than presented to a board. The test we apply is whether a marketing manager could pick it up on the Monday and start.

Can we see the research before you draw conclusions from it?

Yes. We send a running note each week of what we are hearing, and the first read on positioning comes back to you unfinished at around week four. Nothing in the final document should be the first time you have heard it. If a finding is going to be uncomfortable, you hear it while there is still time to argue with the interpretation.

Next

Tell us what is actually wrong

You get a reply within one working day, and a view on whether this is the group that fixes your problem. If it is not, we say which one is.

Book a strategy callAll six groups

The work behind this

The other five groups