I help brands, agencies and organisations figure out what makes them different – and find the words and ways to make it land.

Brand strategy defines who you are and why people should care – your positioning, purpose, principles and personality. Brand strategy is a long-term game. Marketing strategy is the plan for reaching the right people and turning them into customers. One without the other is incomplete. Brand strategy without marketing has no audience. Marketing without brand strategy has no foundation – and usually ends up competing on price.

If your messaging isn’t landing, the instinct is to fix the words. Sometimes that’s right. But more often the words are fine – it’s what’s underneath them that’s unclear. If your own team describes the business differently depending on who’s asking, if new prospects don’t get it even though existing customers love you, or if every sales conversation drifts to price – it’s more likely a brand strategy problem, not a messaging problem.

Both. About half my work is direct with organisations that need brand clarity – from scaling businesses to established companies navigating change. The other half is through agencies across Ireland and the UK, where I provide the strategic depth that helps their creative work land. Either way, I work as part of your team, with an outside perspective.

A proper strategy programme – from stakeholder interviews to a signed-off strategy document – typically takes two to three months. That’s not bureaucracy. It’s the time needed to get people together, gather real insight, test thinking, work through options, and get alignment. Compress it into a couple of weeks and you get generic answers that look like a strategy but don’t work like it.

Not as much as you might think. You need a clear sense of where the business is going and a leadership team willing to engage honestly. I’ll do the rest – talking to your people, your customers, and your market to find what’s actually true about you. The best brand strategies come from listening, not from briefing documents.

Yes. A visual identity is an expression of brand strategy – but it’s not the strategy itself. If you have a strong identity but your messaging isn’t clear, your positioning isn’t differentiated, or your team can’t clearly articulate what makes you different, strategy work is needed. We start where you are, not from scratch.

It involves real conversations – with your leadership team, your people, sometimes your customers. I conduct the interviews directly, not through a junior researcher. From there I analyse, identify the insight that makes you genuinely different, and build the strategic framework from that foundation. You’re involved throughout, not handed a document at the end.

I actively choose to work across sectors – consumer and B2B, life sciences and food, technology and professional services. I’ve found the best thinking comes from not getting too comfortable in one category. A fresh perspective from adjacent sectors often unlocks something that purely category-specific experience can miss.

Projects vary considerably depending on scope and complexity – from a focused messaging programme to a full strategy-to-expression engagement. The honest answer is: call me. I’d rather understand your situation and give you a clear picture than quote a number that means nothing without context.

The clearest signs are not always on a spreadsheet. Does your team talk about the business the same way? Do sales conversations get easier? Do the right clients find you more readily? Does decision-making get faster because the criteria are clear? Brand strategy works when it gets used – when it’s in the room when decisions get made, not sitting in a file somewhere.