How is your product, service or experience positioned in relation to the rest of the market? How is it positioned in the world at large (i.e. beyond its competitive set) given how many things that are constantly fighting for peoples’ attention on any given day? We can help you identify not only what differentiates your product at the feature and benefit level, but also what makes it the most distinctive at the brand level (e.g. we recently helped Nike to position and name their next line of women’s sports bras). Especially in a world where it's getting increasingly harder for consumers to differentiate amongst brands, developing a razor-sharp positioning that can be activated across multiple internal disciplines is key.

As Pine + Gilmore articulated in The Experience Economy, we have moved from a Product to a Service and now an Experience economy. Story-telling for brands has to live cohesively in many forms, across multiple touch-points and even across different devices. But do you have a good sense of how your brand should behave in a given situation? If your brand were to show up in a mobile environment, how should consumers experience you? What would you look like? How would you present your brand? What about the in-store retail experience? What do people want from an interaction with your brand? We help companies to define what their future experiences could and should look like. Take Sonos - the wireless hi-fi company. We have helped them to define what the ultimate home music experiences means to music lovers that stream most of their music digitally.

Are you launching a new product and need to make people aware? Or are you looking to evolve an existing advertising campaign for the next annual communication plan? If you’re a marketer that would like help in crafting inspiring client-to-agency briefs or if you’re an advertising agency that could use some more thinking horsepower - we're a supercharged strategic planning department that understands that the most powerful advertising is usually the most emotional. Getting to unique emotional truths for brands is our trademark competence that has helped win pitches and extended existing campaigns for some of the world's most innovative agencies and clients.

What comes to mind when people think of your product, service or experience? What would you like people to associate with your brand? What your most salient brand truth is? Do you know what drives the consumer + brand connection between your product and those that could benefit most from your offering? We help to define not only what brands do and how they do it, but more importantly what your brand stands for. Through unique methodologies and years of experience with leading brands, we help to define a brand's inspirational reason for being. We help articulate the intangible relationship between people and products that world-class brands know they need to sell as much as any tangible thing.

Are you experimenting with ideas at the earliest stages of development? Are you looking to explore the potential of say, the future of wearable technology? How about the future of user-interface or interaction design? Do you have a technology and you’re not exactly sure what you should do with it? We can help give you a sense of what people want as we are very comfortable living and breathing in environments that are ill-defined and constantly changing. We help to define blue-sky opportunities for products, services and experiences that have yet to come into fruition. Some of the clients we work with on the innovation front include the Nike's Innovation Kitchen and Microsoft's Advanced Concepts Studios at Xbox and Windows. We help to bring to life what people want as it relates to their categories, and help craft a Product Innovation strategy roadmap.

Chances are your target audience isn't homogenous. It's typically made up of segments that differ in a number of ways. They may be united in their consumption of - or loyalty to - your brand, but likely have varying degrees of behavioral and motivational differences. If you need to better understand your target audience for the development of product, communications, PR, UI/UX or technology, we can help create muses for your teams to activate on. By helping you not only discover the true make-up of your audience through a discrete set of similarities and differences in attitudes, values, motivations and needs, you can prioritize audience segments, find opportunity zones or pain points, and help focus your organization around key segments for growth.

Do you work in industrial design and could use additional strategic horsepower? We collaborate with internal design teams and external design firms like MNML to bring products like the SonoSite X-Porte Ultrasound Kiosk to life. For SonoSite, we camped out in emergency rooms and rode along with paramedics in ambulances to see for ourselves how people at the front lines were using ultrasound devices (e.g. specialists in emergency medicine, internal medicine, breast care, anesthesiologists, etc.). We dug deep into what features, forms and functions people needed and more importantly what they wanted out of an ultrasound device. We uncovered what was working and what could be improved from their point-of-view. From there, we developed a design brief with an over-arching story, and a specific set of design principles for the design team to act upon.