A full audience row, one person writing notes in a notebook on their lap. Inside the O, the hand and pen in black and white.

Strategy for consumer brands

Most brands are renting their growth.

The ones that last own it. Customers judge a brand where the promise meets the price, the policy, the product and the service. I help marketing leaders decide where to play and how to win on what the brand truly owns, then make the company keep the promise at every join.

What do you own?Start the brief

The problem

Reach is bought. Memory is owned.

Most of what a brand pays for is bought: reach, agencies, consultants, even strategy. It stops the day you stop paying. What lasts is the place you hold in people’s lives. You earn it at every join where the promise meets the price, the policy, the product and the service. You own it once the whole company keeps that promise.

Sound familiar?

Five sentences I hear from leaders at consumer brands. If one of them is yours, write to me.

The board wants a growth case, not another campaign.
A coherent story, the numbers and the sequence that get your decision makers aligned and the funding released.
I spend more on reach every year and get less for it.
An honest read of your business, where the real levers sit, what to do in what order and what the change is worth.
One thing isn’t working. Direct to consumer, social, the agency model.
A bounded piece of work on a named problem: how to structure social media, how to approach D2C, how to set up a team.
The strategy is signed off. It stalls somewhere between the top and the teams.
The operating model, decision making and ways of working that let a good strategy survive contact with your company.
I need someone to think with who has run a marketing function.
A sparring partner for the big decision or the stuck one, with no project attached.

The departure test

If everyone who built this left tomorrow, would it still work?

Capability you hire leaves when the people do. What the company builds into how it decides keeps working without its builders.

Thirteen stones on each side. The same pieces, laid two ways, both standing on temporary support. Take the support away.

Capability brought in · laid flat, propped up

Stands for as long as the people propping it up stay in the room.They left. It worked once.

Capability built · an arch, on centring

Every arch is built on temporary support. The point is that it comes out.The support is gone. Every stone is still in place.

Take the consultants outPut them back Try it on your last change

Why now

AI believes your customers, not your copy.

Ask an assistant about your brand and it answers from reviews, forums and complaint threads: the record your customers wrote where your departments meet. You control the claim. You borrow the record. Visibility is a marketing budget. The verdict is an operating-model one.

The arch held · the LEGO Group, 2001 to 2026

I ran what I built: carried the budgets, beat the targets, and handed over systems that still run today.

40M+monthly users on LEGO.com, rebuilt from dysfunction into a channel the brand owns.
300MDKK of incremental revenue from marketing experimentation infrastructure, in its first year.
20+markets running that system.

The full track record

Older hands over younger hands, shaping clay together.

What I build

Rented leaves. Built stays.

Four stages, from what you own today to a system your teams run without me. You can stop after any of them.

01
The diagnosis
Where the promise breaks between departments, and the case for your board.
02
The evidence
The bets tested in the market before the budget moves.
03
The blueprint
Where to play, how to win and the model that keeps the promise.
04
The build
The system running inside your teams, without me.

How the work runs