Category: Views

It’s a logical playbook but often falls short. Why? Two main reasons:

Most categories are crowded and real, ownable differentiation is rare. For every category disruptor, there are thousands of companies with agreeable substitutes.

Brand differentiation is inherently competitor- and not customer-focused. In order to be different, you need to be different in comparison to someone or something. There’s value in competitor benchmarking and having a pulse on where you stack up to others, but the best companies and brands take a customer-focused approach.

A customer-focused approach is the key to building a successful brand, and for customers, a successful brand is one that is meaningful. Building brand meaning stems from evaluating what your customers care about on multiple dimensions, evaluating what your company can effectively deliver, and finding the intersection of the two.

We’ve been in your shoes. We’ve been in your agency’s shoes. And that combined experience has helped frame a worldview that empathizes with our team and yours. With many years in the game, here is some of what we’ve uncovered.

We started this place with the belief that advertising won’t change the world but by building a company in a manner in which we personally operate, we can use advertising, mainly the people behind the work, the clients driving the work, and in some sense, the work, to do good.

“Good” looks like creating a company culture in which you’d want to work. “Good” means being a champion for our clients, not because of what’s in it for us, but because that’s just the way we think you should treat all people. “Good” means telling marketing truths and supporting brands and products we personally feel good about while putting high quality work out into the world. “Good” means focusing less on awards and more on customers.

With that, we believe certain things to be true: