How I Work

I don’t follow a rigid system or formula. Every organization is different, and so is every path to understanding it. What I do is immerse myself deeply in the world of the brand — its origins, its culture, its people, its products and services, its customers, and its competitive reality — until the patterns and themes that matter most become impossible to ignore. That is where the truth lives.

Building brands doesn't start with invention. It starts with recognition.

My work is finding that truth  — often hiding in plain sight — and making it the inspirational core of everything that comes afterward.

I study the earliest documents, the founding stories, the institutional history, and the internal lore. Every organization carries a set of ideas about itself — some explicit, some unspoken. These stories often contain the seeds of what makes a brand definitive.

I speak with leaders and key players to understand what drew them to the organization and what they believe it stands for. Their convictions often reveal the internal truth others have stopped noticing.

I go beyond leadership rooms and into the lived experience of the brand.

That means speaking with:

• Customers
• Distributors
• Frontline staff
• Partners
• Anyone whose perception shapes the brand’s reality

I gather the unfiltered good, bad, and ugly — the reactions, the frictions, the surprises, the praise. This is where external need reveals itself.

I watch how people interact with the brand in the real world and how it stands next to competitors. If possible, I buy and use the product or service myself. There's a lot to learn when observation stops and experience begins.

Patterns alone are not enough.

I look for the conceptual artifacts at the epicenter of the brand’s meaning — the ideas, phrases, beliefs, or behaviors that can hold strategy and execution together over time.

Sometimes they come from history. Sometimes they are embedded in the culture. Sometimes they're from what customers think or say when the brand is actually experienced.

Often, they’ve been present all along — noticed but never fully understood or maybe taken for granted.

My role is to recognize these ideas, test their strength, and refine them into something dynamic: a conceptual center of gravity that can influence decisions, guide behavior, inform content and scale across the organization.

This might take the form of:

• A phrase drawn from an origin story that suddenly reveals enduring purpose 
• A single word that captures what leaders deeply value and customers genuinely crave
• A belief that has quietly shaped behavior for years without ever being articulated
   

These artifacts don’t stand on their own. Their power comes from what they contain — the tension, the aspiration, and the meaning behind them.

Once identified, I begin developing and pressure-testing these ideas early, exploring how they might inform positioning, language, experience, and growth decisions — even as immersion continues. The strongest concepts prove resilient. They keep showing up. They hold.

That’s how a brand finds its center.

Once we have the truth, the work becomes ensuring that everyone internally and externally understands it and feels a connection to it at a personal level. 

This takes as much effort inside the company as it does with outside audiences like consumers. It takes repetition and thoughtfulness to keep the brand fresh, to constantly make it new again while staying consistent with the core idea.

The solution, and the strategies that come from it need to be:

• Clear
• Coherent
• Compelling
• Repeatable
• Durable

That's how conviction forms, and when internal belief aligns with external need, the brand becomes unstoppable.