The questions we've helped answer

How do you future-proof a business when 60% of its revenue is tied to one product?

A major drinks business had a hugely successful product at the centre of its commercial model, but customer behaviour around the category was changing.

The question wasn't simply how to sell more of the existing product. It was: where should future growth come from if the thing that made the business successful couldn't be relied upon forever?

We helped the team get underneath changing customer behaviour, understand where future value could sit and identify the strategic choices available to the business. Then we went about creating a prototype to test in the real world.

How do you make an iconic brand matter to the next generation?

An iconic confectionery brand had been part of people's lives for generations, but heritage doesn't automatically create relevance.

We needed to understand a new generation on their terms: how their world was changing, what mattered to them and what role an established brand could credibly play within it, and what would these products need to look/feel like and deliver to appeal.

The question wasn't: how do we make young people like us? It was: what does this brand need to mean to a generation growing up in a completely different world?

What would you build if you weren't constrained by what exists today?

A specialist healthcare organisation wanted to rethink how people with ADHD and executive functioning challenges are supported. The easy answer would have been to improve the existing service.

Instead, we started with a different question: what do people actually need to live better lives?

That meant looking beyond diagnosis and beyond the existing operating model to understand the experience before, during and after someone asks for support. We brought cross-functional teams together to rethink the proposition, experience, partnerships and commercial model from the ground up.

The ambition wasn't a slightly better version of today. It was to ask what should exist tomorrow.

How do you give a famous brand a new reason to matter?

A household-name British brand was going through fundamental change. The organisation had made significant changes to the business behind the scenes and had a much bigger ambition for what the brand could stand for.

The challenge wasn't simply communicating what had changed. It was: why should anybody outside the organisation care?

We helped turn a major organisational shift into something customers could understand, believe in and act on. Transformation inside a business only creates value when it means something outside it.

How do you build a brand for a life stage women don't want to be defined by?

Women's health was finally starting to talk about perimenopause, but much of the category still made the condition the most interesting thing about the woman experiencing it.

We needed to understand women beyond their symptoms: what was happening in their lives, how they felt about this stage and what they actually wanted from a brand built to support them.

The question wasn't: how do we build another perimenopause brand? It was: how do we make women feel understood without asking them to define themselves by what they're going through?

That became the foundation for a very different proposition: perimenopause is the least interesting thing about you, delivered via supplements and an education led ecosystem.

How do you make an established skincare brand relevant to a new generation?

An established global skincare brand wanted one of its ranges to become synonymous with the treatment and prevention of breakouts for a new generation.

Yet competing for Gen Z meant understanding acne as more than a functional skincare problem. Breakouts affect how people feel, what they do and how confidently they show up in the world. We needed to get underneath those emotional moments and understand what the brand needed to stand for beyond product efficacy.

The question wasn't: how do we sell acne products to Gen Z? It was: what role can this brand play in helping a new generation feel like a breakout doesn't get to decide what they do next?

How do you get back to what made a brand brilliant in the first place?

A fast-growing food brand had built its success by being bold, instinctive and willing to do things differently.

Unfortunately, as the business grew, so did everything around it. More people. More processes. More layers. More opinions. The things designed to help the business scale had inadvertently started to stifle some of the energy that had made the brand successful in the first place.

The challenge wasn't to reinvent the brand into something new. It was to rediscover what had made it distinctive, strip away what had accumulated around it and work out how that spirit could show up in the next stage of growth.

Sometimes what's next isn't about adding more. It's about getting back to the thing that made you brilliant before everyone got involved.

What if customers aren't buying what you think you're selling?

A food innovation business had developed a genuinely clever product. Inside the business, the story centred around the product itself: how it was made, the technology behind it and why it was functionally better.

However, customers weren't thinking about the technology. They were thinking about their own lives.

We went back to the customer to understand what they actually valued, the progress the product enabled and where the commercial opportunity really sat, and how does it need to be communicated.

Often the breakthrough isn't changing the product. It's understanding what people are really buying.

How do you change a behaviour people have spent a lifetime learning?

A business was looking to change the way men cared for their hair.

Yet changing a product is easy compared with changing a behaviour. For many men, haircare wasn't something they'd been taught to think deeply about. Their routines were often habitual, functional and built up over years.

We needed to understand the relationship men really had with their hair: how they thought about it, the routines they'd developed, what they cared about, what they didn't, and what would need to change for a new behaviour to feel worth adopting.

The question wasn't: how do we get men to use a different hair product? It was: what would make men rethink the way they've always cared for their hair?

What if the white space in your category isn't about the product at all?

An established drinks business was looking for an opportunity in an increasingly crowded functional category.

It would have been easy to start with products, ingredients, claims and competitors. Instead, we looked at how people were actually consuming the category.

When were they drinking it? What was happening around that moment? What were they trying to get from it? What were they drinking instead? Where were existing products failing to fit naturally into people's lives?

That changed the frame. The opportunity wasn't simply to find another functional benefit or create a slightly different product. It was to identify an under-served consumption occasion, a moment people already had, but the category wasn't properly serving.

That behaviour became the starting point for the proposition. We went hard, doubling down on everything related to it, and went from 0-18% market share in 3 years.

How do you find white space in the ultimate commodified category?

Toilet paper is a category where products can feel largely interchangeable. Softness, strength, price, sustainability, everyone is competing around versions of the same things.

A fast-growing sustainable brand wanted to move from niche choice to mainstream household staple, but better packaging and stronger marketing weren't going to be enough. We needed to understand what customers actually valued, where the category had become predictable and where there was space for the brand to mean something different.

The question wasn't: how do we sell more sustainable toilet roll? It was: where is the white space in a category where customers have been taught that every product is basically the same?

That meant moving beyond sustainability as a specialist reason to buy and building a proposition with the potential to make bamboo feel like the obvious choice for families who are living in a constant trade-off.

How do you take a brand from niche to mainstream without losing the people who got you there?

A fast-growing food brand had built a strong following within a relatively small audience. The business wanted to grow beyond it.

The obvious answer was to market harder to more people. Instead, we went back to the category and the customer to understand why the proposition wasn't travelling.

The breakthrough was deceptively simple: from a dairy-free alternative designed around a specialist audience, to a delicious product that happens to be dairy-free.

The shift created a platform for the brand to reach a much bigger audience without abandoning the customers who already loved it.

What do you do when the market that made you successful changes around you?

A pioneering food business had helped create an entirely new way for people to buy fruit and vegetables, but the market didn't stand still.

Supermarkets changed, understanding and penetration around meal kits grew and customer expectations shifted.  A proposition that had once felt distinctive was becoming harder to explain and defend.

The challenge wasn't simply to remind people what the business did. We needed to understand what still made it valuable in a market that now offered customers far more choice.

The question wasn't: how do we make the brand louder? It was: when the market has changed, what is the reason to choose you now?