High Fidelity

Ignore the noisy internet gurus and their so-called marketing blueprints, you want to do marketing that is designed for you and backed by data.

That’s why all our recommendations and deliverables come with the Why included. We follow the scientifically-proven DECIDE process to dovetail our work with your strategy.

1. Define the problem 
   Before we get to work, we get to the bottom of what you want to achieve — and what’s holding you back.
2. Explore the context 
   We review our findings or conduct supplementary research specific to the problem we’re working on.
3. Craft the intervention 
   When we present copy, design and other output to you, it’s already tested and validated for clarity or comparative performance increases in line with agreed targets.
4. Implement the solution 
   Content gets published, websites get launched, workshops take place.
5. Determine the impact 
   We collect data for 6 to 12 weeks after implementation and then evaluate it with you.
6. Evaluate next steps 
   In the spirit of continuous improvement, we bake feedback loops into our collaboration.

Many brand marketing efforts feel all over the place. Who does what, when, for whom? Team members and outsourced agencies may have conflicting priorities. Consequently, project management often seems either too rigid or too loose. Done internally, it can even turn into a power struggle.

The High Fidelity programme is delivered in 8 sprints. The first two sprints, the Know Your Message phase, set the foundation for the remaining 6 sprints of work. Sprints usually combine work from both Live and Share work streams for an integrated, interdisciplinary approach.

Our efficient sprint format follows a mindful rhythm of 5 weeks’ delivery and 1-2 weeks’ pause, giving you space to review and implement our work.

We kick things off with a planning session to prioritise actions based on the agreed strategy. Each sprint ends with a review session where we present results and discuss next steps.

This custom delivery format means there’s no need for you to get organised before we start the work. From the get-go, we strike the balance between setting clear priorities and staying nimble. You don’t feel locked into a stale plan, but essential deliverables land on time.

To create outstanding brand communications, you need a variety of expertise. But having multiple consultants and creative agencies working in silos is a bit like managing rock bands at a festival, when what you need is an orchestra playing together.

Our team brings diverse and lengthy experience in Marketing, Product, Customer Service and Sales across B2B, B2C and the third sector.

We’re not just book-smart. We’ve walked the walk for years. From iconic toy brands and category-defining SaaS companies to banks, utilities, media giants and public bodies. We’ve supported organisations in the UK, Europe and beyond. Unlocking new roles, new products and new territories. Closing 7-figure software deals and smashing sales targets in challenging markets.

We bring and brief our own copywriters, designers and developers. Your brand shines in every medium while your talent management workload stays close to zero. Information travels once, so there’s less risk of distortion. And combining strategy, creative work and change management in a single contract with a single team saves not only effort but also cost.

Location independent working is becoming the new standard. Smart companies want to roll with these changes to future-proof operations and attract competitive talent.

But just as the proverbial fish doesn’t know it’s in water, many co-located teams underestimate the cultural pillars needed to make remote and hybrid working work. Your status as a (current or future) hybrid or remote-only team presents unique challenges and opportunities when it comes to brand communication strategy and culture change activities.

You need partners who not only understand your desired way of working — but live it.

With over 10 years of location independent work experience in a variety of settings, we help you navigate the particular leadership challenges that arise in remote and hybrid settings. The tools and techniques we use and teach make participation accessible and engaging for every person in your company:

• Video calls
• Remote workshop delivery & webinars
• Asynchronous events
• Optional on-site visits
• Weekly written updates
• Online, visual dashboard to track programme progress

And we practice what we teach. Combining seamless programme delivery and a low travel budget with making sure you feel understood and like we’re part of your team.

Often, leadership teams are not equipped to deal with the change management fallout of improving brand communications. Sometimes, this fallout builds up over time. With Marketing, Sales and Product working in disconnected silos, contradictory information flies from department to department. Each team feels neglected by the other and all three lack the information needed to do a great job. Marketing ends up polishing the surface.

Before you know it, there’s a gap between how you want to be perceived (your marketing messages) and how you actually show up for your customers and employees. You find yourself in messaging gridlock. Or, you pay for creative assets — and never deploy them because they don’t feel right.

Theoretical knowledge is usually insufficient to overcome potential challenges in cross-team collaboration. So it’s no wonder a lot of consultancy projects never yield the promised outcomes: they’re so high-level that they don’t translate into concrete practices. To help departments collaborate and integrate their efforts, you need people on the ground. People who know what it’s like day in, day out.

The Culture Change Club is your programme-steering committee. It creates accountability by including representatives from all customer-facing departments and your leadership team. Working through transformations in this collaborative setting helps us help you turn advice into tangible actions. Your organisation’s change agility and resilience gets dialled up to 11.

Ethical marketing sounds great. And marketing teams face increasing social and legal pressure to tick the box. But does it actually work? After all, you can’t afford to do marketing that “feels good” but doesn’t yield results.

Here’s the thing:

When your marketing messages are all over the place, manipulative tactics can seem like the only way to get results.

Hence, even in the eco and fair trade spaces, some brands still follow an unethical marketing playbook. Putting their reputation on the line — and leaving money on the table.

We’ve developed a radically values-based way of doing marketing. Accessibility, privacy and a minimal climate footprint are at the forefront of our tools and practices. Your recommendations will guide you in which tactics to start, tweak, stop or continue to make your marketing inclusive and manipulation-free.

You’ll reduce churn, increase customer loyalty and grow your conversion rates sustainably.

Marketing assets are surprisingly dirty — from web hosting and video streaming to product packaging and print. Even if you want to protect the planet, you may not have the knowledge or time to research and choose successful alternatives to commonly used providers and practices.

You can rely on our shared pool of recommended vendors and eco-friendly practices to reduce the CO2 emissions of your digital and physical assets. Depending on your strategy, we can suggest or integrate planet-friendly options to help achieve your goals.

Accessibility, diversity and intersectional needs vary regionally, linguistically and culturally. Still, many agencies only work in one language, leaving you at the whim of AI, Google Translate or translators who follow their CAT tool to the letter without understanding you and your audience.

At best, your foreign-language brand communications sound translated, at worst, completely alien or unintelligible. You risk unintentionally excluding or even discriminating against your audience.

Almost everyone on our team is multilingual and has intercultural, intersectional experience. Combined with sound research & testing processes, our backgrounds ensure a close cultural fit even if we don’t share all the attributes of your target audience.

If you’re looking to reach multilingual audiences, we’ll bake it into your marketing strategy. By adapting and transcreating your copy rather than simply translating it, we’ll make sure your audience feels at home in your content — whether we’re addressing Scottish freelancers, Swiss runners or Spanish zero-waste shoppers.

With multiple agencies working side by side on fragments of your marketing strategy, success can feel out of reach. It’s not cheap, it’s more effort to oversee, there’s more room for error, and positive effects are often limited to individual campaigns.

Your in-house marketing team is left managing a growing workload and unpredictable budget with little long-term gain.

Make this uncertainty a thing of the past with our fixed, (almost) all-inclusive monthly price.

You’ll never have to worry about how many hours we’ll spend creating something and what that next invoice will look like.

Offering our integrated services at a fixed monthly price means we have no reason to push for more activity than you’d benefit from. You can trust us to deliver excellence over mindless quantity. Signal versus noise. Instead of headache-inducing procurement processes, there’ll be just one budget approval. Then you’re all set for the entire year.

Ever seen a cookie bar that said “we value your privacy” — before forcing you to spend an eternity deselecting third-party vendor tracking to use the site without surveillance?

Traditional marketing playbooks prioritise data collection over data analysis. Most companies collect way too much personal information without ever using it. Not only does excessive data collection create a poor customer experience — it also exposes you to legal threats and regulations such as the GDPR. You might even collect data that can be used to discriminate against people based on their location, perceived ethnicity/race, gender, sexual orientation or class. So much for being a force for good in the world.

We recommend practices that help you achieve the same (or better) outcomes while minimising data collection. For example, we’ll help you migrate to privacy-friendly website analytics tools, create custom dashboards and adopt better web design practices.

While we’re not lawyers, we are sensitive to the risks of data collection. You can count on us to never knowingly recommend or support practices that damage people’s right to privacy.

If external creative agencies hold the keys to your brand communication, you’re beholden to them. Want to create a piece of comms? First, you need to request access to the file you need. Ending the contract feels like stepping off a cliff edge. That sense of dependency may even stop you from cancelling — or signing up in the first place.

We’re not interested in locking you into a collaboration that doesn’t serve you. Yes, after working together for 12 months our partnership will be wonderfully efficient. The better we know each other, the faster we’ll be able to deliver high-quality stuff. But when you’re ready to continue on your own, we’ll use the final sprint to make sure you have all the tools and knowledge to do so. Here are just a few things we’ll do to round off our collaboration:

• Creating and/or exporting documentation
• Train-the-trainer workshops
• 1:1 coaching
• Editing your work
• Scouting for, assessing and onboarding creative talent for your in-house team