What We Do

What's Special

Solve Tricky Brand Challenges
[ Turning brand liabilities into assets that perform. ]

​We partner with teams to solve tricky brand challenges that usually live outside of day-to-day marketing activities. Projects address areas that deliver significant impact, and leave everyone better prepared to execute going forward.

​Common triggers and challenges we help solve:
  • ​Identifying more actionable, profitable target audiences
  • (Re) Positioning for greater growth
  • Brand renewal
  • Better insights needed to drive marketing and/or product innovation
  • Marketing teams building a "true north" foundation
  • Mergers and acquisitions outcomes
  • Shifts in technology or category dynamics
  • Business strategy pivots
  • New leadership in the organization
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Create Whole Brand Strategy™
[ And why yours might not be. ]
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Like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, many brand strategies are actually just communication strategies—or creative ideas—masquerading as something intended to drive your entire brand experience—product, communication, support, IT, sales, UX—you name it.

​Not sure if this applies to you? Take this brief quiz to find out. 

Whole Brand Strategy™ is built for your entire brand experience and the enterprise that supports it, not just communications. And it connects to other organizational filters, like mission/vision, purpose, and CSR and DEI initiatives.
Front Load Your Activation
[ We help your people activate your strategy. ]

​The hardest part of developing a brand strategy is actually getting it implemented. To do so, engagement needs to start before strategy development begins. Success relies on more than just great content:

​Breakthrough strategies actually break through by also crafting context, and building alignment. CurtisAlan brand strategy incorporates cross-functional input, alignment and activation into the engagement process. 
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Develop Better Marketing AND Better Marketers
[ Helping your teams and partners make better, faster decisions. ]

Everyone on the team has different skills and experience. And emerging marketing talent in particular has differing needs and motivators: 
  • For many, the appeal of working at a DTC startup is stronger than honing skills at a traditional marketer like P&G
  • Keeping up with emerging tech overrides nailing down marketing fundamentals
  • Job tenures are measured in months vs. years
It forces a focus on the How, and less about the What and Why. 
​
We combine strategy with internal readiness activities to provide a marketing foundation that fills in the gaps, aligns your teams, and helps them make better, faster decisions.

Your teams will not only do better marketing; they will become better marketers. 

Grow Your Brands and Your People

We develop core insights and strategies in parallel with team readiness activities to help you deliver better, faster brand activation.


​Services

Our work falls into four areas:
Discover
Discover the beauty and the beast in your brand.
  • Audience, Organization and Category Insight
  • Brand Equity Assessment
  • Enterprise Brand Gap Analysis
Define
Define the path forward: your target, white space, promise and guardrails.
  • Target Audience Definition
  • Whole Brand Strategy™
  • Brand Portfolio & Architecture
  • Extension & Alliances
Align
Create understanding and inspire commitment.
  • Brand Foundations™ Learning Platform
  • Brand Accelerator Briefs
  • Agency Partner Brand Jams
Accelerate
Extend better marketing and faster decision making across the organization.
  • IGNITE™ Brand Activation Planning
  • Product / Service Innovation Guardrails
  • Sales Teams Accelerator
  • IT / UX-brand Integration

POV

Our purpose is to help unlock the power in people to do better things, and do things better. Our work is guided by these beliefs:

Structure Powers Creativity
Purposeful ideas come more easily when there are meaningful guardrails to inform and inspire thinking.

​Powerful brand strategies spark more creative, more actionable outputs.
Learning > Change
Change is not an objective, it’s a result (and one that most employees fear until it’s happened). We believe people get better when they grow. And they grow by learning. We help companies grow their brands and their people by helping them learn to do it. ​​
Willing + Able
The key to achieving business and brand goals is to surround yourself with those who are more willing and more able to help you do so. We help create customers that are more willing, and employees that are more able.
Get It, Together
We know it takes a village to deliver on brand experience—agency partners, sales, IT, product—everyone. But Marketing owns the building and managing of brand equity—its superpower—to drive business performance.

Better, faster brand activation is achieved through powerful strategy, early engagement, building team readiness, and cross-functional collaboration.
​

Client Testimonials

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Their work simplified decision making around just about every aspect of brand implementation, and provided a common language that got everyone working off the same page. It also made our agency partners' work better. And their process helped us seamlessly engage our sales and product innovation groups. Lastly, they are just a great partner, and a pleasure to work with.

Elizabeth Di John

Senior Director of Marketing
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Smithfield Foods

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CurtisAlan was a great partner for Honeywell. Their unique talent is ensuring that the analysis, segmentation and branding could be usable by the sales team. The result was a sales team that was better enabled to convey the Honeywell brand promise and connect it clearly to individual customer needs. 

Rob Kim

Director, Strategic Marketing S&C
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Honeywell

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What impressed the team most was the level of insight and strategic thinking brought to bear so quickly, along with an approach that was both logical and intuitive. It created an environment of comfort and trust that got everyone on the team engaged and contributing from the start. CurtisAlan elevated and accelerated our thinking, got us to where we needed to be, and we had fun getting there too.

Kimberly Keller

Senior Brand Manager
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Johnsonville Sausage

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As strong as their research insights and strategy deliverables were, what really distinguished CurtisAlan was their ability to engage everyone in our organization –– from our leadership team to frontline employees. Great thinking, easy to work with, and highly attuned to navigating our organization and its needs.

Emily Ransdell

Brand Strategy Manager
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The Standard Insurance

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CurtisAlan helped us map out a structure and create a foundation for delivering on our vision—all on a short timeline. They became just another member of the team, in the best possible way.
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Jennifer Lee

Director of International Marketing
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Six Flags

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The challenge and opportunity with a heritage brand like Nathan's Famous was how to build new platforms for growth in harmony with a 100 year-old brand under license. CurtisAlan provided the perfect leadership for our task at hand. Great insights. Great teamwork.

Lillian Mehta

Brand Manager
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Nathan's Famous

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CurtisAlan provided us the most insightful look into our client base as we have ever had in our 60 years as a firm.

Jeff Durocher

Vice President Market Development
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RHR

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CurtisAlan did a superb job helping us to better understand our brand and to reposition it for the future. I found them to be extremely insightful, thoughtful and honest. They were true partners who took the time to immerse themselves in our brand and to embrace it as if it were their own.

Edward C. Emma

President and COO
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Jockey International, Inc.

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​CurtisAlan impressed us greatly with their strategic thought leadership. They helped us challenge conventional thinking and position our brand in a fresh perspective. They are incredibly collaborative and helped uncover some key insights that helped direct our brand initiatives.

Kanan Banerjee

Sr. Brand Manager
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Frito Lay

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Scope & Impact: Case Study

Clients and Deliverables

deliverables
  • Brand architecture strategy
  • Product / service nomenclature strategy
deliverables
  • Segmentation and targeting
  • Positioning strategy
deliverables
  • Equity & needs assessment
  • Positioning strategy
  • Brand architecture strategy
deliverables
  • Brand architecture assessment​
deliverables
  • Equity & needs assessment
  • Segmentation & targeting
  • Positioning strategy
  • Messaging strategy
deliverables
  • Equity and needs assessment
deliverables
  • Positioning strategy
deliverables
  • Segmentation and targeting
  • Positioning strategy
  • Brand planning
deliverables
  • Equity & needs assessment
  • Segmentation
  • Positioning Strategy
  • Product innovation workshops