Design, Brand, and Product Strategy

I engage with a range of strategic methodologies to provide guidance and culturally-rooted strategic thinking on brand identity, product innovation, packaging and experience design, and comms. I have wide ranging experience, in everything from fashion & sportswear, to telecoms and tech, to ultra luxury travel, to food, drink, and hospitality. I help clients create, package, brand, and market products that showcase their values and communicate meaningfully and uniquely to drive consumer belief and commercial growth.

I believe that brands are a fundamental part of our culture, and that acknowledging this helps brand owners and marketers make more meaningful and successful brands and products. Successful brands are constantly engaged with culture - reacting to it, evolving with it, and even co-creating culture with consumers. When brands recognise this, they’re better equipped to stay relevant, and maintain their commercial goals by being an integral part of peoples’ lives.

I am particularly interested in how anthropology, deep cultural thinking, and thoughtfully observing less overtly articulated beliefs and influences can help develop meaningful and pragmatic products and strategies, and help develop truly unique and impactful design solutions. Beyond aligning with trends, I want to know how we can create real emotional and cultural connections with people, no matter what the medium is.

Methodologies:

We are all immersed in visual, language, and sensory patterns all the time, and participate in their evolution and meaning. Semiotics is invaluable for brands to understand the subconscious cultural influences on consumers and uncover what language and design is communicating.
I use my anthropological training, background in commercial semiotics, and permanently culturally curious eye to observe the world around us provides an opportunity to understand what usually goes unsaid. Simply put, semiotic analysis is cultural pattern recognition blended with ethnographic research. I use this methodology to identify shifts in visual, material, and linguistic culture and make sense of them on a deeper level.
Traditional qual and quant methodologies often miss important elements that can drive brand performance, because many people are not able to articulate explicitly how they interpret the signs around them. Semiotic analysis can help brands understand what their current design and language is communicating (and which elements are more or less useful to their strategic goals), or it can help design teams to identify key signs and symbols to be leveraged in a redesign.
Closely related to semiotics, cultural analysis and cultural foresight are invaluable for helping brands and businesses understand the deeper emotional and social needs of consumers, how brands can find unique and untapped ways of meeting these needs, and how brands will need to adapt to stay relevant and connected to peoples’ lives.
Using my anthropology training and consumer insight background I am experienced in conducting cultural analysis across a huge range of topics and markets, and helping to uncover the key narratives and trends that brands need to understand to adapt and continue to be successful as consumers’ needs and preferences change alongside the culture they’re immersed in.
With my experience in insight and brand design agencies I work collaboratively to translate commercial challenges and business objectives into actionable creative briefs and develop clear strategic guidance for brands - whether starting a brand from the ground up, working on an innovation pipeline, or evolving a brand identity and offering.
My strategy outputs range from product strategy and range architecture, to developing creative principles and platforms for brand ID and campaigns, to working alongside designers to develop design principles that inform packaging design, interiors, CX, and more.

Selected Strategic Work:

EE - telco retail redefined

EE was undergoing a transition from being positioned as a telco brand to tech brand, and as part of this wider strategy needed to redefine their retail experience. Working as part of a wider design team at Dalziel & Pow, I used consumer insight and stakeholder interviews to define the underlying purpose of empowering consumers and developing the retail platform "here you can". Using this platform I built creative principles that guided the design principles and experience design, including services offered, omnichannel consumer journey, employee guidance,and physical retail environment design. Ultimately we created the award winning EE studio which also informed smaller store concepts.

New Balance - Defining a cultural narrative for a new creative platform

New Balance had identified a key value they wanted to own to showcase their unique role in the fashion & sports category and continue their recent growth success. Working with New Balance and VMLY&R, I led a project using semiotics & cultural analysis to develop three creative territories of their chosen value that also encompassed The Beauty of Sport. We worked collaboratively to prioritise a territory, which was then taken forward by VMLY&R to use as a platform for both internal alignment and consumer-facing comms.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by New Balance (@newbalance)

Guinness - Storehouse Ingredients Experience Redesign

Guinness wanted to update its Storehouse experience that tells the story of how Guinness is still made from four simple ingredients, and how they source those ingredients. The objectives of the update where to make it feel contemporary and engaging for today’s audience, but also to improve the flow of visitors through the space without sacrificing on storytelling. Working with the design team at Dalziel & Pow, I helped to redefine the narrative in a way that was simple, engaging, and told a brand-centric story rooted in heritage and Guinness’ commitment to regenerative farming today. The new narrative is woven through and helped guide the physical and visual design of the space, which was successfully rolled out in 2024.

Defining territories for a global wine brand

A leading global wine brand was launching a new Pinot Grigio into the US market, with the goal of winning against competitors in the luxury price point space. In order to help the new brand clearly communicate its value as a luxury Italian white wine, while being distinctive and contemporary on shelf, I conducted a semiotics and cultural analysis project to guide brand and design development. The project included a cultural analysis of the codes of Italian Luxury in the US market, to understand how the new brand should look and act to showcase its identity in a meaningful and contemporary way for consumers. This was followed by an audit of the competitive landscape to ensure the new brand would be truly unique. Ultimately I helped define 3 key territories of Italian Luxury that the brand could test and choose from to take forward. Each territory provided guidelines for developing a creative platform for the new brand, including design, typography, tone of voice, and web and social media content strategy.