About

We’re a very small and very contrarian brand strategy, communications and media boutique. We value your time — and ours — so we won’t insult you with yet another cliché-ridden mission statement remarkable only in its ability not to offend anyone. Instead, we’d like to begin our relationship with a short list of promises we’ll never make…

We’ll never show you how to do things faster, smarter and better. On the contrary: we’ll show you how to slow down, how to let go of things that don’t work, and how to simplify your brand strategies and communications.

We’ll never bore you with incessant drivel about our obsession with ROI because we don’t have one.

We’ll never suggest a proprietary suite of metrics du jour to help define your brand because we don’t have one of those either (besides, marketing metrics never describe things that work for you as much as they describe things that can be sold to you).

We’ll never show you how to automate or otherwise eliminate friction in your brand communications because we know that the real impact of your brand relies on the deliberate friction it creates.

We’ll never describe our thinking as outside-the-box because outside the box is precisely where you’ll find all of the brand clutter currently produced by all of the self-professed, outside-the-box thinkers who can’t even distinguish their own brands, let alone yours.

We never make the above promises in part because everyone else does, in part because they’re meaningless to begin with, and in part because they rarely if ever survive the final sales pitch. We understand, however, that the above list of things we won’t promise is by design short on things we will promise. We promise to keep it that way because we believe that true innovation and common sense almost always begin with subtraction and disintermediation. So think of the above list of things we won’t promise as an exercise in restraint and an overture to true innovation.

We offer our special brand of brand strategy, communications and media consulting on a retainer basis, and are just about to launch our wildly contrarian and entertaining Just BE Workshop, a full-day brand innovation workshop for senior marketing managers and executives. Be forewarned, however: we recommend that you contact us only if you’d like to try something truly different, and only if you’d like to try something that truly works — and always has — for a change.