Lessons from a Corporate Brand and Growth Strategist

Fifteen Years, One Throughline

Fifteen years across three agencies, Ogilvy, Axcess Worldwide, and Huge, working with clients like Coca-Cola, Rolls-Royce, and Norwegian Cruise Lines, taught the same lesson in a dozen different forms: strategy is the discipline of saying no to almost everything so the few right moves can actually land. Clients rarely lacked ideas. They lacked a filter for which ideas deserved the budget, the timeline, and the organizational attention required to execute well.

Good strategists spend most of their time removing options, not generating them. That's the part of the job that looks the least glamorous and matters the most.

What Fortune 100 Brands Get Right

Working inside brands the size of Coca-Cola and Rolls-Royce exposes a pattern smaller brands often miss: the biggest, most established names are usually more disciplined about consistency than they are creative about any single campaign. A recognizable brand voice, applied relentlessly across every touchpoint for years, builds more equity than any individual clever execution.

The lesson that traveled with me from those rooms: clients who wanted to chase the next big creative idea before the last one had time to build recognition were, more often than not, working against their own growth.

What the Field Taught That the Agency Didn't

Co-founding Edges of Earth and spending three years documenting frontline conservation work across 50+ countries added a dimension agency work rarely touches: direct proximity to the actual people a strategy is meant to reach. Agency strategy is built largely from research decks and focus groups. Field documentation is built from sitting with someone like Yosef, who rebuilt his fishing livelihood around coral restoration after dynamite fishing collapsed his reef, and hearing directly what changed his mind and what didn't.

That proximity reshaped how I think about strategy work now. A brand strategy built entirely from secondary research misses the texture that direct observation catches: the specific objection, the specific moment of trust, the specific detail that makes a message land instead of just sounding right.

A Framework for Strategists Starting Out

Here's what I'd tell someone early in a brand or growth strategy career.

Common Mistakes

• Generating more ideas instead of filtering to the few that deserve investment. Volume of ideas rarely correlates with quality of strategy.
• Chasing a new creative concept before the last one had time to build recognition. Consistency compounds. Novelty for its own sake resets that compounding to zero.
• Building strategy entirely from secondary research. Research decks and focus groups miss the texture that direct exposure to the audience catches.
• Treating client relationships as one-off projects. Long-term trust produces better strategy than a series of disconnected engagements.