Delivering opportunities
We uncover opportunities for your brand to elevate commercial impact. Then help you make them happen.
With strategic analysis and creativity, we take a multi-dimensional view of your brand’s potential to elevante commercial impact – with your consumers, customers and people. The result? Love for your brand (a Lovemark) and peak-performing people.
"I highly recommend James to any CEO looking to elevate their brand and business to new heights."
Husayn KassaiCEO & Founder, Quench.ai (former CEO & Founder of Onfido)
Defining purpose, vision & values
Everything starts with purpose. Purpose, values, and vision are essential foundations for any successful business. A clear purpose defines why your organisation exists and guides decision-making, beyond profit. Distinct values shape your culture, inspiring employees, customers, and stakeholders to act with conviction. Vision provides a long-term direction, inspiring innovation and aligning efforts toward a shared goal. Together, they create a cohesive strategic underpinning to business strategy and performance.
Sharpening audience understanding
Customer is boss. Understanding how your customer feels what's important to them is vital to fuel commercial impact. We combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to explore opportunities and provide tangible recommendations that will elevate commercial impact. From studies addressing particular business challenges through to customer segmentation models, we unlock potential in your brand and communications.
Defining growth & innovation strategy
Identifying opportunities for growth is the first step. The next is understanding how to get there, whether it's a series of activities that elevate performance such as sales and marketing strategy, new product / service development or audience understanding. Or something more transformational that requires business model evolution. We make sure you have the support you need to work through the challenge, and create commercial impact.
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Defining brand positioning
Elevating commercial impact depends on changing how your business is perceived – this is called repositioning. And it runs deep. We make sure the strategic underpinning is there: your purpose, beliefs and commercial goals. This all creates strategic alignment for your leadership. Then we project this new positioning into the marketplace, defining who you will be, and building the bridge from who you are today.
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Delivering sales & marketing strategy
An attractive brand experience isn’t enough. It needs to be activated coherently and consistently across all your experience touchpoints. From retail environments to customer communications to advertising it has to be impactful. And because experience works from the inside out, we harness your people to be engaged, inspired and your primary advocates for change.
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Developing new products & services
Fusing vision, customer understanding and creativity is vital for ensuring your products and sevices delight customers and prospects. Whether it's identifying how your existing products and sevices could work harder, or working with you on new ones, we apply the same analytical and creative rigour. Plus we're expert at helping your team work in new ways and nurture innovative ideas through your business.
Structuring sales, marketing & innovation teams
Form follows function. Depending on the opportunities for your business, the structure will need to evolve. Whether it's an evolution in business model, expansion into new markets or a realignment of sales and marketing strategies, new structures will be required. We work with you each step of the way to realise your goals and elevate organisational performance.
Founded in 1847, Booths is an iconic food and drink specialist. Their stores are clustered in
North-West of England, a region renowned for its beauty, culture and exceptional food and drink suppliers.
Booths is famous for its ‘warm northern welcome’ and its expansive, delightful, range of goods. It’s one of the most loved retail experiences in the UK. Broadcaster Kirsty Allsop recently stated that “Clearly all shops need to study Booths”. We then supported the development of a growth strategy, marketing strategy and repositioning the brand. The design with developed in partnership with Smith.
"The Strategy Shop have been a valuable partner to us in clarifying our future opportunities, defining how we create sustainable growth and supporting our delivery with expert insight, advice and guidance... we get extremely high levels of commitment and quality output. They have been vital in supporting our leadership to define and deliver positive and meaningful change."
Nigel Murray, CEO Booths
Quench.ai helps people gain access to the knowledge they need to thrive in their professional lives. With this technology, company knowledge that’s hidden away in thousands of words and hours of recordings can be transformed into immediate actionable insights.
Quench.ai was founded by Husayn Kassai, who previously started and scaled unicorn AI-based identity company Onfido for ten years. Quench.ai’s $5m pre-seed funding round was led by prominent venture capital firms and angel investors, including firstminute capital, Tuesday VC (formerly CrunchFund), BY Venture Partners, Plug and Play Ventures, Notion Capital, IFG, Antler, Ventures Together, Northzone scout, and over fifty founders.
The Strategy Shop helped the Quench CEO and his team to reposition the business for the next stage of their dramatic growth. Working with partner agency Smith, The Strategy Shop repositioned the brand to unlock growth and refreshed the identity.
“We're thrilled with the outcome and already seeing the positive impact on our team and customer engagement.” Husayn Kassai, CEO & Founder, Quench.ai
Nespresso is a world-leader in coffee and revolutionised the home coffee experience with pioneering technologies and a luxury retail experience in their 800 boutiques. Today, Nespresso continues trailblazing in regenerative farming, responsible business and circularity.
James was brought in to lead strategy, working closely with the Creative Partner and Global Client Partner at Nespresso’s creative agency. He was responsible for all strategic output including brand positioning, brand identity, packaging, boutique retail concept design, new product development, sustainability as well as numerous research streams.
James also led the development of the B Corp launch strategy and how to integrate certification into their brand and communications – a milestone for Nespresso and the global B Corp movement.
“James is an exceptional strategist. He is rigorous, methodical, and instils confidence in clients with the recommendations he makes.” Matt Boffey, Chief Strategy Officer Design Bridge & Partners
Deloitte is the world’s leading professional services firm with revenues of $67.2bn and employing 460,000 professionals. For more than 100 years, clients have relied on Deloitte and its predecessor organisations for solutions to their ever-changing needs.
James was engaged to help develop Deloitte’s global brand vision, working closely with their creative agency’s Chair and Global Client Partner . He was responsible for leading research, strategic analysis, interviewing senior leaders and C-suite members around the world, for creating and shaping the vision, and aligning various key stakeholders.
Since implementing its new vision, Deloitte has reinforced its leadership position and grown revenues 29% between 2022 and 2024.
“James naturally builds relationships with senior decision-makers, who quickly come to rely on him for advice and guidance..” Matt Boffey, Chief Strategy Officer Design Bridge & Partners
Testimonials
