A multi-award-winning exec brand strategist and advisor to CEOs and CMOs. With classically-trained brand strategy skills and a deep sociological understanding of consumer culture, she helps leaders position their brands for both cultural and commercial growth. Before Tomorrowism, Beth sat on the boards and leadership teams of some of the world’s most-respected creative agencies and strategy consultancies (Wieden+Kennedy, adam&eveDDB, Portas, VICE), advising generation defining brands (inc. Nike, Google, John Lewis, Topshop, Cult Beauty, Uniqlo, L’Oreal, Vans), plus served as a government advisor to ministers in Whitehall. Beth leads all our brand strategy projects, and is also the editor of our digital publishing platform, Pattern Recognition, read by 30,000 brand leaders, academics, futurists and cultural analysts in 40 countries.
Mark has served in exec creative management positions at some of the most revered and awarded design practises and creative agencies (Made Thought, Wednesday, Moving Brands, Mother). With deep craft skills in brand design and art direction, his understanding of visual culture has helped lead and shape the visual codes and brand worlds of some of the most culturally tapped-in luxury, fashion and lifestyle brands (Adidas, Bally, Bang & Olufsen, Barbour, Ellesse, GAP, Kickers, Land Rover, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Stella McCartney, Victoria Beckham). Mark leads all our brand design and visuals projects.
Paul is a highly experienced creative agency leader, having run a mix of award-winning specialist agencies and consultancies across strategy, advertising, design, CX, content and activation. That’s given him a unique vantage point on how to break down and solve all sorts of modern brand growth challenges. Paul runs all our projects, working closely with our client partners to build the right approach, format and team, then ensuring we deliver world-class work.
We’ve spent 20 years advising the leaders of some of our generation’s most iconic brands through complex brand growth challenges, in times of ongoing cultural and commercial upheaval. Our work has won more than 100 awards. We don’t just know how brands grow. We know how brands grow when everything around them is shifting.
We don’t talk around in circles in workshops. Or fill your server with long-winded documents you’ll never read again. We don’t speak in metaphors. And we tell the truth. Our work makes brands more distinctive, aspirational, covetable, memorable, iconic.
The greatest risk in modern business isn’t your competition. It’s cultural irrelevance. And rightly so. Brands that lose step with what’s going on in culture pay a heavy price. Brands with low cultural capital spend more on customer acquisition (Deloitte, 2024). Brands with high cultural capital command price premiums (McKinsey, 2024), and tend to be valued at higher multiples vs. peers with lower cultural significance (Morgan Stanley, 2024).
The most powerful levers of modern brand growth don’t show up in your quarterly report. But they affect what’s in it.
Cultural fluency
Your organisation’s ability to recognise shifts before they surface, by understanding the underlying forces shaping consumer culture. Where others might see random fluctuations, you see patterns. While others react to what’s trending, you’re the tastemaker.
Aesthetic intelligence.
The other AI. The art of expressing that cultural fluency to build brand worlds, codes and behaviours that feel distinctive in a sea of algorithmic sameness.
A pragmatic, efficient consulting model that works. The way we break down and tackle challenges is based on the kind of advice and support we know CEOs + CMOs actually value (we know, we’ve asked a lot of them about this). Sometimes we do everything on this list, sometimes we don’t. Every business is at a different stage with different needs.
Cultural + commercial pattern recognition.
Our tried-and-tested programme of problem diagnosis. Based on commercial analysis, behavioural science, semiotics and foresight, we work with you to decode and clarify your brand’s most critical headwinds and tailwinds. They’re not always what you might expect.
The brand blueprint.
A brand’s x-ray on a page. Or a tablet of stone. Creating shared vision + momentum throughout your organisation; fuelling commercial growth + cultural heat within your audience.
Audience mapping + sizing.
Conventional demographics and personas are too often based on convenient fictions. We’ve built smart ways of opening up new depths of audience understanding, shedding new light on where your growth’s really coming from. And why.
Brand platform.
A powerful, enduring foundation that roots your brand in culture and helps build authority for years to come. We’re the ones who wrote Where Design Lives for Heal’s, Anything But Ordinary for M&S, Don’t Shop Around for LYST, and plenty more.
Brand design.
Visual mediocrity is no longer acceptable. We evolve or rebuild brand worlds, codes + operating systems to make them more culturally fluent + aesthetically intelligent.
Brand health + investment modelling.
So much you could do. What should you do? We’ll help you make better decisions, and build the case for ongoing, effective brand investment and measurement.
Radley reborn: a 360-degree strategic reset
With a new ex-Loewe design atelier in place, Radley was ready for some serious reinvention. A much-loved British heritage brand that had exploded globally during the 2000s, Radley’s core audience was starting to age out. Meanwhile, the elevated everyday accessories category was evolving and expanding rapidly. Radley needed to shed its outdated, homely image and point itself at a new and more style-forward audience…without abandoning its powerful British design roots.
Our brand rejuvenation has propelled Radley into a new peer set, and a new future.
Brand repositioning: we partnered with the CXO and investor team to enact a full strategic reset that respected the brand’s heritage while breaking new ground. Brand platform: a new organisational vision, attitude + culturally-intelligent brand platform to engage a new generation: Stylish Thinking. Audience mapping: Tomorrrowism’s proprietary next-gen audience mapping, sizing and segmentation approach, merging machine learning with cultural anthropology. Brand design: a more elevated, more confident, more differentiated brand world + more distinctive visual and verbal codes. Brand activation strategy: a fresh set of signature acts and deeds that put Radley right where the heat is in its category. Company culture/engagement: cross-business education and embedding to ensure the success of this brand rejuvenation.