Consumer Brands & DTC

The most expensive problem in consumer growth is a brand that has to explain itself in every ad. Positioning fixes that: who the brand is for, what it is replacing in their life, and the one thing it should be believed for. We build it from customer interviews, category analysis and the language buyers actually use, not from a workshop consensus.

For consumer brands the sharpest positions usually come from an occasion, an identity or a tension rather than a product attribute. Attributes get copied within a season; a position in someone's head does not.

The output is a decision and a messaging architecture the whole team can use — the core narrative, the proof behind it, and the phrases to avoid because they belong to somebody else.

With platform targeting largely commoditised, creative is the targeting. Accounts that produce a few assets a quarter cannot compete with accounts producing dozens, so we build a creative pipeline: hypotheses drawn from why people buy and why they hesitate, formats spanning static, UGC-style video, founder-to-camera, demo and review-led, and a testing cadence that keeps the account learning.

Account structure is consolidated so campaigns exit the learning phase, budget is split deliberately across prospecting, retargeting and retention, and a fixed share is reserved for testing so new creative always has somewhere to run.

Creator partnerships feed the same machine. The most valuable output of a creator programme is often not the reach but the rights-cleared assets, which routinely outperform brand-produced work when boosted in paid social at a fraction of studio cost.

Most DTC brands can buy a first order profitably at small volume and cannot at scale. We model contribution margin by product and by cohort, establish what a customer is worth over twelve to eighteen months rather than one order, and set acquisition targets against that number.

That model then dictates the growth plan: which products to lead acquisition with, where bundling or subscription changes the maths, what discounting is actually costing, and at what blended acquisition cost scaling stops being sensible.

We report on contribution after ad spend against total revenue, with platform metrics as diagnostics. Where budget justifies it we validate incrementality with geo or holdout testing, because the gap between claimed and actual contribution is frequently the difference between profit and loss.

Repeat purchase rate decides whether a consumer brand compounds or treadmills. Lifecycle marketing across email and SMS — welcome, abandonment, post-purchase, replenishment, winback and VIP — is the cheapest revenue in the business and is usually running on defaults.

We build flows around real behaviour: replenishment timed to actual consumption, cross-sell based on what customers genuinely buy next, and segmentation that stops loyal customers being discounted at unnecessarily.

Higher lifetime value then buys acquisition headroom. Knowing your eighteen-month value lets you outbid competitors still optimising to first-purchase return, which is the most durable advantage available in a crowded category.

Brands entirely dependent on paid acquisition are renting their growth. Organic search, content, community, PR and creator relationships build demand you own, and they are cheapest to build before you need them.

We fund that work separately from performance budget and measure it on branded search volume, direct traffic share and repeat purchase rate, so it does not get cut the first time last-click reporting fails to credit it.