BRAND CONSULTING

Brand on the Inside.

Most agencies start with the logo. Richard starts with your people. Everything a company does and says should be driven by, and aligned to, its brand. Especially its culture.

Start a consulting conversation → Richard’s Brand Framework →

Not what you need? If you’re after a speaker rather than a consulting engagement, see Keynotes → or Workshops →

Richard’s Brand Framework The BIP Model™

Discovery
Strategy
Identity
Launch

Explore the framework →

Why this isn’t just a consulting pitch

Branding starts in the boardroom, not in the marketing department.

Twenty-two years ago, Richard walked away from traditional advertising to pioneer a different way of building brands. Instead of starting with logos, taglines and campaigns, he starts with the people who lead the organisation. Because a brand isn’t created by marketing. It’s created by behaviour, shaped by leadership and brought to life through culture. That approach has helped organisations build stronger, more aligned brands and earned Richard a place among the world’s Top 30 Brand Gurus for 14 consecutive years.

A new way of branding

Richard spent 18 years learning branding. The next 22 redefining it.

SAATCHI & SAATCHI LONDON · OGILVY & MATHER · DDB · MCCANN ERICKSON · GEORGE PATTERSON PARTNERS

Richard spent the first 18 years of his career inside some of the world’s leading agencies, helping build some of the world’s best-known brands. But he came to realise that while advertising could make a brand promise, only the organisation could keep it.

For the past 22 years, Richard has worked directly with CEOs, executive teams, HR and marketing to build brands from the inside out. Because the strongest brands aren’t created by better marketing. They’re created when leadership defines who the organisation is, and every part of the business brings that identity to life.

Is this you?

This is for you if…

New CEO. New direction.
Preparing for a rebrand.
Merger or acquisition.
Rapid growth.
Culture has drifted.
Leadership isn’t aligned.
Mixed messages across the business.
The brand no longer fits.
Everyone’s busy. No one’s united.
You need one clear story.

The Method: every engagement runs on the BIP Model™. See the four stages →

The Methodology

The same framework. Built for an organisation, not a person.

This is the first time it’s had a name, but not the first time it’s been used. It’s the system behind QBE’s culture change, CSIRO’s rebrand, and Hunter Water’s people development. At the organisational level, the BIP Model™ becomes the actual structure of the engagement: not just a way of thinking about the problem, but the order in which the work gets done.

Discovery

Brand Discovery Phase

One-on-one conversations with leadership: CEO, MD, the executive team, HR and marketing, sometimes board members, occasionally clients. Richard calls these his “red wine, midnight conversations”: not workshop platitudes, but real talk about hopes, fears, and what the place is actually for. Depending on the size of the organisation, this can be six conversations or forty; CSIRO and RSPCA both ran to around 40. Everyone interviewed gets a written Discovery Report back. This phase is billable, and it’s usually the most time-consuming part of the whole engagement, deliberately. Ends with absolute clarity on who you actually are, not who the website says you are.

Strategy

Positioning & Architecture

Richard builds a “straw man”: a deliberately provocative early draft, designed to provoke reaction, not to be agreed with quietly. He pressure-tests it first with the main stakeholder (usually the CEO or MD) so the room isn’t cold. Then comes what Richard calls the Brand Day Out: a two-to-four-hour, full-executive-team workshop, run as a consensus process, surfacing the contradictions and unspoken disagreements that always exist between what different leaders say privately. Everyone leaves aligned, because everyone was heard. The output is the Business Brand Blueprint: vision, mission, purpose, essence, target audience and promise, written down and signed off by the whole leadership team, not handed down by marketing.

Identity

Visual & Verbal Identity

Where needed, the Business Brand Blueprint becomes the creative brief: a designer is briefed directly from it, usually with three directions to react to (one safe, one bold, one in between) before the organisation commits to one. The result is built out into a full set of guidelines, so the identity stays consistent at scale (CSIRO’s ran to roughly 300 pages). Not every engagement needs this stage; some, like Sunnyfield’s, are culture-only and skip it entirely.

Launch

Culture, Activation & Follow-Up

The hardest and most important phase, and it runs in two directions at once. Brand on the Inside: a staff workshop, not a single all-staff briefing, but teams working through what behaviours need to start, stop, and continue to make the new values real, then reporting back. Many engagements include a small “brand book” each person signs, with their own personal commitment written into it. Brand on the Outside: turning the same Business Brand Blueprint into market-facing positioning, story, and value proposition, activated through marketing, comms, sales collateral, and campaign. Launch doesn’t end at the launch event: it now includes structured Brand Follow-Up, a check-in at 90 days, and again at six months, on whether the brand is actually sticking, inside and outside. A deliberate, scheduled return to the conversation, not a final report that goes in a drawer.

Services

Five ways Richard works with organisations and leaders.

Service 01

WHEN YOU NEED CLARITY BEFORE ACTING

BIP Assessment & Diagnostics

Problem

You suspect there’s a brand or culture problem but don’t have hard evidence to bring to the board.

Fix

A structured BIP Model™ audit across your organisation: a measured score, not just a gut feeling.

Outcome

Evidence you can take to leadership, with a clear next step attached.
Service 02

WHEN YOUR POSITIONING NEEDS RESETTING

Brand & Positioning Reboot

Problem

Your brand makes sense on paper but isn’t believed or felt, by your people or your market.

Fix

A full Discovery and Strategy process, the first two stages of the BIP Model™, resulting in a brand position your leadership team actually believes, because they helped build it.

Outcome

A brand strategy that drives decisions, not just decoration.
Service 03

WHEN YOUR ORGANISATION IS BECOMING MORE COMPLEX

Brand Strategy & Architecture

Problem

You’re growing, merging, or repositioning, and your current brand architecture can’t hold the complexity.

Fix

The same rebrand and repositioning process behind Data61’s and Breast Cancer Trials’ full identity transformations, applied to your structure.

Outcome

An architecture that scales with the business instead of constraining it.
Service 04

WHEN YOUR CULTURE NEEDS ALIGNING

Culture & People Alignment

Problem

What you say about your culture in the all-staff deck isn’t what your people experience on a Monday.

Fix

The Launch stage of the BIP Model™, closing the gap between stated values and lived behaviour, the same work behind Munich Re’s people development programme and Sunnyfield’s culture-only engagement.

Outcome

A culture that doesn’t need a poster to remind people what it stands for.
Service 05

Personal Brand & Executive Coaching

Problem

You’ve spent your career building everyone else’s brand: your team’s, your company’s, your clients’. And never your own. In every room you walk into, you’re being branded anyway, by your behaviour, your language, your decisions. The only question is whether it’s deliberate.

Fix

The same discovery process Richard runs for organisations, run one-on-one: a direct conversation, a blank pad, the real questions: who are you when the job title comes off, what do you actually want, what’s in the way. No room, no workshop. Just the two of you and the truth.

Outcome

A personal brand audit as rigorous as the one you’d commission for the business: the foundation for influence, trust and legacy.

FAQ

Questions worth asking.

How is this different from a typical brand agency?

Agencies usually start with the logo and the campaign. Richard starts with leadership and culture: the brand strategy comes from the inside, and the visual identity, if needed, follows from it. He also works directly with your executive team, not through layers of account management.

How long does an engagement typically run?

This depends on scope: a Brand & Positioning Reboot and a full Culture & People Alignment programme run on different timelines, and a sharpening-the-saw refresh is faster than a complete rebrand. Richard scopes this directly with you after the first conversation, not with a generic package.

Do we need to commit to a full rebrand?

No. Many engagements start with a BIP Assessment & Diagnostic, a clear, evidence-based picture of where the gaps are, before any decision about a fuller programme is made. Others are culture-only from the start, with no marketing or visual work at all.

Does Richard work with our marketing team, or instead of them?

With them. The BIP Model™ treats brand as a leadership responsibility, not a replacement for your marketing function. Richard’s work gives your marketing team a clearer, more defensible strategy to execute.

What if our leadership team doesn’t agree on what our brand should be?

That disagreement is usually exactly why you need this process, not a reason to avoid it. The Discovery phase, and the Brand Day Out that follows it, is built specifically to surface and resolve that kind of misalignment in the room, not paper over it.

Do you work with individual leaders, not just organisations?

Yes, see Personal Brand & Executive Coaching above. Same process, one-on-one.

Brand on the Inside.

Branding starts in the boardroom, not in the marketing department.

Richard spent 18 years learning branding. The next 22 redefining it.

This is for you if…

The same framework. Built for an organisation, not a person.

Five ways Richard works with organisations and leaders.

BIP Assessment & Diagnostics

Brand & Positioning Reboot

Brand Strategy & Architecture

Culture & People Alignment

Personal Brand & Executive Coaching

Questions worth asking.

Don’t take his word for it.

Ready to back the human being inside the human doing?