Client stories
Read about the impact we’re having on our clients.
A sampling of our B2B clients
Data & insights consultancy
Acquired by Brave Bison during fCMO tenure
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MTM had no marketing function. No team, no strategy, no baseline. Just a handful of activities with nothing to join them up. They needed to understand what marketing should actually look like for a business at their stage, and who their first marketing hire should be.
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When MTM’s CEO first came to Branding Matters, we started with an immersion: a close look at what MTM had been doing, what was working and what the opportunities and quick wins were.
That initial work evolved into a fractional CMO engagement, giving MTM senior marketing leadership and strategic continuity without the overhead of a full-time hire. At the most intensive points, Diane was in the business three days a week. Once the Head of Marketing was in role and operational, we settled into a one-day-a-week rhythm.
Alongside developing a business-aligned marketing strategy and mentoring the Head of Marketing, Diane worked with MTM's leadership team on the foundations across the engagement: vision, mission, value proposition and company messaging.
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MTM was acquired two and a half years into our engagement. Caroline Wren, their CEO, has said that professionalising their marketing function 'may have had a bearing on attracting potential investors including our actual buyers.' That's the kind of outcome that doesn't appear on a KPI dashboard, but it's precisely the reason senior marketing leadership matters at the right moment in a company's story. Other key highlights included:
Strategic marketing plan developed and aligned to MTM's business objectives
First Head of Marketing recruited and mentored, building a capability that could grow with the business
Vision, mission, value proposition and messaging developed with the leadership team and embedded across the company
First company-wide off-site planned, managed and facilitated, with positive feedback and meaningful impact at a pivotal moment
Thought leadership programme built from scratch: e-guides, webinars, a podcast series, infographics and other impactful content driving client engagement and quality inbound leads
HubSpot implemented with lead scoring, plus regular KPI reporting to the leadership team
Growth, value creation and M&A advisory
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Collingwood is a niche consultancy with big ambitions. They want to scale and, ultimately, exit, but the marketing capability wasn't keeping pace with business growth and needs. The team was fragmented: a junior marketing manager who left just as Branding Matters came on board, and two part-time content people who were also carrying responsibilities elsewhere in the business. No joined-up strategy, no clear ownership and no clear path to where they needed to get to.
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When Collingwood came to Branding Matters, Diane started with an immersion that went beyond the marketing audit. It also included a clear-eyed look at the team structure, with recommendations for what the org should look like now and as the business scaled.
From there, she developed the marketing strategy, embedded into the senior leadership team as an active member and led and mentored the existing marketing team through a period of change, while championing an internal candidate for the Head of Marketing role, which she stepped into.
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One of the most immediate wins was something Collingwood had struggled with before Diane joined: getting the leadership team aligned around a shared value proposition, messaging and ICP. That alignment, reached in just a few short weeks, became the foundation for everything that followed.
Other key highlights included:
First joined-up campaign to promote Collingwood's annual industry report, which was also professionalised as part of the engagement, resulting in a doubling of email open and click-through rates on the prior year, nearly 450 report downloads and 60 marketing qualified leads, primarily from an organic campaign with modest paid LinkedIn activity
First-ever half-day value creation summit, an event the business had long wanted to run, but lacked the strategy and organisation to pull off. The summit was oversubscribed and achieved an NPS of 68, an exemplary score for an event of this type. It also solidified Collingwood as the leader in their industry space
HubSpot database cleanup and enrichment, plus lead scoring setup, giving the marketing function the infrastructure to operate as it should
When the time was right, Diane championed the newly promoted Head of Marketing to take her place on the senior leadership team, phasing out the fractional engagement and leaving Collingwood with a high-performing, self-sustaining marketing team
High-end audio production
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Forever Audio, a well-respected industry player with a 20-year trading history was looking to invest in and uplevel its marketing. They had a capable Head of Marketing, but without clear ownership, a defined budget or a strategy to anchor her efforts, she couldn’t make the kind of impact the business needed. The Co-founders realised that they needed senior marketing leadership to come in, build the strategy and give the team support, structure and direction to run with it. Essentially, Diane was engaged to help the leadership team understand what ‘good’ looked like and set them up to make it happen.
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When Forever Audio came to Branding Matters, Diane started with an immersion exercise, understanding the business goals, taking stock of the marketing activity to date, identifying quick wins and mapping out the bigger opportunities. Most of those quick wins were implemented rapidly by the team. From there, working in partnership with the Head of Marketing and other key stakeholders, she developed a marketing strategy aligned to the business goals, agreed a modest marketing budget and embedded into the business as guide and mentor to the Head of Marketing on a light-touch basis, one day every fortnight for a six-month engagement.
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When Diane completed the work with Forever Audio, they had a clear strategy, the bones of a marketing engine and a better supported Head of Marketing pointing in the right direction. Key highlights included:
Marketing strategy developed and aligned to business goals, with a dedicated marketing budget agreed for the first time
An evolved value proposition, messaging and tone of voice developed and aligned with the leadership team, giving the business a consistent voice across all its marketing activities
Recommended Zoho Marketing Plus implementation, plus Apollo to enrich the current database and build a stronger prospect list and championed the development of several key nurture tracks
First thought leadership e-guide scoped and in development, supported by a social media campaign and webinar, the kind of content programme the business hadn't previously attempted
Performance marketing, data and AI innovation consultancy
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Pierian's offering is genuinely complex, spanning data, AI, performance marketing and ecommerce across a consult, create and operate model. The team knew what they did exceptionally well. What they needed was a sharper way to position and articulate it, particularly to martech buyers: a part of the business they wanted to dial up. They brought in Branding Matters for a focused, one-off project to address exactly that.
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Diane ran a full-day co-creation workshop with the Pierian team, working through the value proposition and messaging collaboratively. She followed that with desk research and competitive and market analysis, then developed a refined value proposition, messaging framework and, critically, a positioning that could cut through.
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The positioning Diane developed: ‘Data.Driven.’ resonated so strongly with the Pierian leadership that they adopted it not just for the martech proposition it was originally created for, but across the business as a whole. When a positioning lands like that, it means it's captured something true about what the company actually is, not just what it wanted to say.
A sampling of our B2C clients
Longevity-focused welltech company
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Vidavii didn't exist yet. Not as a brand, not as a business. The founders had a compelling concept: to build a unique 30-minute biohacking circuit, bringing together cutting-edge longevity devices in a single central London space. Before anything else, they needed a brand credible enough to build a business on. They needed a name, an identity and a strategic foundation that could carry them through launch and beyond. They came to Branding Matters for brand strategy.
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Diane held workshops with the founders and their immediate team to establish the business goals, define what the brand needed to do and map out every dimension of the identity, from tone of voice and visual direction to values, personality and brand essence.
From that foundation, she developed the full brand strategy, including the brand essence that became the strapline: 'Crave feeling.' She then created a shortlist of branding agencies suited to the brief and budget, ran the selection process, appointed the chosen agency, briefed them and managed their work through to completion, resulting in the Vidavii name, brand identity and full asset suite.
One of the standout outputs was a simple three-word schema for the biohacking devices that make up the Vidavii circuit: breathe, squeeze and freeze. Easy to understand, easy to talk about and memorable. The framework was picked up quickly by press and on social media, with visitors name-checking their favourite part of the circuit.
Diane also managed the integration of the brand throughout the physical space as it was being built, and advised on launch and ongoing marketing for a short period of time.
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Full brand strategy developed from zero: values, personality, tone of voice, visual direction and brand essence
Brand name (Vidavii) and complete identity system created, from agency brief through to delivery
Strapline developed: 'Crave feeling'
'Breathe, squeeze and freeze' device schema for the circuit that gave the brand a simple, sharable language people could engage with, talk about and remember
Brand applied and managed throughout the physical space build
Launch and marketing advisory
AI language learning app
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Aimigo, then trading as Gymglish, had built a successful language learning app, but growth had stalled. Ahead of a key board meeting, the business needed an honest, rapid assessment of where they stood across marketing, sales, customer service and partnerships, and clear recommendations on what to change, where to invest and how to allocate the marketing budget more effectively.
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Digital and ecommerce strategist Gabrielle Hase called upon Branding Matters to bring complementary expertise to the brief. Together, they travelled to Paris for a concentrated programme of workshops, one-to-ones and team sessions with the CEO, founders, leadership and marketing team. They synthesized everything they learned and came back with specific, prioritised recommendations.
One stood out above the rest: rather than continuing to invest in the Gymglish brand, Diane and Gabrielle recommended the business consolidate behind Aimigo, the name planned for their new AI-powered app and build from there. The client agreed and acted on it immediately.
A follow-on project followed: with multiple brands in their language learning portfolio, Aimigo needed an architecture that made sense now and could accommodate planned growth. Diane led that work, developing a framework built to scale.
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Branding Matters delivered:
A rapid cross-functional audit across marketing, sales, customer service and partnerships, synthesized into clear prioritised recommendations for the board (this engagement was conducted in partnership with Soleberry and became the prototype for what is now the Paceworks offering)
Marketing budget analysis and reallocation recommendations
Strategic recommendation to rebrand to Aimigo adopted and actioned immediately
Brand architecture developed across the language learning portfolio, designed for current clarity and future growth