FAST
Most ad agencies and brand consultancies operate under a model we call the marathon of sprints. Every part of the process is done as quickly as possible, which means that half-baked strategy underpins rushed creative which is emailed to someone’s boss’s boss. Teams and clients suffer through round after endless round of work, running laps rather than moving forward, until they burn out.
NEEDS
At Tortoise, we recognize that to run a race, you have to lay the road first. That’s a long slow unglamorous laborious process, and nobody gets a gold medal at the end. But then there’s a road that’ll stand the test of time.
We’re paving the way, so you know where to run.
SLOW
We’ve thought long and hard about branding and marketing, and distilled our hard-won learning to lay a solid foundation for what comes next. We aim to not just solve problems, but to help you — our clients, our peers, even our bitter rivals — understand how you can solve them better.
We think about
Brand strategy
How do you decide what you want your brand to mean to your audiences? How do you make a plan to actually build that reputation? And most importantly of all, how do you get the people that influence that reputation to believe in the plan and lead with it?
Have these questions? Find simple, useful advice in our brand strategy 101 article.
Brand architecture
How do you build a reputation across a number of brands? How do you use the associations they build to help one another? What kinds of relationships should they have, and how can you weave new or acquired brands into that tapestry? And what the hell is a ‘house of brands’ supposed to be, anyway?
Get started with our brand architecture 101 article.
Brand naming
How do you decide what single concept your brand should be most associated with forever? What do you do if there are three or four ideas you want to convey? How do you make strategic decisions about creative style, and at the end of the day, how do you own it?
Get started with our brand naming 101 article, then dig in with our naming deep-dives.
Let’s think together
Have questions? Have ideas? Need help?
Feeling disconnected in the remote-hybrid age?
Whether you’ve been thinking about this stuff for years, or you’re just engaging with it for the first time, we’d love to hear from you and share our thoughts.
Join our Slack to chat live with like-minded branding professionals around the world, or check out other ways to connect with the Tortoise community.