Channel architecture
One plan
Five agencies, five plans
SEO plan
CRM plan
Web plan
Analytics plan
Social plan
Nobody in the room to align them
One strategy
Customer journey
Channel architecture
KPIs & sequencing
Diagnosed
Sequenced
Shipped
01 — Why strategy work fails
Six months. A senior team from a name-brand consultancy. A 60-page deck with an executive summary, a market sizing, a 2x2 matrix, and recommendations that everyone nods at. Then the team flies home, the deck sits on a SharePoint, and a year later somebody asks the obvious question: “What ever happened with that strategy work we paid for?”
The deck didn’t fail because it was bad. It failed because nobody owned implementation, and the consultancy that wrote it was structurally incapable of executing it.
The second: the five agencies who don’t talk to each other.
The SEO agency runs its own strategy. The CRM agency runs its own. The web agency, the analytics consultancy, the social team — five plans, five quarterly roadmaps, five sets of priorities, all defending their own remit. The marketing leader who’s supposed to coordinate them has a calendar full of vendor calls and no way to actually align them on what matters.
The strategy that would work is the one that ties them all together. But there’s no one in the room with the standing to say so.
We sit between those two failure modes. Senior enough to see the whole picture, close enough to the execution to make sure the strategy ships. Most strategy work we do comes attached to execution we’ll deliver ourselves. Some of it doesn’t. Both are real services on this page.
02 — Three shapes the work takes
Most engagements blend two or three of these. Knowing which one you actually need is half the work.
01
The 12-month plan, the channel architecture, the customer journey design, the lifecycle program structure. The work that defines what marketing should look like a year from now and what has to happen between now and then. Built for marketing leaders who need a real plan, not a deck — and a partner who’ll come back six months later to adjust it based on what actually shipped.
Multi-month engagements, often run as retainer, with the strategic layer feeding directly into the execution work we deliver alongside.
02
Product launches. Brand activations. Seasonal campaign moments. The strategy work that has a deadline attached — three weeks until Black Friday, six weeks until the new SKU launches, a quarter to land the international expansion. Channel mix, customer journey, KPIs, measurement framework, launch runbook. Time-boxed, focused, executable.
This is where strategy meets execution most directly. We can hand off the plan to your team or run the launch ourselves — usually both.
03
Pure advisory work. Vendor selection (the right DAM, the right CRM, the right CDP). Architecture audits (your stack, your data flows, your tooling decisions). Stack rationalization (which tools to keep, which to retire, which to consolidate). The senior outside voice that calls bullshit, asks the questions internal politics won’t let anyone ask, and writes the recommendation the in-house team can take to leadership.
Most often delivered as a focused engagement where execution sits with the in-house team.
03 — What we do well
The work below shows up across all three engagement types. Some engagements need all five, some need two.
01
Customer journey design
Mapping how real people move through awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention — not the idealized funnel from a marketing textbook. Cross-channel, cross-touchpoint, with the friction points and the moments of truth named explicitly. The kind of journey design that survives contact with the actual customer.
02
Channel architecture and omnichannel design
Which channels do what, where they hand off, where they overlap. The hard work of saying “this channel owns acquisition, this one owns retention, this one stops trying to do both.” Most stacks underperform because every channel is trying to do everything.
03
KPI alignment and measurement frameworks
Before we strategize, we agree on the numbers. What success looks like, in which timeframe, measured how. Vanity metrics demoted, revenue and retention metrics elevated. The unsexy alignment work that prevents the post-strategy “how do we know if it worked” argument.
04
Roadmap and sequencing
What ships first, what ships second, what waits. Most strategies fail at sequencing — they list everything that should happen but not in what order. We separate quick wins from structural changes, name dependencies, and tell you what your team can actually execute alongside running the business.
05
Tough love
The part of the job nobody else will do. Telling the CMO their team isn’t structured to execute the plan they’re approving. Telling the CFO that the budget allocation is wrong. Telling the team that the campaign idea everyone loves probably won’t work, here’s why. Honesty is the rare service most agencies don’t offer.
04 — How we work
Engagement length depends on the shape. Advisory audits run two to four weeks. Launch and campaign strategy runs three to eight weeks. Long-term strategy retainers run quarterly, with strategic reviews at each cycle.
01
Diagnostic
Before we strategize, we map. Current state, performance, organizational reality, competitive landscape. We talk to the team — not just leadership. We pull the numbers — not just the ones in the deck. The strategy is only as good as the diagnosis underneath it.
02
Strategic design
We write the plan. Customer journey, channel architecture, sequencing, KPIs, ownership. Specific, executable, scoped to what your team can actually run. Not 60 pages — usually closer to 15 — because the rest is filler.
03
Implementation handoff or co-execution
Most engagements blend strategy with the execution work we deliver alongside (CRM, web, analytics, CRO, SEO/GEO). Some hand off to internal teams. Either way, we stay close enough to course-correct when reality diverges from the plan, which it always does.
04
Strategic review
For long-term retainers: quarterly review and adjustment. What shipped, what didn’t, what changed in the market, what the data is now telling us. Strategy that doesn’t update is just a deck.
05 — Engagements
Premium B2C, public sector, financial services. The common thread is leaders who needed a strategy that would actually ship — and a partner senior enough to push back when something needed pushing back on.
06 — Related services