During this spring and early summer the board at Stagis as well as all of the Stagis team has been working on our new strategy towards 2020. The board has set the bar in their top-level strategy, where the primary focus is growth in terms of Stagis’ size and earnings as well as some changes towards the output of our processes and the clients we want to serve. We will focus more on the transformation of the companies we work with and help them discover and focus their strengths into meaningful brands, driven by a clear purpose. Our fundamental belief in understanding the authentic identity of the organization will still be our way of informing the process of defining business strategy and business purpose. But our main aim will be our clients’ transformation into living and expressing their purposeful brands.
This spring we defined a new brand promise that is rooted in our history and processes but gives a new focus for the future of Stagis:
We transform your company into a purposeful brand. We discover your inherent potentials and help you live and express your brand. We deliver purpose-driven growth.
A couple of weeks ago the Stagis team gathered for a full day in the kitchen of Cucina Autonoma, a special place that we’ve used many times, which is now changing and relocating. We spent the day understanding challenges and creating the initiatives that will bring our agency forward in the near future. Let me tell you about some of them.
Defining the category in the Nordics
We will build a strong category of strategic brand consultants in the Danish and Scandinavian market. A category that is rather undefined and blurry in Denmark and the nordics – opposed to the UK and US. In Denmark, the formulation of business purpose, brand strategy and brand development is handled by a variety of businesses like classic strategy consultants, design agencies, ad agencies and PR agencies. Most of them would agree that they do branding and brand strategy, but also that it may not be their specialty. We want to build that category more clearly so that CEOs, MDs and boards in Denmark and Scandinavia knows why you need a brand consultancy as your counsellor when you want to grow, change and transform your business. I believe clarity in our type of business will both serve other agencies, our common industry as well as the companies we help transform.
Bigger means better
What we are sure of is that we want to grow Stagis larger, stronger, deeper, more creative and more flexible. We have an ambition of growing our business to become four times bigger in four years. We know that’s ambitious and not easy at all, otherwise most small consultancies would have done it already. I never worked in this business in order to create a large company – I think that in itself isn’t meaningful. But we do run a handful of projects at the same time and we need the flexibility and skills of a larger team, so we’re going to create that the size necessary.
Our focus is brand development
We will continue to deliver a range of solutions that serve a wide range of implementations in the organization of our client. That means our niche is brand identity strategy and brand development which means our execution will continue to be all the ways and places in which a corporate brand unfolds. Some things we produce and deliver ourselves and others we direct and co-create with our skilled freelancers, specialized agencies and production companies.
Deep discovery of who you are
One of the differences between other brand consultants and us, especially in the Scandinavian market, is our focus and practical use of anthropological and ethnographical studies to understand the potential of a company, an organization or their customers or users. There are a number of international and Danish consultancies who do deep qualitative studies such as R&D.
Creative brand agency
I think our creative level hasn’t been as great as it should over he past years. And I think my design team mates agree. We want to heighten the creative level of our design solutions and challenge the creative ambitions of our clients so that their brands are expressed in creative ways that will impact their customers and users and deliver growth.
Corporate Denmark
We want to serve mid size and large companies in Denmark and see our closest markets as our primary focus. The brand transformation that we are capable of orchestrating in businesses such as the bus industry, Hedeselskabet or OKI Printing Solutions can help lots of companies in our region – mid size and large companies in Denmark, no matter if they are operating locally or internationally. We will still help cities, places, ngo’s and public organizations and we are thankful for the attention our work with cities and municipalities get (about 70-100 articles and interviews per year during the past three years) but we do see business as our primary scene.
From graduate to Senior Partner
We want to bring more senior advisors into our business and this year we will be announcing new people on the Stagis team who will help the board and myself develop Stagis further in the coming months and years. That also means we’ve decided to change things a bit in regard to ownership of the agency. In the future there will be partners who are co-owners of the company rather than just one founder and owner. We will continue inviting young talent into our new 2-year graduate program that we launched last year. My hope is that one day we’ll see an intern become consultant and grow into becoming a senior partner at Stagis.
