Case study 06
Market One
- Research and analysis
- Brand strategy
- Verbal identity
- Copywriting
- Project direction
Market One asked for a new website. Two meetings in, everyone in the room could see the website was the last problem to solve, not the first.
Visit the siteContext
The firm was repositioning itself. It had spent fifteen years building commercial strategy for companies like AB InBev, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Walmart, across more than twenty countries, and it was moving from Latin America toward a global footprint.
The promise of consulting led by big names was not the one it wanted to make. Market One was betting on the opposite: hands on, end to end, leaner, closer to the last mile. None of that had been put into words yet, and a new site built on an unresolved position would have shipped the old company in new packaging.
What I did
I stopped the project before it started.
The repositioning they were taking on reached the deepest roots of the brand. It needed a new mindset understood first and named second, which meant being honest with ourselves and questioning what we thought we knew about the company. We rebuilt the scope, moved the dates, and started over: six workshops with the managing partners, interviews, benchmarks and data analysis, across six months.
Consultant to consultant, they understood the decision. It changed the project and it changed both teams.
What came out of the process was a company that had to stop competing on reputation and start competing on how it works. I wrote that into a manifesto, a tagline, a message matrix by audience and a set of storytelling guidelines, and directed the visual identity toward the same idea.
Companies today need consultants who move faster, read sharper, and work with fresher frameworks in a reality that no longer is, but is becoming, and will be something else in eighteen months.
The tagline
It took two rounds. The first was descriptive: four words explaining what the company does and how. The client pushed back, and they were right. What the brand needed was not an explanation but the energy I had heard in every interview.
Nothing was lost. Today both live on their homepage, one above the other. Partners End-to-End sits over Fuel your Commercial Journey, and the first one closes the site in the footer.
Two arguments
On disruption, the client wanted something that broke everything and I argued for a middle point: enough to stand apart in a sector where everyone communicates alike, not so much that the firm had to pretend to be something it was not. I held the position and the middle point won.
On colour I lost, and I should have. We favoured a cooler palette; several partners fell for an indigo almost nobody in the industry was using. The identity makes it obvious which way we went. Listening to the client is not the same as agreeing with them, and knowing which one a moment calls for is most of the job.
After the launch
In June 2025, four months after the new site went live, Market One joined Andersen Consulting as a collaborating firm. I did not close that deal and I will not pretend otherwise. What I can point to is the language: in the announcement, the co-founder described the company the way the new positioning had defined it, hands on, end to end, present until the results are in.
A brand works when the founders stop reading it and start speaking it.
Results
In numbers
6
workshops with the managing partners, across six months of strategy work before a single page was designed
In meaning
They came for a website and left with a brand.
The scope was rebuilt before the first deliverable, and the repositioning came first.
In permanence
Both taglines are still live.
One in the hero, one in the footer. Months after the launch, the brand a global platform evaluated was the one we had just built.
Delivered
- Research and analysis
- Brand strategy
- 58 page brand manual
- Manifesto
- Tagline
- Messaging by audience
- Storytelling guidelines
- Visual identity direction
- Communications plan
- Website architecture
Fuel your Commercial Journey
Tagline written for the brand
You added tremendous value to the huge challenge we had of rediscovering our essence and relaunching our positioning and value proposition.