Liquid Agency
Strategy Director
Project engagement
2022-2023
SaaS, Enterprise security
Brand strategy, brand positioning, brand architecture, nomenclature strategy, activation planning
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ROLE
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TIMEFRAME
INDUSTRY
KEYWORDS
Material and market audits, stakeholder interviews, co-creative workshops, qualitative customer validation
METHODS
Splunk, an enterprise global SaaS company that offers a platform solution for security and observability, came to Liquid in 2022 looking for help defining a new brand strategy, brand architecture, and nomenclature strategy.
The story of this project is really a story of communication and orchestration. Splunk, like many growing companies of its size, has a lot of moving parts, and finding the right combination of stakeholders, champions, and internal knowledge holders proved to be the central task. By partnering extremely closely with our core project group on Splunk’s brand team, we were able to build relationships and consensus with a highly dynamic group of people from across the organization, each with their own set of priorities, opinions, and experiences with the brand.
After conducting a round of discovery to uncover what the positioning and architecture opportunities were for the company, we worked through a series of co-creative workshops to generate the inputs we’d need to synthesize a direction. The deep integration between my team and the Splunk team to not only define the strategic elements, but also to develop the narrative that the team would use to communicate the recommendation with executive leadership. We also co-created a holistic activation plan for bringing the direction to life following the launch of the new direction at their employee kickoff event.
OVERVIEW
Launched new brand purpose and strategy at employee kickoff in March 2023, new purpose and architecture rolled out externally in the subsequent months
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Liquid Agency
Strategy Director
Multi-year relationship
2019-2023
SaaS, User research
Brand strategy, brand positioning, category definition, brand messaging
Material and market audits, stakeholder interviews, co-creative workshops, qualitative customer validation
METHODS
Liquid has been UserTesting’s strategic brand partner since 2019, with a wide ranging set of initiatives over that time. We started the relationship in an unusual way: rather than defining a brand position and strategy, then communicating to market, we did it in reverse. With a couple key external drivers, the UT team needed to get some refreshed messaging out to the market—but didn’t know what it should be, or how it would impact their strategy for the following years. So we took a test-and-learn approach—creating a set of positioning concepts that were based on extant research and some rapid auditing. That campaign established a key brand concept that UT continues to own today: “human insight”.
While human insight connected strongly with UT’s audiences, and drove success in its marketing efforts, we knew that it wasn’t enough to anchor the brand strategy for the next chapter. So we partnered to examine not only where the brand had permission to play, but also how its offerings fit into the culture, workflow, and broader trends in the way its audiences accomplished their goals. This work, done in 2020 as the world transitioned to remote-first work, was not only an extension of our initial test-and-learn, but also marked our first foray into developing and facilitating co-creative workshops (a key Liquid methodology) in an online environment using Zoom and Miro.
Three years later, with years of campaign and media under our belt, UT came to another inflection point. They had successfully IPO’d in 2021, but the market had shifted under them, and they were acquired by private equity in 2022, and merged with the number two brand in the category—UserZoom. So we were given a rare opportunity: evaluate and evolve a brand that had just been created two years before, and define the category that that brand would lead. To get it right, we orchestrated efforts between ourselves and two other specialist agencies to collectively examine the brand, the category, and the product that would result from the merger of the two brands.
OVERVIEW
KEY OUTCOMES
Brand positioned for IPO in 2021, defined and owned a leadership position in its category, led to acquisition and privatization in 2022, strong reputational foundation for next chapter of growth
Liquid Agency
Strategy Director
Multi-year relationship
2019-2022
CPG
Brand strategy, brand positioning, Cx strategy, brand messaging, product portfolio strategy
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ROLE
TYPE
TIMEFRAME
INDUSTRY
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Material and market audits, stakeholder interviews, co-creative workshops, qualitative customer validation, brand tracking, persona development, journey mapping
METHODS
Columbia River Knife and Tool—CRKT—is a family founded company that has been making knives and tools in collaboration with some of the world’s best custom knife designers for the last 40+ years. They came to Liquid with a clear, audacious goal: help us become a customer-centric, premium brand, delivered through an omnichannel strategy.
Over the course of ~18 months, we engaged in a deep, thorough body of work that explored all the facets of what it would take for CRKT to begin this transformation—one that touched every component of the organization. Our research and discovery included not only market and competitive analysis, but brand tracking, persona creation, social listening, qualitative and quantitative efforts, financial studies (through a key partner agency), and sales data analysis. Each of the research efforts was orchestrated together—enabling us to build correlations and validations across multiple methods, and ensure a high degree of confidence in our resulting insights.
Among many questions and strategies that we tackled over the course of the engagements, one of the essential existential questions that we needed to solve was “What does it mean to be a premium brand—and what is a premium knife?” Knife enthusiasts, like enthusiasts of other stripes, are a well-educated, highly opinionated community, with clear (though often conflicting) points of view. We needed to give CRKT’s product team some direction, enabling them to create a portfolio that would support the brand’s new direction. But how would they know if they products they designed met the perceptual expectations of their audiences? To do this, we turned to an intersection of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. We blended findings from brand tracking and concept testing (quant methods) with 1-1 qualitative interviews, social listening, and competitive analysis (qual methods), to create a rubric that the product team could use to apply some empirical thinking to a highly subjective challenge. We modeled a number of different factors, and created weights for things like blade material, country of origin, product family and others. We then validated this rubric by evaluating the portfolios of CRKT’s key competitors, to map out where the product opportunities were.
OVERVIEW
KEY OUTCOMES
Delivered a comprehensive set of tools and strategies for the CRKT team to own and activate, the first phase of the brand evolution was launched in Q2 2023.
Liquid Agency
Strategy Director
Multi-year relationship
2018-2020
SaaS, Enterprise software
Brand architecture, service design, organizational design, messaging, experience design, governance
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ROLE
TYPE
TIMEFRAME
INDUSTRY
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Material and market audits, stakeholder interviews, co-creative workshops, qualitative customer validation
METHODS
Over the course of multiple years, we had the opportunity to partner with ServiceNow on a number of engagements that ranged from internal visioning and planning to external brand architecture to organizational service design. I’ve provided a couple highlights below of some key engagements.
For ServiceNow’s internal innovation team, at the time called NowX, we partnered with the global team leadership to help them define the team’s reason for being, ways of working, service offerings, and value proposition. Through a series of co-creative workshops, we created a team charter, mapped out how it would interact with its internal customers, and the different working models that it could use to provide value to everyone from a discrete business unit to the executive briefing center.
For ServiceNow’s product content team, a group comprised of UX and technical writers who owned the customer-facing product documentation for the ServiceNow platform, we partnered to not only define a charter and ways of working, bringing their team workflows and tooling into a more modern place through service design, but also cast a vision for what the product documentation experience of the future could be like for customers through the creation of experience principles and prototypes. The result was a refreshed and revitalized team, with modernized approaches and a shared vision for not only how to do their work, but how to do it well.
For ServiceNow’s brand team, we worked to create a new brand architecture and nomenclature strategy, which then grew into the design and implementation of a naming governance model. At the time, ServiceNow’s portfolio had over 700 named components, from hero products to features, and there was no group or system in place to determine how, why, or what a name should be. With the development of the architecture and the nomenclature strategy in place, we conducted extensive research through SME interviews, audits, and other secondary methodologies to create a governance system that would enable global ServiceNow employees to have a clear, unified process for creating, vetting, and approving names. Tools for ideation, evaluation, and processes for submission and review, as well as RACIs, chains of command, and organizational makeup were created to give ServiceNow a robust, extremely thorough system that would unify their naming approach.
OVERVIEW
KEY OUTCOMES
New brand architecture and nomenclature strategy, global naming governance model, internal org design and structure, experience visions and other tools created a culture of high execution, driven by ServiceNow’s brand purpose: to make the world of work work better for people.
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Liquid Agency
Sr. Strategist
Multi-year relationship
2018-2019
Automotive repair
Brand strategy, service design, physical and digital experience design, business modelling
Material and market audits, stakeholder interviews, ethnographic research, co-creative workshops, qualitative and quantitative customer validation, brand tracking, rapid prototyping, journey mapping
METHODS
Christian Brothers Automotive, a 41-year old nationally franchised auto repair business, needed to define a vision for the next ten years and trusted Liquid to help them cast it. We researched their customers, market, competitors, existing brand experiences and intersected them with future behavioral trends and scenario planning to build a brand lighthouse. Qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic and co-creative methods helped to drive a deeply collaborative 6-month engagement. We built a new brand strategy, innovative service offerings, and physical and digital experience prototypes that will carry CBA into 2029, all unveiled through a keynote presentation and breakout session experience at CBA’s annual convention for 500 employees.
From the start, we set up tight guardrails for our research efforts, knowing that we needed to keep our eyes to the future while understanding CBA’s current landscape. That research uncovered the central insight that powered everything: 61% of CBA customers never came back a 2nd time—a shocking number that stood in stark contrast to the brand’s anecdotally high retention rate.
We used touchpoint auditing and mapping to explore ownership and intent for all existing internal and external touchpoints, which highlighted not only the fractured nature of the customer-facing touchpoint ecosystem, but also deep inconsistencies in channel type and usage. Our future vision captured conceptual customer journeys that bring together five lighthouse pillars in a way that the franchisees were able to get excited about.
With the strategy launched, we helped activate the first phase of the transformation by redesigning CBA’s brand expression, and designing and launching a new customer-facing website that moved beyond simple brochureware into providing real functional value through a logged in experience.
OVERVIEW
Launched new vision and expression for the brand, developed campaign and activations including new corporate website, created a vision for the evolution of the business model, and physical and digital experiences.
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Level Studios
Digital Strategy Lead
Project engagement
2015
Banking
Service design, organizational design, design ops, service blueprint, team charter
Stakeholder interviews, co-creative workshops, journey mapping
METHODS
UBS had embarked on a strategic initiative to connect and streamline their design practices from across the globe. The key goal was to build consistency, predictability, and repeatability into their global design practices — ensuring that both the design teams and their internal clients had a clearly understood way of working.
To build this, we conducted global interviews with members of UBS’ various studios, mapping out the journey of a design project from inception to delivery. Analyzing the data and resulting visualization enabled us to compare and contrast practices, tools, systems, and actors across the different studios, highlighting pain points and key moments in the journey.
We convened a 3 day immersive workshop in Zurich, Switzerland, where 25 members of the global design and design leadership teams gathered to co-create a vision for the practice. After presenting findings and opportunities, we started by co-creating a charter for the practice — a North Star that would guide and align the group going forward. With that in hand, we moved on to a current state service blueprint for the practices — using the journey we had generated through qualitative research as a jumping off point. Participants populated actions, actors, touchpoints, and systems for the front and backstage, with plenty of lively discussion and debate along the way. Finally, we used our two tools—the charter and the current state blueprint—to craft a future state blueprint, mapping out the way that the practice would work and interact with the various internal clients that it serviced.
OVERVIEW
We created a final visualization of the charter and the future state blueprint, documented in a playbook, and distributed it to the design org, who were able to use it to evolve how they worked, resulting in better global alignment and consistency of service experience.
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Level Studios
Digital Strategy Lead
Multi-year retainer
2014-2017
Technology
Enterprise software, UX design, UX research, experience strategy, design strategy
Stakeholder interviews, journey mapping, usability research, persona development, wireframing, IA creation, rapid prototyping
METHODS
While at Level Studios—a bespoke digital agency with a long standing deep relationship with Apple—I had the opportunity to lead multiple engagements for various orgs around Apple, creating internally-facing software, strategies, and research as well as external digital experiences.
Please get in touch for more information, as I’m unable to share more publicly.
OVERVIEW
Created strategies and designs for internal and external digital experiences