Our Expertise
Northbound helps leaders in complex industries and organizations, or with complex challenges, see past blind spots and achieve breakthrough growth.
UNLOCK VALUE, TRANSFORM GROWTH
- Define
- Envision
- Position
- Reframe
- Pivot
- Turnaround
- Scale
GET REMEMBERED, BREAKTHROUGH
- Design
- Create
- Rebrand
- Clarify
- Message
- Name
RALLY TEAMS, INSPIRE WHAT’S NEXT
- Inspire
- Reinvigorate
- Enculturate
- Roadmap
- Integrity
- Alignment
STRATEGY DRIVES CLARITY AND
FOCUS THAT OUTSIZES THE MARKET
Want people to believe in your vision or to buy your product? To engage and advocate?
Whether you’re selling agentic Al, wind power, or wearables, the answer isn’t more proof points.
Vision isn’t just about sales goals. And, positioning isn’t just about a differentiated feature set-competitors can catch up too easily. To create value and transformational growth, you need a complete reframe that taps into the emotions of what people most want or need in a way only you can.
We’re experts in Foundational Strategy and Brand Identity Expression. We help bring to life ideas that are unique and meaningful to customers. And we help clarify, focus and align teams in ways that outsize growth.
By finding the common, unifying core of your brand across product and expression, Northbound delivers brands that are crystal-clear and impossible to confuse with competitors.
FOUNDATIONAL STRATEGY
We ensure your brand strategy is built equally on strategic rigor and emotional resonance. Just rigor, and your brand falls flat. Just emotional resonance, and your brand risks falling short or losing market leadership. To grow and lead, you need both.
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Company and Product Positioning
We use rigorous frameworks and methodologies to create a compass for your company and product that helps you focus on your differentiation while creating a clear, emotional connection to your customers. Through positioning, you can achieve greater product market fit and lower customer acquisition costs.
For your company, we craft purpose and positioning. For your products we position against alternatives and create value propositions that sell.
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Company Vision & Values
We help leaders codify corporate vision and values through facilitation and workshops.
When you establish your vision not just on your growth goals, but on the impact you want to make in the world, you inspire teams and customers alike. And when you articulate the non-negotiable values for your teams, everyone can move more quickly in the same direction.
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Portfolio Strategy & Brand Architecture
When you have a clear brand architecture, you increase both clarity and elasticity. Cross selling opportunities open up, differentiation is clearer, and expansion of your brand into innovative and growth markets becomes easier.
We apply decades of know-how across some of the most complex product portfolios in the world to create brand architectures, growth and transition strategies, naming systems, nomenclature, naming conventions, taxonomy, and portfolio naming strategy.
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Customer Insight & Empathy
We help you map and understand the full customer experience using empathy and insights. Using insights, we identify customer needs, emotional drivers, and the critical moments of truth across their journey. We uncover opportunities to differentiate your brand, emotionally connect with customers, and remove friction that prevents growth.
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Innovation strategy and capabilities/product mapping
Through facilitated workshops with product, service and other operational teams, we identify gaps in delivery, areas for innovation, greater brand alignment, and new opportunities for bringing the brand purpose to life in experiences.
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Messaging Strategy & Frameworks
For messaging to work, you can’t just start writing based on what sounds good to your or your team. We develop a structured brand messaging strategy that defines the perceptions you want to shift in the market, and articulates the messaging needed to achieve those goals. We identify what you need to overcome and what you want to achieve in the hearts and minds of your audience, and create messages that close any gaps for your brand. Through testing and iterative development, we refine your message to positively shift the way the market perceives your brand.
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Employer Brand & Culture Practices
The customer experience will never exceed the employee experience. We define or refine your internal employee value proposition, so your team feels proud, aligned, and energized to be brand ambassadors.
BRAND IDENTITY EXPRESSION
Emotional connection isn’t soft or sweet. It’s science. Emotions drive all decision-making and memorability. And memorability drives growth. When you bake emotion into the very heart of your brand expression, you become unforgettable. We build the verbal and visual systems that ensure your audience experiences a clear, emotional, and memorable identity.
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Brand Narrative & Brand Idea
Stories are the syntax of humankind. It’s how humans understand the world around them, connect with one another, and pass down knowledge. We use narrative to rally audiences internally and externally and bring your brand strategy to life in ways your stakeholders can immediately and viscerally understand.
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Brand Personality & Persona
A strong brand has a recognizable personality that shapes how it speaks and behaves. We help you define and codify that personality so that every expression — whether visual, verbal, or experiential — feels cohesive and unmistakably yours.
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Brand Voice & Verbal Identity
We bring your brand to life through naming, copy, taglines, brand voice creation, voice guidelines and copy playbooks. A tagline distills your brand’s strategy into a single, memorable phrase. We craft taglines that are both inspiring and practical — powerful enough to rally audiences internally, and flexible enough to anchor campaigns, products, and communications.
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Visual Identity & Logos
Translating strategy into design, we create visual systems that are distinctive, scalable, and true to your brand’s core. This includes everything from logo and design systems, to color and typography, to photography and iconography, brand guidelines and toolkits creation, ensuring your brand feels both timeless and flexible.
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Creative Naming
We know that naming is the tip of the spear for a brand, creating an instant heuristic for your brand, company, or product. We have deep expertise in how to guide naming strategy, decision making, and creativity to get to the right name.
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Portfolio Naming
Naming within a portfolio isn’t just a creative exercise – in fact, it’s often just the opposite. Knowing when and how to leverage existing brands, industry language, and when to break free and create a new name takes expertise and experience. We have both.
WAYS TO ENGAGE
Northbound is built for flexibility to address the most critical problems our clients face. Our work is outcome-focused with all major deliverables leading towards how brands progress towards market leadership. Below are the most common ways we engage with clients.
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FRACTIONAL EXPERTISE
Northbound is a team of executive-level strategists with deep expertise in Foundational Strategy and Creative Expression.
One way to engage with our team is to think of them as hiring fractional expertise to guide a goal and the process to accomplish those goals. This structure is lean and focused on what is needed, often with one person on our team leading all aspects of the deliverables.
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MODULAR SPRINTS
Modular Sprints are designed for speed and focus. Sprints are guided by a team selected to be able to progress specific deliverables with precision and clarity. Sprints typically last from 4-8 weeks and focus on a single prototype, problem, or deliverable.
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PROJECT-BASED ASSIGNMENTS
Project-based engagements are designed around the needs of the client, building a comprehensive team/approach to accomplish a number of deliverables around larger client initiatives.
Where sprints are focused on a key deliverable, Project-Based Assignments are often more complex with overlapping workstreams. Additionally, the timing and process is more often guided by the client team based on what’s needed.
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RETAINED RELATIONSHIPS
Ongoing and dedicated expertise to address all levels of Foundational and Creative Expression. Retained relationships are scoped based on ongoing expectation of expertise and deliverables over the course of extended time frames (often annual).
