A boutique consultancy dedicated to delivering relevant insights that guide clients through complicated decisions and uncover new ways of thinking.
Shari Allison
Principal
Shari has spent the past 20 years helping clients refine the way they look at their marketplace, their customers & their business. Co-founder of Ignite in 2011, Shari focuses on challenging convention, redefining context & delivering clarity to client partners. Although she holds advanced degrees in consumer behaviour, Shari’s expertise extends well beyond research & insights to thought-leadership & true strategic-partnership.
Stephen Tile
Principal
For the past 30 years Steve has been helping some of the biggest brands refine their target, define their messages and build their businesses. He is a consummate strategist who uses an array of research tools to deliver crisp & meaningful insights that inspire and transform.
Ignite is brought to the table when senior level, objective, thought-partners are needed to help provide clarity, focus decision-making & optimize opportunity.
Our business model allows for intimate, hands-on engagements that are flexible & provide meaningful business outcomes.
While Ignite can of course execute basic research, our sweet spot is really those issues that are strategically significant to the organization.
We focus on strategic, high-touch engagements related to…
- Market dynamics
- Brand strategy
- Brand targeting & positioning
- Brand identity
- Innovation
- Concept development
- Concept evaluation/execution
- Communication strategy
- Communication development/evaluation
Specializing in retail, travel, packaged goods, alcohol, technology, financial services & luxury goods segments.
- Ignite employs a creative range of methods to uncover insights…from traditional focus groups & online surveys to inventive interactive, observational & ethnographic approaches.
- Emphasis is on driving insights deep into organizations, either up or down, where they can be actioned — use facilitation & workshopping methods to ensure organizational enculturation.
Personal Branding Basics: 3 Easy Steps To Advancing Your Career
I googled “personal branding” today and got nearly two million results. When I started my personal branding business, Reach Personal Branding, almost 15 years ago, few people knew what personal branding was, and even fewer were interested in building their brand. Today, as Google results reveal, there’s lots of talk about personal branding, and virtually every career-minded professional understands its importance. Personal branding helps you find a new job, get promoted, open clients’ doors, increase business success, and enhance your happiness at work every day. And it helps you do your job better – regardless of your role. Today, most major corporations have programs to help their employees uncover and build their brands to increase engagement, performance, satisfaction and retention. Yet, despite this high awareness of personal branding, misconceptions persist. In this article I share with you the personal branding basics from my latest book, Ditch. Dare. Do! – what you need to know so you can use the power of personal branding to fully energize and maximize your career. Personal branding is as easy as 1-2-3: Read more about the 3 easy steps...
10 Tips for Making Your Sales Video Stand Out
We’ve all seen stale sales videos. What’s rare are creative and compelling ones. But how do you make that happen while relaying important information? To findout, we asked 10 members from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question: “What is one way to make a sales video standout?” Here’s what YEC community members had to say: 1. Stop Selling “Teach the customer everything you know. Give away the farm. Honestly, they will be too lazy to do the work. They are coming to you for a reason and if you teach them everything, they will recognize you as the ultimate source of information.” ~John Rampton, Adogy Read more about it...
How to Manage Facebook Pages as a Multi-Unit Brand
If you are a multi-unit business with locations around the world, you can’t ignore the need for local pages. Here are some tips for managing your global Facebook presence. For franchise and multi-unit businesses, managing data and pages on Facebook can be a nightmare. Rogue pages, unseen customer complaints, and inaccurate data are just some of the challenges these businesses face every day. For those particular brands with multiple locations throughout the United States and the world, Facebook offers a feature that links the main brand page to all local pages, and helps maintain consistency across all locations. The feature is called “Facebook Locations” and is often referred to as the parent-child integration, with the main brand page being the parent, and the locations being the children. Whether you want to believe it or not, local pages exist. “Out of sight, out of mind” isn’t an acceptable philosophy in this situation. Local pages can be created by users trying to check in or by Facebook pulling data from various other sources around the Web (e.g., Yelp listings). By taking stock of what’s out there, claiming pages, and cleaning up duplicates you can protect the integrity of your business’ reputation and data, and create a more efficient process for managing pages moving forward. Read more about it...
Four Important Steps To Align Celebrities With Your Startup Brand
It goes without saying that having a well-known celebrity endorse your brand or product can do wonders for a startup. The problem, however, is getting celebrities to give you the time of day. Recently, we’ve been lucky enough to have a number of high-profile celebrities (especially celebrity athletes) join us in our quest to build the world’s largest private coaching service. We’ve learned quite a bit about aligning celebrities with our brand as well as how to get them to join, and we’d like to share our tips with you. 1. Start with your brand. Who are you? What is your mission? What problem are you trying to solve? Before looking outward to see what type of celebrities you want associated with your company, you really need to be clear about your own brand. Start by really defining how you want to represent your company to the world. This is important to understand so that you can make an educated decision as to which celebrities are best suited to amplify your brand. Asking the wrong celebrity to represent your company can be costly and end up damaging your brand in the future, instead of helping it. Read more about it...
Five Tips in Building a Personal Brand in your Media Career
I’ll be speaking next month to a large group from all over the country of radio sales people, programmers, and managers on helping them build a personal brand. It has done wonders for me in taking my career to the next level. Here are five tips I learned after launching my Personal Brand I wish I knew before I did! I hope they help you jumpstart your journey in creating separation points from the competition in your career. 1) Decide on a niche target of who you want to help and start there. (I chose “marketing”. It’s extremely difficult to just write and create content and value about “marketing” in my eyes. It’s too broad and my writing was all over the place. Now my focus is on helping companies or individuals build out and market their community project or idea and turn it into a reality.) Read more about this topic of building a personal brand for your media career...
3 Ways Every Brand Can Use Social Influence to Drive Business
Even as we get ready to usher in 2015, PR pros and marketers alike continue to struggle with the best ways to use social media in a successful campaign strategy. Social is now (hopefully) considered crucial for any business or brand that wants to be seen — after all, it’s where your audience heads for information, to ask questions and to be heard. But that’s just your own shared media. So how can you make social work for your brand using influencers outside of your organization? Make the Pitch: We’re in PR, right? There’s nothing wrong with reaching out to the influencers you have developed relationships with, and letting them know of the great new products or services your brand has to offer. Tell them why it matters to their audience and give them all the information they’ll need for a write up or an interview. Pro tip: Consider giving them a couple of pre-written tweets with pertinent information included, which they can easily share. The easier you make it for them to help you, the more likely they are to do so. Read more about it...
5 Tips on Rebranding from a Billion-Dollar Expert
The decision to rebrand should be weighed carefully, as it can be a complicated and challenging overhaul for any company. Before you even think about altering your current brand, make sure you ask yourself: Who are you as a brand? What are you best known for? Does that mesh with your expectations of how you want to be perceived? Rebranding isn’t a “fix” if you don’t know what is broken or why. Once you’ve decided to take the plunge, there’s both an art and a science to getting it right. Here are a few tips from my experiences branding and rebranding several billion-dollar companies that can help companies of any size, miniscule or mammoth, successfully tackle the process: 1. Rally the internal forces to win the external war. Although rebranding typically focuses on winning over the outside world, it’s just as important to capture the hearts and minds of those within your organization. (It is my belief that brand ambassadors start from the inside.) Read more about it...
How The Top Brands Use Social Media for Marketing
Top brands receive high leverage from social media marketing and internet companies are getting highly interested on how they pull it off. By social media marketing, a brand or business is able to build its popularity by increasing its website presence and growing the number of its followers using the social media. There are many marketing tricks employed by many businesses in order to increase their website traffic and ranking by using the social media influence. Here’s how top brands are able to use social media for impressive marketing and profitable leverage. 1. Red Bull Social Media Campaign Social media is responsible for the profit earned by Red Bull in 2012, selling about 5.2 billion cans of its energy drinks. It launched a marketing campaign that leverages on its buyer persona. On its website, thrill seeking athletes were featured, including race car drivers. Its social media campaign kicked off by launching on its Facebook page the upcoming thrilling events of playing addicting games and featuring on its Twitter page a photo of the week contest that gets the viewers talking, sharing and engaging with the Red Bull brand. It also featured the experience and adventures of heroes on an adrenaline pumping action on the Red Bull TV that is optimized by an app to accommodate more viewers and followers. What makes this top brand fare well in its social media marketing campaign is knowing their target audience to be likely engaged with their brand and will be interested in using their products. The social media campaign is not all about the Red Bull drink, but leveraging on the interest of...
Tips to Tell Your Brand’s Success Story: Stand Out and Get Noticed in Interviews
What vibe is your brand emitting? Does it represent the awesome sauce of YOU? It’s important to be conscious and deliberate about putting forth an authentic brand identity especially when you want to get noticed by TV producers or potential employers. Your brand identity is not about what you do, it is about how you do what you do, what makes you unique and what it means to you and others. Your brand identity gives us hints about the type of experience we will have with you. Read more about it...
5 Cool Twitter Marketing Tips For Your Brand
Twitter and other social media platforms are great ways to keep in touch. What started as a purely personal platform for people to re-connect with friends and family has today become a marketing tool for business, small and large. Businesses are literally hustling up to get attention on social media platforms and leave their mark on people. There is no doubt that Twitter is a great marketing tool for businesses and taking the right steps is the only way to get noticed. But what are these right steps? In this article we will be looking at a few great ways to use Twitter for marketing. 1# Focusing on How To Use Search Results Search function on Twitter works in a slightly different manner. For example when we type keywords in a search engine, we get any/all results related to the words used. You would expect the same for Twitter however this isn’t the case. Twitter lists results when ‘all’ the keywords are present in a single tweet. Now, that’s not very helpful, isn’t it? To avoid this you can use ‘the/or’ in between keywords while searching on Twitter. The use of these words tells Twitter that you are searching for one or the other term from the keywords. Read more about it...
9 Tips for Packing Your Brand’s Message Into a 15-Second Instagram Video
It has been shown through data, most recently by Forrester Research, that Instagram represents by far, the best platform for marketers to interact with consumers. Brands are beginning to understand that having a presence on the platform is a necessity, but many don’t understand all of the features it has to offer. One part of the service to note is the 15-second video feature. According to a report from BI Intelligence, in the U.S. 50 million people watch video via their mobile devices. Globally, 15 percent of all time spent watching online videos is done using a smartphone, tablet or other mobile devices. While a common misconception amongst brands is that video marketing is too costly of an endeavor, by utilizing Instagram’s free 15-second video editing feature, businesses now have an invaluable tool to engage their audience with. Read more...
5 Tips for Instagram Video Success: Build a Brand in 15 Seconds
It’s been more than year since Instagram added video to its bag of tricks, giving its users 15 seconds to tell their stories. That was a generous 9 seconds more than Twitter’s Vine, whose 6-second clips presented a challenge to even the most creative marketers by making them find a way to produce a brand pop in a literal blink of an eye. Instagram Video’s 15 seconds may not be much, but it’s as long as many TV spots, and the platform offers marketers compelling reasons to attempt this kind of ultra-short form messaging: audiences numbering the hundreds of millions; a virtually non-existent barrier to entry; high levels of engagement, awareness building, and sharing; and no concerns about taxing a viewer’s attention. Read more...Ignite Lab Inc.
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