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.
8 Ways to Improve Your Communication Right Now
No one is a perfect communicator. Throughout our lives, we all develop little habits and patterns. Some of these habits are helpful, while some create challenges when working with others. We don’t usually intend to cloud our objectives or make others feel like they weren’t heard. In most cases, it’s just these little habits that get in the way of solid teamwork and accountability. Here are 8 simple tips that will solve most communication issues in the workplace. You will learn a lot about how to improve your communication by reading that...
You Should Take This Interpersonal Communication Skills Test
Communicating with others is an essential skill in business dealings, family affairs, and romantic relationships. Do you often find yourself misunderstanding others? Do you have difficulty getting your point across clearly? When it comes to communication, what you say and what you don’t say are equally important. Being a good listener is quite crucial. Find out how your interpersonal skills rate by taking this Communication Skills...
How to Address Poor Oral Communication Skills in an Employee Evaluation
Communication is essential for an effective workplace. Communication usually comes in the form of written and oral, with the latter responsible for conveying ideas and concerns to co-workers and managers. An employee who struggles to communicate orally may cause confusion among others when he talks. Addressing the employee’s ineffective oral communication in his performance evaluation lets you help the employee one-on-one. Remaining supportive and instilling confidence in the employee leads to the best results. Read more about how to address poor oral communication skills...
Why You Should Minimize Your Brand’s Target Market
Think you work with everyone? Think again. You need to know EXACTLY who your target client is in order to save money and time on your marketing. Learning about your target market is not a luxury for when you get some extra time. It is essential to your business success! You’ll earn more and be able to line up future events easier when you nail who your target client is. Believe it or not, knowledge of your target audience affects everything from your social media campaign to the way you bill customers. There are many reasons to know your target market. Here are three of the most important ones. Read more about how you can minimize your brand’s target market...
Brands Come Out From the Closet to Target LGBT Community
In the week the UK saw the country’s first same-sex marriages, some brands are developing campaigns to appeal to gay and lesbian consumers looking to tie the knot. The move is part of a wider effort by brands to target the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community in an attempt to better represent their customer base and tap into a multi-billion sales opportunity. Menswear brand Moss Bros is displaying images of Union J band member Jaymi Hensley and his fiancé Olly Marmon wearing designs from its spring 14 collection in 80 stores across the UK. It is the first campaign from the 150 year-old company to target LGBT consumers. It claims it “overindexed” on gay and bisexual men last year in terms of social media activity. Read more about how these brands target the LGBT community...
13 Content Marketing Tips
Do you remember how in the past, marketing consisted of grabbing your attention with loud colours, catchy (and then later, irritating) jingles, pretty people – and if that didn’t work, huge billboards? These days, businesses are slowly giving those campaigns up in favor of getting in touch with their customers. Pop-ups and other gimmicky ads are moving aside for tailored content – be it in print, image, or video — that a company’s customers may find useful, or otherwise worth sharing. When we think of what businesses use to speak to their audiences, the list most commonly goes like this: email newsletters, social media posts, SEO-optimized blog posts and podcasts. On a general level, the type of content businesses use depends – and should depend — on their target audience’s online behavior, such as what’s more likely to interest them and keep them coming back for more. If you’re looking to use content marketing to drive up your business’s sales through the power of sharing, here are a few content marketing tips you might find...
Is Your Brand Vision Realistic?
What does a winning brand vision look like? As I noted in a recent post, the brand vision should reflect and support the business strategy, differentiate from competitors, resonate with customers, energize and inspire employees and partners, adapt to different markets and precipitate a gush of ideas for marketing programs. Creating a brand vision that meets these requirements is a great start to success. However, the brand vision implies a promise to customers and a commitment by the organization. It cannot be an exercise in wishful thinking but, rather, needs to have substance behind it. Read more about whether your brand vision is realistic or not...
Only Woman On The Team? 4 Communication Tips You Need To Know
“People don’t take me seriously because I’m a girl,” I said to a friend about the computer science graduate seminar we were taking my junior year of college. “People don’t take you seriously because you talk like a Valley Girl,” he said. Subtlety was not his strong suit, but he had a point. I sounded like I belonged at the mall in Los Angeles, not in a computer science class at Harvard. What a revelation: People discriminated against me not because of my gender, but because of behaviors associated with my gender. Since then, as I am often the only woman in the room at work, I have learned to adapt my behaviors to be taken more seriously. Of course, it would be ideal if people accepted women as they were, but expectations and biases do not change overnight. In the meantime, here are some lessons I have learned during the many years of my PhD program in computer science, a field that is only 20% women. Find out more about these effective communication tips for women...
Facebook Brand Pages Get Big Boost from Algorithm Tweak
Facebook as a company is notoriously difficult to read. But news websites that run Facebook fan pages, much like ours, have been noticing an intriguing trend over the past two weeks: Our Facebook page is being liked by far more people than ever before. The numbers don’t lie. The rate at which people are discovering the Canada.com Facebook page has risen by more than ten times. Our numbers are sky-rocketing. Where the numbers of people discovering and becoming a part of our Facebook community were growing predictably, we couldn’t have foreseen such a stark surge so suddenly. And we’re not alone. Find out more about Facebook brand pages...
How a Chinese Tech Firm Became the NSA’s Surveillance Nightmare
The NSA’s global spy operation may seem unstoppable, but there’s at least one target that has proven to be a formidable obstacle: the Chinese communications technology firm Huawei, whose growth could threaten the agency’s much-publicized digital spying powers. An unfamiliar name to American consumers, Huawei produces products that are swiftly being installed in the internet backbone in many regions of the world, displacing some of the western-built equipment that the NSA knows — and presumably knows how to exploit — so well. Find out more about how this tech firm became a surveillance nightmare for the NSA...
To Boost Safety, Cruise Lines Want to Be More Like Airlines
After a fatal capsizing and two high-profile fires aboard ships, observers began wondering whether cruise lines were operating with minimal regulatory oversight. An engine-room fire that leaves a 2,750-passenger ship adrift at sea for days? In 2013? That incident aboard the Carnival Triumph—beamed round the world for days courtesy of CNN’s saturation-coverage strategy—followed the 2012 grounding of a European ship in which 32 people died. Three months after the Triumph blaze, meanwhile, a fire damaged Royal Caribbean’s Grandeur of the Seas. The incidents deeply embarrassed the industry, decimated Carnival’s financial results, and prompted politicians and regulators to make noise about tougher oversight. Late last year the industry’s two largest companies, Carnival (CCL) and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCL), hired retired military admirals to oversee their sea operations. Read more about how cruise lines are developing new concepts to operate more like airlines...
What Oculus’s $2 Billion Payday Teaches Us About Innovation
Tuesday’s announcement that Facebook is buying the virtual-reality start-up Oculus for $2 billion no doubt left many people scratching their heads. It was only a month ago the social network giant shocked everyone by paying as much as $19 billion for WhatsApp, an Internet-based text messaging start-up which had amassed an eye-popping 400 million users in only a few years. Have Silicon Valley companies and investors been transported to some alternate universe in which start-ups become irresistible targets before they’ve made any profits or, in the case of Oculus, before they’ve even made any products? Read more about what we can learn about innovation from this business deal...Ignite Lab Inc.
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