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.
Richard Branson on Branding
The conventional wisdom at business school is stick with what you know. Of the top 20 brands in the world, 19 ply a well-defined trade. Coca-Cola specializes in soft drinks, Microsoft in computers, Nike in sports shoes and gear. The exception in this list is Virgin — and the fact that we’re worth several billion dollars really bothers people who believe that they know “the rules of business” (whatever they are). We’re the only one of the top 20 that has diversified into a range of business activities, including airlines, trains, vacations, mobile phones, media, the Internet, financial services and health care. Read...Brand Personification: Humanizing the Brand
Since the start of modern advertising in the late 1800’s, the method of persuasion has been at the core of all commercially communicated messages. The evolved marketing landscape and a technologically advanced society have made a significant impact on how people are persuaded by brands today. Once persuaded only by rational factors invoked by advertisers, today people are persuaded emotionally through immersive marketing that employs consumer behavior modification. Read...
Keys To Breakthrough Brand Messaging
Recently, in a thought-provoking post on why the PR industry, advertising and the mainstream and hybrid media need to work in a much more integrated way, Richard Edelman made this deceptively simple observation, “Ads are inherently more effective when you have something to say.” Read...
Crafting A Powerful Brand Story
Facts feel right. They portray the sharer as informed and aware. They give a sense of pragmatism. They quantify and substantiate. But they seldom motivate us to shift from where we are now and what we like now to somewhere new. Read...
Start-up Leaders Give Thanks
Six Inc. 500 alums reflect on the simple twists of fate and brilliant strokes of luck that saved their businesses. Read moreAlibaba, the company with 24,000 employees making Marissa Mayer Look Good
Marissa Mayer became the CEO of Yahoo on July 16, 2012. Since then, the stock has exploded from ~$16 to over $35. But while Mayer has done a remarkable job improving the working culture at Yahoo, hiring mobile developers and redesigning the company’s wide array of products, she is not the only reason for Yahoo’s stock turnaround. In fact, the main reason Yahoo stock is up so much is that way back in 2005 Yahoo bought 40% of a tiny Chinese e-commerce company called Alibaba for $1 billion. Then, over the next six years, Alibaba turned into a massive hit. In the spring of 2012, Alibaba bought a portion of its stock back from Yahoo for $7.65 billion. When Mayer took over in the summer of 2012, she agreed to use some of that money to buy back Yahoo stock. This financial engineering drove Yahoo’s stock price. So did Yahoo’s remaining stake in Alibaba, which continued to grow in value as the Chinese company’s market cap went from ~$50 billion in 2012 to a rumored $100 billion now. Soon, Yahoo will be able to realize that gain. Alibaba is expected to IPO in 2014. When it does, Yahoo will sell all but 10% of its stake in the company, adding another few billion dollars to its bank account — money that will almost certainly fuel more share buybacks. Despite its prominent role in Yahoo’s turnaround, Alibaba remains a mysterious company in the U.S. To remedy that, I visited the company during my recent trip to China. Click here to see what I saw and learned »...To Advance Your Career, Always Be Ready to Bail or Bolt
In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, the most sought-after and desirable employees are the ones whose bags are always packed-;not because they are disloyal or disinterested but because they recognize that “up or out” is the way of the world today. Read...The Reason Why Gift Cards Get Prime Real Estate at Retailers
On a recent Christmas shopping excursion, I noticed an influx of kiosks positioned in the front of every store from Walgreens to Walmart. They seem to rise from the floor like UFOs, populating almost every square inch of prime retail space. At first glance, it made me think of Japan with its ever plentiful array of unique displays and insatiable appeal. However, these (displays) are now the new NEW and can be found in almost every retail establishment imaginable. They are omnipresent, unavoidable and here to stay. Also, retailers that house these kiosks usually receive a small percentage of commission for selling the cards – hence their added incentive for selling even the cards of major or minor direct competitors. Read...
From Grad Student to Social Media Millionaire
Skeptics say social media hasn’t existed long enough to produce experts. Clearly, those folks haven’t met Shama Kabani. The 26-year-old wrote her master’s thesis for the University of Texas at Austin about Twitter–when it had only 2,000 users, not the 175 million it has today. She hosts a web TV show about technology. Her 2010 book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz and Increase Revenue, is the No. 4 seller about web marketing on Amazon.com. Read...
The 4 Silent Killers of Your Business
When it comes to your health, high blood pressure is known as the silent killer. Left untreated, it can combine with other conditions, such as high cholesterol or diabetes, and lead to heart disease and stroke. But what about your business? Are there silent killers there, too? Steve Blue, business growth consultant and CEO of Miller Ingenuity, a Minnesota-based engineering firm, says yes. Read...Non-profit and Digital Media: How to Achieve Speed With Your Cause
The explosion of digital story telling tools will remained a mystery to anyone who lived and passed on in the 20th century. That is if they have opportunity to resurrect now. For every organization and especially Non- profit, there is now ample opportunity to gain speed if the mission is genuine and has a driven force behind it. Read more at...LinkedIn fine-tunes branding spotlight with Showcase Pages
LinkedIn has set up a new scheme for major brands from every possible vertical to break down their product portfolios and put the spotlight on more, well, brands. Read more...Ignite Lab Inc.
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