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.
Relationship Stress? Pain Is A Symptom, Communication Is Key To Health
Relationship stress is a symptom, like neck pain or back pain, of a communication problem. For happy and healthy relationships, we know communication is key. That’s why if you’re experiencing stress in a relationship, whether it’s at work or at home, the problem could be the way you express yourself in your communication with others. Take a quick reading on how you communicate with others. Ask yourself a few questions and be honest with your responses. Do you get what you want and, more importantly, make the people who give it to you happy in the process? Want to have an easier time communicating with family, friends, clients or co-workers? You may need to check your internal stress first. Read more about how you can use communication as a key to health...
Communication in the SAT Classroom
Picture your role model for success. Maybe you imagined Warren Buffett, chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), or maybe you thought of your mother, who started her own business. What do they do to motivate and inspire people? How do they successfully sell their products and services? The answer is effective communication strategies. Similarly, strong communication skills are necessary to achieve great results when taking an SAT course. Two students of equal intellectual capacity can end up with significant differences in their scores because one is a much better communicator. Here are four communication strategies to use in the classroom. 1. Reduce the say-do gap. Give yourself a one or two hour buffer when estimating the amount of time needed to complete the SAT assignment. My mother always told me to multiply the time you think you need by two, especially if you have difficulty with time management. Furthermore, if you consistently miss assignments, do not say “I will do my homework.” You and your teacher should find the reason for this repetitive inaction together instead. Was the topic for this particular assignment difficult to understand? Were there stressful issues at home? Was it finals week, with schoolwork becoming overwhelming? Were there other distractions, or was the reason simply laziness? Finding the solution requires knowing the problem. Read more about the other tips for communication in the SAT classroom...
Hello, Bélo: Airbnb Brings Its New Brand Identity Home
Surely, many Airbnb users tidy up their places for incoming guests, and now the controversial service is doing the same with the launch of a new brand identity and user experience. Launched in 2007, Airbnb has grown to accommodate millions of travelers in nearly 200 countries, capitalizing on the growth of the sharing economy. But Airbnb’s success hasn’t been without controversy, namely legal spats in cities that say the company avoids hotel taxes and violates housing agreements. All that aside, Airbnb is pushing forward into new markets with its refreshed brand and tagline, “Belong Anywhere.” In a livestreamed event, Airbnb detailed its new logo, a symbol it’s calling a “Bélo,” along with a redesigned website and mobile experience that “make it easier for users to find the information that they need while also making listings on its platform more appealing,”TechCrunch reports. Read more about it...
11 Unusual Social Media Tips and Tricks to Drive Branding, Clicks and Conversions
Effective socia-media marketing helps build successful businesses. Arecent study by Shareaholic, which tracked 300,000 websites over four months, suggested that social-media referrals now lead to 30 percent of websites’ overall traffic. If your business website falls below this benchmark, you may want to consider if your social-media strategy is working. Then again, if your site receives more visits from social media than that rate, you might still want to know what more can you do. Read more about these 11 unusual social media tips...
How to Interview a Sales Professional – Tips for Recruiters
Selecting the right sales person is one of the most important tasks for someone in a leadership position. Too often it is approached in a casual and unprofessional manner. The consequences of recruiting the wrong candidate are costly, damaging and time consuming. What are the two most important abilities that a sales person needs? There has been extensive research in this area and the answers are clear. The two most critical factors for a sales person are the ability to ask questions and the ability to listen. Both of these capabilities can be tested at interview yet most interviewers miss the golden opportunity to do so. Here are some tips to help you when you are next interviewing a candidate for a sales position in your company. Read more about it...
Yakkity Yak, Don’t Talk Back: 8 Tips for Communicating with a Narcissist
Communicating with a narcissist usually goes one of two ways. He either is doing all the talking or he isn’t responding at all. You see, either way he controls the conversation. Narcissists don’t use language like normal people do. We communicate our needs, thoughts, feelings, and ideas. We talk to entertain and be entertained and we talk to gain intimacy in relationships. The narcissist talks to obtain a goal. He may be talking to win over a new source of narcissistic supply, to gain sympathy, to deceive, to divide people, or to divert consequences. He almost never talks in order to share who he is and he never listens without an ulterior motive. If he is in a conversation he can’t win he will either attack the person talking or he will take his ball and go home with a petulant, “You’re illogical – I’m outta here.” It’s good to keep that in mind. Read more about it...
Entry Level Job Seekers, Need to Build a Personal Brand? 30 Tips to Achieve this Goal
A personal brand can help entry level job seekers stand out to employers. In the following post, learn 30 tips for building your brand. For the young careerist fighting the economy, stiff competition, and a bit of self-doubt, presenting a strong personal brand is a must. Done well, your brand becomes a huge asset to your career. Done poorly, or wrapped in a cloud of me-too sameness, your brand becomes yet another obstacle. Read more about it...
6 Steps To A Comprehensive Brand Strategy
Despite what a lot of newbie entrepreneurs, businesses and even some mediocre corporations seem to believe, your brand is not determined by a logo, no matter how stunning it is (Tweet this). Your brand is what people perceive, think, or feel when they consume your content or buy your products. How do people feel when they wear Prada? Luxurious. The Nike brand equates to inner strength. A brand survives on these connections. Companies either work hard to develop a successful brand strategy or they fail to appear authentic. It’s typically hit or miss. Read more about developing a comprehensive brand strategy...
Nike’s Risk Everything Soccer Strategy Showing Signs Of Success
Nike started the 2014 World Cup with the most teams (10) of any brand. Despite its spend, the Nike swoosh will not be prominently displayed on the jerseys of either Argentina or Germany, the two nations competing in the World Cup Final. Both federationsare sponsored by Adidas. Yet, Nike’s “risk everything” campaign was never only about sponsoring enough teams to give the brand a fair shot of gaining exposure in the final match of the World Cup. It was certainly a goal of the brand, which posted a 21% increase in soccer revenue for the year June 1- May 31 preceding the tournament. However, Nike’s position going into the World Cup Final is that it sells to wholesale customers on a “futures” basis, thus the outcome of the tournament has no bearing on its revenues around the world, which are up handsomely. Read more about it...
Five Tips for International Brands Expanding to Canada
When it comes to our big, beautiful country, a ‘one size fits all’ approach to introducing an international brand just doesn’t work. There are several extremely important factors to consider when entering new terrain, especially one as diverse as ours. But first, a bit of background on our company: First founded in Denmark in 2000 and now headquartered in London, England, Just Eat is the world’s largest and fastest-growing online restaurant and food ordering service and operates in 13 countries worldwide. Canada has grown into one of the largest and fastest growing countries in our international business. Read more about it...
3 Tips for Trustworthy Sponsored Content
For publishers and lifestyle websites that target moms, sponsored content can be a powerful marketing tool. Its form can range from quick articles to total site takeovers, and it allows consumer brands to tap into the audience of well-known publishers. Sponsored content has a unique advantage over other types of partnerships. It can be useful to the publisher’s established audience, as well as appealing to the wider audience held by both the publisher and the consumer brand. However, publishers may run into resistance among readers when they take on sponsored content partnerships. In recent findings, 54% of surveyed internet users say they don’t usually trust sponsored content. Most of the remainder only trusts sponsored content if they already trust the publication it runs on (19%) or they already trust the consumer brand (23%). Even if the sponsored content is well-integrated into the publisher’s typical format, readers tend to consume it very differently than they do non-sponsored content. Chartbeat’s analytics suggest that two-thirds of readers spend 15 seconds or more with editorial content on average, while only one third of readers spend that much time on sponsored content articles. Read more about it...
Seven Tips to Build and Maintain a Successful Startup Brand
Best friends: reliable, intuitive individuals with personalities that click perfectly. The same feelings often apply to favorite brands because the genius innovators behind them get into consumers’ heads, figure out what they really need and offer a clear, easy-to-use solution to the problem at hand. Thanks to this strategy, consumers trust solid brands and are eager to purchase, recommend to others and continue buying from the same company when new products and services are introduced. Obvious example: Apple. So how does this apply to startups? In every way! At Aveya Creative, DC’s only boutique branding agency dedicated exclusively to entrepreneurs, we stick to this guiding concept for success: when it comes to branding, remember to keep it simple and sincere. 1) First things first … No matter how innovative, the concept must be useful in order to start building a brand around it. Even the most beautiful logo in the world is not worth the investment of time, effort and money if it’s for a useless product or service for which target markets have no need. Being a useful brand relies on correct targeting; it may take several pivots to settle on the optimal target audience where users have the most pressing need for your solution. It can be a painstaking process, but remember: patience is a virtue. Legendary branding goes well beyond visual identity. The concept driving the brand must provide a solution to a pain point or fill a gap in the target market, and offer a memorable experience to go along with it. Read more about the seven tips to build & maintain a successful startup brand...Ignite Lab Inc.
40 Eglinton Ave. East
Suite 703
Toronto, ON
M4P 3A2