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.
4 Tips to Being Your Brand’s Champion on TV and YouTube
Marketing campaigns have changed drastically in the past few years. Conversation-like PR campaigns have made it practically mandatory for business owners to have a virtual face-to-face with their audience, whether through a TV appearance or a YouTube promotional video. You are the image of your brand, so use these four suggestions to best handle your time to shine. 1. Know your audience. As an entrepreneur, you invest the time necessary learning as much as possible about existing and potential customers but the web has made market segmentation more complex. Don’t assume your on-air audience is the same as your current or potential clients. On a morning show, your audience will be mostly female between the ages of 25 and 50, whereas YouTube is visited more often by minority males under the age of 25. Read more about it...
Top Tips To Build Your Personal Brand Image
The concept of ‘Brand You’ is how to you want others to see you, think about you and talk about you and also how to make yourself stand out from all other candidates when seeking a new job, according to careers website Monster Gulf. The company offers the following tips to build ‘Brand You’ – 1. Tell your story We are often asked by friends, colleagues and contacts ‘what have you been up to lately’ and our default response can often be ‘same old’ or ‘not much’ – but this is a prime opportunity to tell your story about a key project or recent achievement. The message should always be the same, regardless of the person you are talking to. Read more about it...
How Brands Can Effectively Baby a Millennial: Four Crucial Tips
Between social media, e-commerce, and emerging technology, the way we shop has changed dramatically. At yesterday’s Fashion Tech Forum, hosted by Gap, Karen Harvey, and partner Elle Magazine at Chelsea Piers in New York City, many panels discussed millennial shoppers—a group born between the ages of 1982 and 1996 that is two billion strong. Millennials grew up accustomed to a certain immediacy and sufficiency and as a result, can be quite demanding. Jamie Gutfreund, the chief marketing officer of research and marketing groupNoise, told a group of some 400 entrepreneurs, CEOs and media personal that the key to expanding or even a launching a business these days is tounderstand the way millennial shoppers work. “Words often used to describe millennial, or Generation Y, are ‘entitled, selfish, impatient.’ Why do they behave like that?” Gutfreund said. “But really, they are the most misunderstood generation. They live in a real-time world and are looking for efficiency.” Below are a few guidelines Gutfreund laid out as a way for businesses to keep up with the millennial shopper. Read more about this...
Evolving Your Content Marketing Strategy: 4 Tips for Brands
While it is well known that Google’s content marketing drive has forced webmasters to prioritize the quality of the content that they publish, its impact has been felt far deeper in the world of online marketing. Not only have marketers been forced to focus on the quality of content that they produce rather than quantity, but they have also faced the need to redefine their strategies and the metrics used to measure success. After all, the rise to prominence of content marketing has destroyed many of its most significant misconceptions, especially regarding its purpose and the time that is required to develop an effective strategy. More specifically, businesses who have familiarized themselves with contemporary content marketing practices are now aware that the cultivation of a successful strategy requires time, innovation and a willingness to refine their techniques. So, although marketers and brands may have undergone a process of trial and error in the quest to develop their content marketing strategy, they can use this knowledge to drive improved results in the future. Read more about it...
4 Ways to Nail Your Brand Voice
When my business partner Claire Mazur and I developed the idea for our company, Of a Kind in 2010, establishing our voice was a serious undertaking. We were creating a website to sell pieces from up-and-coming fashion designers and also to tell their stories, and we knew that figuring out how to speak to our audience — not just what to say but also how to say it — would be key in shaping people’s perception of what we were doing and selling. Having come from the world of magazine editorial, cementing that tone was something I was excited to tackle. And though this project was especially crucial to our eCommerce business with its content-heavy approach, really, every company under the sun has to think about the voice and the personality of its messaging — how do you write an Instagram caption or respond to user feedback if you don’t know what your business sounds like? Read more about the 4 ways to nail your brand voice...
14 Very Effective Communication Skills
Do you have “ice breakers” (or short phrases) that you use to meet new people at events or for networking during your daily stroll around town? Since any opportunity is great moment for prospecting, this blog has some very interesting points that could help you develop your communication skills and, in turn, be more successful and attract new clients. However, even though the first point says to “give them (the ‘new’ person) the impression that you’re enthusiastic about talking to them,” I would like to differ and say that you should be genuinely excited about talking to new people and caring about what they have to say. Showing that you are genuine will “shine through” and really change the communicative and behavioral dynamics in a conversation. Some of the other points, like smiling, are important too. So, bookmark this one and re-read it before going to an event or meeting a new client! Read more about it...
Three Tips for Effective Internal Communication
It’s really important that you find effective ways to communicate with your staff. Buy-in from them is key to productivity and to keeping a loyal workforce; after all, you’ve invested in their development, now you want them to stay! Unfortunately the bigger you become, the harder it is. If you fail to rise to this challenge though, you’ll end up with a resentful workforce motivated purely by their salary, rather than driven by the overall success of the company. This was a dilemma we faced just over a year ago; while the company was booming, morale was in decline because, while the senior management were completely in the loop on all our plans for the future and where and why money was being invested, the majority felt in the dark. We weren’t making the effort to share news with them and as a result they rightly felt unconnected from the decisions we were making and the direction the company – and their future – was taking. Here are the key things we did to rectify the internal communication situation....
How Learning a Second Language Teaches Better Communication Skills
As communicators, we’re always looking for new ways to improve the way we write, speak and, well, communicate. Maybe we follow writing blogs to find tips or even watch YouTube videos on how to improve our public speaking. One thing that never seems to be talked about is how learning a second language opens a whole new window of opportunity to learn how other people in this big ol’ world are communicating and what we can take away from that. Here are my top four takeaways: 1. Things Don’t Always Translate Word for Word More often than not, phrases and sentences aren’t going to translate perfectly. You can’t read through a sentence, translating it word for word and expecting the combination to make sense at the end. You learn to look at the entire context of a phrase or sentence and make the connection to its equivalent in your native language. Being able to search for and find contextual connections in a second language makes it easier to do the same in your first. Read about them...
First Take: Innovation Can Solve Samsung Doldrums
The next wave of Galaxy smartphones and mobile devices cannot come fast enough for Samsung. The electronics giant needs to get its mojo working again. Sales were sluggish during second quarter of 2014 – down 24% from last year — the Seoul, Korea-headquartered company announced in its earnings preview. Operating income of 7.2 trillion won ($7.1 billion) amounted to a two-year low for Samsung – and far below the analyst estimates of 8.1 trillion won. The company will release full earnings at the end of the month. Read more about it...
Practical Innovation: Getting Real on Getting Creative
The word innovation can inspire either great enthusiasm or a lot of eye-rolling. While it’s a huge driver for the technology industry globally, we know that locally it can crash against the reality of resource and tactical constraints. Given these challenges, Rick Mears, CIO of Owens & Minor and a recent ComputerworldPremier 100 IT Leader, found a way to make innovation work, and work quickly. Read more about it...
Balancing Act: Fight Workplace Bullying with Better Communication Skills
Based on the responses I received to last week’s column, it’s clear that bullying is a real problem in our nation’s offices. But I also believe it’s a problem we can overcome. To refresh your memory, I wrote last week about a May 2014 VitalSmarts survey of 2,283 people in which 96 percent of respondents said they had experienced workplace bullying. What’s worse is that the respondents said 89 percent of office bullies had been at it for more than a year, and 54 percent had been exhibiting bad behavior for more than five years. Read more about it...
Communication Equals Love: A Missing Link In Your Hiring Process
Many of us in HR and Leadership circles – I am among them – bemoan the negativity that springs up during the process of recruiting employees, affecting positivecandidate experience and your employer brand. One would think companies would have a stake in ensuring candidates, whether they are hired or not, have a positive experience with the hiring company and your recruiting process. Others might point out that not getting the job is in itself enough to sour the candidate on the company if he or she is passed over. Yet studies have shown even unsuccessful applicants retain a positive experience of the company, if a too-often-overlooked link is maintained: clear, unambiguous communication. Read more about it...Ignite Lab Inc.
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