About me
Jonathan Staines
I am a brand strategist with over twenty years’ experience of creating, naming, launching, and rejuvenating brands. I have worked for or on some of the world’s most well-known brands and for much smaller businesses.
My marketing career started at Orange in the early 2000s, where I was part of the UK Brand Team, managing and protecting the Orange brand before moving into a global role, helping to deliver major projects as France Telecom rebranded its incumbent businesses around the world to Orange. Since then, I’ve worked agency-side and as an independent consultant, returning in 2012 to what was once Orange to support its transformation into EE – now the UK’s leading mobile network.
Alongside brand strategy, I am an accomplished copywriter. I have written for every medium – print advertising, outdoor, digital, and broadcast as well as a huge number of internal brand engagement campaigns.
My love for and skill with words has also led me to name and reframe numerous businesses – from shopping destinations across the UK, to recruitment businesses and even a landmark London hotel.
In terms of formal training, I have passed the first two parts of Marty Neumeier’s Level C brand mastery course: Brand Specialist and Brand Strategist, and I am hellbent on taking the Brand Architect course. As a member of the Associated Planning Group , I have passed their Strategic Masterclass course in managing strategy.
Skills and experience
Below is the range of skills I have acquired over many years, working with organisations ranging in size from start-ups and SMEs to corporates with a global footprint.
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The focus of your organisation’s direction. This is about defining your brand’s meaning internally and externally. How do you articulate your brand’s difference from your competitors and set the most viable and astute direction for it to take.
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This is about devising an immediately recognisable identity, name and positioning for your brand. What is the story you’re telling, how is it being made manifest and what are the verbal and aesthetic assets that will make it distinctive?
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What is special and compelling about your brand, product or service? This is about sharply defining your offer so that it sets your brand and your product and services apart from the competition.
It's also about crafting the right language: uncovering the messages that will resonate with your audiences and the most potent way of expressing them — using whichever communications channels best connect with your audiences.
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How does your brand philosophy connect with your team?
How does it affect decision-making and behaviour?
Is your brand alive and well within your organisation or has it lost its meaning and traction?
Do you need to re-energise your brand within the hearts and minds of your people?
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Your people are the most valuable asset your business has.
Are your communications connecting and resonating with them?
Are your teams engaging with your communications and are your communications having any effect?
Do you need to reassess and reset them?
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I have designed and run hundreds of workshops for many different kinds of businesses in the UK and all over the world.
If you are seeking to address communications challenges your business has and you need to do this as a team, I can devise and run workshops that will help you collaborate, address challenges and map a way ahead.
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It may be some time since you evaluated your brand identity, your communications, and your overall marketing strategy.
A communications audit helps to uncover where your strengths and weaknesses are or where there are simply opportunities to create better, more effective work that will resonate more powerfully with your audiences.
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I have a wealth of experience of working with senior teams to arrive at a name for a new business, product or service.
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I have many years of copy writing experience and have written for every medium including print advertising, digital, radio ads and scripts for video and television.
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How well is your brand ethos expressed through its language? It’s important to define your brand’s tonal qualities and how they are expressed through the language your brand uses.
How present is your brand ethos in your communications? Is there a schism between its external (‘above the line’) voice and other channels?
A selection of brands I’ve worked with
Here is a small selection of radio ads I wrote while working on the Audi account at BBH.