We Analyse, We Question, We Think, We Imagine, We Evaluate.

We Create Actionable, Business Building Marketing Strategy.

We are a research led strategy consultancy.
We create marketing, brand, and audience strategies that can be applied widely, and which build business.

We can do this because we have class-leading experience in the world’s best clients and agencies.

We conduct both stand alone research projects and strategy projects informed by research. But if we conduct research-only projects, our findings and recommendations are informed by our wider strategic understanding, making our research output more actionable.

We understand how strategy impacts on everyone from a marketing manager, to a salesperson, to a creative team, to a production manager, to a curator, to call centre staff.

We work with the world’s most sophisticated clients in multiple sectors, across the world. We have worked on some of the most commercially successful and creatively awarded brands of modern times. We bring that experience to bear on all our projects.

What people say

“We engaged them to work on a youth targetted music project. They suggested specialist input might help. They ran a co-creation process with DJs, club promoters, music journalists. The work evolved significantly and sailed through research”

O2

“It was a great presentation today, thanks. I was excited, inspired and also a little scared- it reminded me of the need to aim really high with this. A great call to arms!”

Royal Academy of Arts

“The workshops run by Simon and Kiran were extremely valuable. My team felt it was the best training they’d had. It provided theory backed up by real examples, and processes that have given us a framework which is being used daily. Thank you very much”

Tesco

“You are the best agency I have worked with”

Vera Levitskaya
Pernod-Ricard

(Groucho’s is in Soho’s Dean St, and the venue of a workshop we ran for Vera.)

Examples of our work

(Click on the image to find out more) 

Nestle

Nestle impress us. Of the multinational FMCG businesses it is the most flexible and adaptable, maybe along with Pernod-Ricard.

We were appointed to identify portfolio priorities and define key brand propositions.

V&A

Big initiatives hadn’t resulted in big growth in visitor numbers.

We were appointed to find out why and propose actions.

Stella Artois

Stella Artois has long been one of Britain’s most successful beer brands. But it hasn’t always been plane sailing. It has gone through several periods of decline. We got involved during the last one. A repositioning was planned. The ad agency wasn’t sure that was right. They suggested we have a look.

Minette Walters

Our first publishing project.

Defining audience, brand, and communications plan.

Very successful.

We work in the UK, multinationally, and in individual overseas markets 

 

To see some of the places that we have worked in, click on the image below:

The library of the Condesa DF hotel, Mexico City

We were there doing insight research into pain relief for McNeil / Johnson and Johnson.

Mexican doctors were surprisingly knowledgable.

Unlike the Chinese doctors we met in Shanghai shortly afterwards: they used Wikipedia as a source of advice. Really!

In their defence, they had grown up in a culture of natural remedies and training in pharmaceuticals was very limited, they told us.

 

“I wanted to write to you in appreciation of our recent time together. They were some of the more enjoyable hours spent in recent months thanks to your refinement, the quality of the process you had worked out and its worthy goals.  All were quite delicious to my intellectual palate.  I congratulate you on a job extremely well done.”

Email to Simon from Stuart Denenberg,
Denenberg Fine Arts, West Hollywood, USA

The excellent Avalon hotel, Beverly Hills. Scene of our stay in L.A.

To answer the question “Why are you called Muse?”

A detail of the Doges Palace, Venice. Scene of a Muse conference presentation

Our name is Muse because of its meaning as a source of inspiration, and the value of inspiration to businesses.

But it also has classical references to quality and endurance, which are characteristics we seek in our output.

We didn’t want to be embarrassed by a transitory, fashionable name that didn’t reflect our values.

So the Doges Palace seemed an appropriate venue for us.

Someone told us it implied ‘old fashioned’.

Perhaps they lacked a bit of discernment?

The Penny Farthing is old fashioned. One of the world’s most iconic buildings isn’t. There is all the difference in the world between being permanently relevant and old fashioned.

We think that truth applies to brands every bit as much as it applies to bikes and buildings.