We create marketing, brand, and audience solutions 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 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 about us
“We engaged them to work on a youth targeted 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”
“The segmentation was very clear and it’s value to us was clear even to those not familiar with such things. The analysis of visitor and non visitor perceptions was very clear and the idea generation sessions brought the best out of everybody”
“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”
Examples of our work
(Click on the image to find out more) K
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.
MINETTE WALTERS
Our first publishing project.
Defining audience, brand, and communications plan.
Very successful.
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.
V&A
Big initiatives hadn’t resulted in big growth in visitor numbers.
We were appointed to find out why and propose actions.
To see some of the places we’ve been working 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.
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. We want to make brands permanently relevant.
We’re in the heart of Soho, London, and so we’re in the heart of some of the most culturally influential and inspirational places in modern history. As one writer said:
“Soho needs to be seen to be believed, a beast unto itself, a stage fully dressed with a full cast of actors, professional or otherwise. By day, a warren of streets thronged with film directors, ad agency ‘ideas people’, Chinese porters, Booker Prize-winning novelists, sober ponces, nonces and fakers, Irish vagabonds trying to scrounge a penny to keep the wolf from the door, and everything in between. By night, a neon-lit labyrinth through which courses a virus, infecting tourists and barflies alike, a sickness that makes that one last drink never the final one of the evening and always the first of many more which will maroon a man in London’s heart until the birdsong of dawn, his braces looped by his knees, office eyes zombified, glazed by the debauch, strung out and skint, his wife back in the burbs already flicking through the local Yellow Pages for the numbers of family lawyers. And the hookers in the side street walk-ups, the kind you never see, but who keep the red lights burning in windows whose iodine curtains hang sadly with the scurf of a million johns.”
We’re glad to be a small part of that history.
The image at the top of the page is of the John Snow memorial, near our office. That groundbreaking, inspirational doctor traced the source of London’s cholera outbreak to the site of the memorial in 1854. It amuses us that the much better known memorial to him is the ‘John Snow’ pub, in the background!
Recently from our blog:
Membership Marketing – It’s a Jungle Out There
This week’s blog extols the benefits of membership schemes and offers some of our learnings for those managing them. “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member” So said Groucho Marx. These days however it would appear that the nation very much wants to...
Car Advertising: That Joke Isn’t Funny Any More
Today's blog hopes that the recent Honda spoof encourages car advertisers to be more adventurous. Last week the web was all a-chortle with an ad for a second-hand (that’ll be ‘pre-owned’ these days, Ed.) Honda Accord. If you didn’t see it, here it is: It’s well...
City Year UK appoint Muse and Technique for brand refresh
Today’s blog praises a rigorous approach to brand development. Uncommon as it is for us to blow our own trumpet, we’re going to make an exception for a good cause. We’re delighted to say that City Year UK have appointed Muse and our creative agency Technique to define...