Branding Studio Collaboration: A Conversation Between Two Agency Founders

We’re a branding studio. Harriet Cox runs a marketing consultancy. On paper, the disciplines are adjacent but in reality, they’re constantly overlapping and occasionally misaligned.

Harriet has worked across large businesses and fast scaleups, while we approach brands from the inside out. They’re different entry points but ultimately ask the same question: how does this business connect with the people it’s trying to reach?

This conversation marks the start of a monthly series with Immo Studio’s partners. It’s an ongoing look at how adjacent disciplines intersect, particularly when working with a branding agency alongside other specialist partners.

Imogen:

You've worked with global brands like Microsoft and now with scaleups as well. What are the main differences in how they approach marketing?

Harriet:

When you're working with big businesses, the resources are immense. You’ve got people whose job is to do each individual slice of marketing. In a smaller business, you’re juggling all of those roles at once. 

Another difference is planning cycles and the amount of time you have to achieve things. In bigger businesses, you’re thinking much further out because the resources allow you to.

That’s where small businesses can shift to being more reactive than strategic. Whether that’s a good thing or not, there’s probably an argument for both sides. The ability to be reactive is good as long as it doesn’t take you away from your strategy, fundamentals, and who you’re trying to reach. Having shorter timelines can actually make you sharper in your decision-making, as long as you’re applying the same level of rigor.

The other key thing when working with smaller businesses is building trust with the founders and team. You need to be able to have honest conversations about what’s working and what’s not, and how you’re going to help build a strong foundation for the business going forward.

Imogen:

Similarly in branding, a lot of it comes down to earning that trust by showing you understand the business and what they’re trying to achieve before making any quick judgments. What do you think is the biggest misconception founders have when it comes to marketing? 

Harriet:

Sometimes they believe the strategy is their content plan, or that they just need someone to manage their ads. But really, what they need is strategic thinking.

The strategy is something you define at a point in time, but it should always be evolving. Your audience changes, the landscape changes, technology changes, so it has to move with that. Starting can be difficult, because it requires you to pause. But it sets you up to build the right content plan or the right media plan off the back of it.

I think the confusion between tactic and strategy is one of the biggest misconceptions. The strategy has to come first, so you can build something meaningful on top of it.

Imogen:

If we think about teams trying to do things in-house, what do companies tend to underestimate when trying to do it themselves?

Harriet:

I think it’s the trade-off of their time. They’re not really looking at that properly.

The founders I work with are excellent visionaries. But then they start taking on all of the different roles in the business. And while they’re capable, their time is better spent building the business.

Imogen:

I think that's often the curse of small businesses and energetic founders trying to cover it all.

Harriet:

It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s about understanding your strengths and limitations, and bringing in the right people to support you so you’re not constantly jumping from one thing to another and creating inconsistency. And with marketing, consistency is important.

Imogen:

It’s the same in branding. Consistency is huge. It’s the less exciting part, but probably the most underrated. Just showing up, repeatedly, and saying things in a way that starts to stick.

Companies talk a lot about reach, growing their audience, more customers, more profit. When do you think retention becomes a more important metric?

Harriet:

You need to be thinking about retention as soon as you have customers.

It’s easy to focus on acquisition because those numbers are more visible. But they can mask what’s happening underneath. If you’re bringing people in but they’re not staying, there’s something not quite right.

Often that points to a disconnect between what you’re promising and what people are experiencing. And that’s not always a marketing issue. It can be the product, the service, or how the whole thing is positioned.

I think it’s really important to understand why your loyal customers stay but it’s just as important to understand why people leave. If retention is low early on, it’s a sign that something more fundamental needs to be addressed.

Imogen:

Let’s talk about AI, because we can’t really have a conversation without it. Has the rise of AI tools shifted where you think companies should invest their time?

Harriet:

I actually think it’s made strategic thinking more important, not less.

AI can help you produce things faster but if you don’t have a clear strategy in place, it’s just more noise. You still need that initial human thinking because that’s what allows you to ask the right questions in the first place.

I think the value now is in being able to untangle your thinking early on. You really need to understand your audience, what problem you’re solving for them, and what your point of view is. AI will only amplify whatever foundation you give it. If that foundation isn’t clear, AI is not going to fix it.

Imogen:

It almost creates a bit more confidence on the execution side, which should mean more time spent getting the thinking right upfront.

Harriet:

Exactly. You’ve still got to have that solid point of view from the beginning, so you can judge whether what it’s producing is actually going to resonate.

Imogen:

If we take a step back to when you’re building a marketing strategy, what do you need to understand about the audience before anything else?

Harriet:

What is the problem you’re trying to solve for them? And going a level deeper, it’s not just what the founder thinks they’re solving, but what the customer would actually say if you asked them.

For example, I worked on a cinnamon bun brand. The insight wasn’t that it’s a delicious product. It’s that you’re sending a gift that means you don’t have to worry about whether your friend will love it.

The insight isn’t always the obvious thing you’re delivering. It’s the thing your customer is really craving, and what they hope you’ll enable for them. Understanding the gap between assumption and reality is really important. That’s where you need to get into whatever data points you can access to uncover that.

Imogen:

If that data doesn’t exist yet for earlier stage companies, how do you approach that?

Harriet:

Even a small amount of data is a good place to start. A few honest conversations with customers can be enough. If you don’t have that, then you have to make a hypothesis. 

Based on your understanding of the industry, your experience with that type of customer, you need to put a point of view forward. Then test it. Give it enough time to actually learn from it, and iterate.

Imogen:

Outside of direct data, do you ever look at places like Reddit, reviews, adjacent brands?

Harriet:

Definitely. It can feel a bit like opening Pandora’s box, but it’s a great place to start.

Reddit, forums, reviews, anywhere people are speaking honestly. There are also tools like Answer the Public, or SEO tools, where you can explore the kinds of questions people are searching around your category.

Imogen:

And finally, when marketing is underperforming, how often is it actually a brand or positioning issue?

Harriet:

Often. Usually, it’s because businesses have jumped straight into tactics without anchoring on a proper strategy first.

You’re never going to out-execute a positioning problem if you’ve got it wrong from the beginning. A lot of the time, it comes back to trying to appeal to everyone. They haven’t found their specific place in the market. So the work is about going deeper.

It’s rare that the creative was bad, or the channel was wrong. It’s that they haven’t quite got to the core of why the customer is coming to them, and how they should position that solution.

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Interview with:
Harriet Cox 

Fractional Marketing Lead

‍Bio: Harriet is the founder of HCxConsulting, a strategic marketing consultancy. She works with founders and growing businesses to bring clarity and direction to their marketing, from audience insight to strategy and execution.