Welcome to Significance Consulting

Every business has something to say. We'll make sure it's significant.

The 'why we're different' bit

Significance is a new strategy-led brand consultancy, laser-focused on driving growth.

Having experienced the world of brand-building from all angles, we’ve seen just how many branding initiatives struggle to deliver on their investment. Too often there’s too much emphasis on execution and too little emphasis on strategy. And where strategy does see the light of day, it’s generic, poorly articulated, and not focused on addressing the most important drivers of growth.

To us, strong strategy isn’t about building a verbose and unnavigable brand model, nor is it box-ticking a purpose, positioning and promise so you can quickly skip to the creative bit. It’s about finding a simple, single and original strand of logic that makes the brand more significant in the eyes of the people it needs to persuade. And with significance, growth is never far away.

Where others work backwards from what they are resourced to deliver – design, digital, advertising, etc – we work forwards from your growth challenge. By being centred on the jobs to be done and agnostic about the methods of delivery, we’re able to create strategy that’s more capable of becoming the lynch pin to all brand-building activity. And we’re not just talking comms; our work helps leaders direct and connect the whole organisation.

The 'what a project might look like' bit

Our focus is on creating what we call the brand’s ‘Growth Ignitor’ – a way of creatively capturing the optimal proposition that you can credibly substantiate today, whilst providing a growth pathway that stretches and directs product innovation, culture change and enhanced customer experience tomorrow.

We surround this logic with well-illustrated examples of how it might shape the brand going forwards – messaging, service hallmarks, product development ideas, signature collaborations, and more. By bringing together the logic with manifestations of the logic, our ‘Growth Playbooks’ are an ideal catalyst for change, taking brand direction out of PowerPoint and into the real world.

We aim to deliver projects in short sharp sprints that are affordable to clients big and small. By working with us to define your ‘reframe’ you’ll be much better equipped to determine exactly what should be the first domino to push over to create the maximum impact on growth. And that might not be a costly ‘rebrand’. Whatever actions are needed, we assemble and chaperone the best-in-class creative resources to make it happen.

The 'pertinent case study' bit

Global Blue are the world’s largest operator of downtown tax free shopping – that’s where a foreign national can reclaim the VAT on the things they buy on the high street of a country they are visiting.

With their growth limited by the number of Governments they could persuade to adopt their tourist-enhancing service, we helped rethink and reframe their offer and put it on a new path to growth.

The Growth Ignitor: “The Globeshopper’s Best Friend”. By taking ownership of the high-value audience they served – The Globeshopper – and asserting a role that would stretch them way beyond tax free shopping, this simple and single-minded piece of logic became the catalyst for unprecedented growth in the business. It not only kick-started new revenue streams – a magazine, concierge services, shopping tours, marketing insights – it catapulted the company’s valuation, leading to an exit value five times that of the previous sale, four years prior.

The 'hard to argue evidence' bit

So if it’s true what we’re saying, and we’ve cracked the formula for agile and effective growth, surely we’ve got an accolade or two to support our claim?  How about 37! That’s the number of prestigious Transform Awards we landed in our previous incarnation as Goosebumps. The Transform Awards are one of the few gongs to acknowledge the ROI on brand building initiatives. Believe us when we say 37 in a four-year period is more than a little unusual.

The 'behind the curtain' bit

Significance was founded by Simon Cotterrell. Simon’s career falls neatly into two halves. The first half saw him working as a planner in some of the world’s leading ad agencies – Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury, Saatchi & Saatchi, Lowe and DDB.

The second half saw him flip over to the world of brand consulting working initially for Interbrand and Landor before setting up his own agency Goosebumps which he successfully ran for 10 years. Simon spent the last seven years as Head of Strategy at Interbrand before making the move back into the world of owner/operator to be closer to the action.

Simon is joined by an ever-growing roster of collaborators, hand-picked to tackle the specifics of each challenge.

The 'give us a call' bit

From start-ups and scale-ups to established companies looking to regain momentum, every company can find themselves questioning how to find that new hockey-stick kick in growth. Whether it’s customer demand, investor support or talent engagement you seek, we’d love to help you find it.