Our kind of business

We
Believe an
Introduction
Is In Order

We are probably the first of our kind: A creative agency entirely dedicated to helping companies accelerate on their path to commercial excellence. Naturally, this gives us a great deal in common with a range of different companies you already know. But before you file us under ‘c’ for ‘competitor’ to your advertising agency, sales trainers, ux-designers or management consultants, we would like a chance to present ourselves as the ‘missing link’ instead. First, let’s make sure that we are talking about the same thing.

The excellence
you need to position
your business so that
it can reach its
commercial goals

By ‘commercial excellence’ we mean the complex and interconnected practice of bringing your business into a position from which it can reach its commercial goals. It is an excercise that inevitably involves a whole value chain of different specialists who have to agree which way is forward.

A lot depends on setting a clear direction from the word ‘go’. But sometimes a PowerPoint just doesn’t get the ball rolling. Sometimes you need to go a little further before people start to follow. And that’s our cue.

Today, commercial
excellence requires
a new level of
cultural intelligence

In a time when commercial excellence requires a new level of cultural intelligence, we offer business leaders a creative edge. For some it is a matter of switching from ‘push’ to ‘pull’, for others we bridge the gap between ‘purpose’ and ‘purchase’.

We call our agency ‘1st wave’ because we help business leaders make their first move once the commercial strategy is in place. By defining and designing a ‘guiding star’ - a 1st wave - our clients can begin leading the way to commercial excellence.

We help turn
push into pull
and bridge the gap
between ‘purpose’
and ‘purchase’

Over the past years, we have helped both private and public clients - local start-ups and global C20 companies. We have defined everything from new ways of selling to new ways of marketing and designed both management tools and global brand platforms - whatever it took to start a business-defining first wave.

Our Point of view

It’s
Never
Just
Business

You no longer have to be Sigmund Freud to see that it’s never ‘...just business’. Nowadays, people evidently take business more personally than ever. Whether we identify as customers or employees, we want the deals we make to make sense on a personal level. So before choosing which company to engage with or which products to buy, we search our soul. Our business decisions have never been more values-based, and to win us over, companies have to meet a whole new range of cultural criteria.

Today’s companies
have to meet a
whole new range of
cultural criteria

Running a business was of course never just a science. There has always been an art to doing it well. And long before consultants coined the term ‘commercial excellence’, companies have had to rely on some form of ‘cultural intelligence’.

Initially, a business only had to deal with one cultural concern: improving the work ethic among its own employees - and most business leaders were satisfied with trusting their gut. But, ever since Freud’s psychoanalytic theory provided companies with a way to prime and predict consumer culture, cultural intelligence has been regarded a ’business critical’ discipline in its own right.

Businesses have
always had to rely
on some form of
cultural intelligence

Today, it is considered common practice for a company to manage popular demand by manipulating popular culture. It is no longer a ‘game-changer’ like it was a century ago - it has become a basic qualifier. In fact, we have come to expect every company to present itself on the surface as a symbol of cultural significance, as a ‘brand’ - even those without any consumer facing at all.

As a result, more and more companies have recently felt compelled to ‘think different’. At first, it was only a handful of iconic brands. But what these pioneers achieved by taking their company’s relationship with culture beyond the symbolic has now moved the goal posts for everyone.

A brand no longer
has any business
influencing culture
unless it has a strong
culture of its own

By the standard that their success has now defined, a brand no longer has any business influencing culture unless it has a strong culture of its own. And only by becoming a business worth taking personally can a company lay claim to a competitive position in the minds of current customers and employees.

It has come to the point where every commercial entity that banks on human behavior as either a resource or as a source of income has to come to terms with itself as a cultural entity too. Consequently, ‘why’ has lately been among the most frequently asked questions in boardrooms and c-suites. And having a higher ‘purpose’ has become widely regarded as a new license to play.

Today, commercial
excellence requires
a new level of
cultural intelligence

In recent years, company after company have tried to ‘re-found’ themselves and make their business more values based in order to become competive in a culturally defined playing field. Still, out of the many that have embarked on culturally transformative journeys, only a few have - in our view - ended up ’finding themselves’.

We welcome a higher degree of ‘soul search’ within companies. It is an opportunity for businesses to discover potentials that research never could. But ‘soul searching’ takes discipline, not just a flair for the melodramatic. Unless you remain true to what your company really is, you risk introducing a ‘purpose’ that doesn’t ‘live’ in same world as the people you have employed to drive ‘purchase’. The fact that so many fail to reconcile their newfound ‘why’ with their ‘how’ and ‘what’ on an everyday basis goes to show that commercial excellence now requires a new level of cultural intelligence.

It is with this challenge in mind that we have developed our methods. And it is from this point of view we see an urgent need for agencies like ours.

Our team

Our
Network

Rather than running a tradtional full service setup, we believe in letting the task define the team. That’s why we have cultivated an informal network of independent specialists ready to mobilize depending on the challenge,