Case study · The Story Engine · Utica, New York · 2019
Turning Unaffordable Brand Strategy Into a Working Classroom
Four businesses in Utica needed brand strategy. The problem was, none of them could really afford brand strategy.
Curriculum designFacilitationBrand strategyLaunch
The situation
That sounds like a pricing problem. It wasn't.
The work had value, the businesses needed it, and the Mohawk Valley had plenty of creative talent capable of doing it. What was missing was a model that made the economics work for everyone in the room.
So instead of discounting the consulting, we changed who paid for it, who participated in it, and who got to learn from it.
The clients became the curriculum.
The work
Turn the engagement into the product
Working with thINCubator, Real Useful Company and the Uptown Theatre for Creative Arts, we built a six-week brand and talent practicum around four live businesses.
Not a lecture series.
Not discounted consulting.
Both at once.
Twenty-five participants learned the same methods normally buried inside an agency engagement, then immediately applied them to real businesses in the room.
The system was built around a few structural moves.
- Turn four local businesses into live client briefs
- Pair every teaching session with a working session the following day
- Bring experienced facilitators from Los Angeles, Detroit, Boston, New York and Utica into one shared program
- Combine entrepreneurs, students, freelancers, agency talent and working creatives on the same teams
- Move every client through discovery, audience insight, positioning, story, creative development and launch
- Design the curriculum around usable outputs, not theory
- Give participants the method so the capability stayed in the community after the program ended
The teaching funded the consulting.
The consulting made the teaching real.
The strategic shift
From consulting engagement to capability engine
Brand strategy was something local businesses had to buy from specialists, usually at a price that made the work inaccessible.
The same strategic process became a shared learning system where businesses received the work while local talent learned how to produce it.
That changed the economics completely.
Instead of one client paying for one engagement, twenty-five participants bought access to a working practicum built around four live clients. Every Friday introduced a method. Every Saturday put that method under pressure.
Discovery became a Why statement and Job To Be Done.
Audience research became positioning.
Positioning became narrative.
Narrative became campaigns, content, landing pages and launch-ready creative.
The deliverable was not just the work.
It was more people capable of doing the work again.
What the model proved
Twelve working days, twenty-five seats, four live businesses
The program ran for twelve full working days across six weeks, with twenty-five seats and four live businesses moving through the process together. Participants paid $100 per module, or $500 for the full series.
Basis These figures come from the program's own material, which was written before the series ran. No verified post-program performance results from the six weeks have been recovered, so we are not going to turn projections into proof. What the surviving material does show is the model itself.
What each client was to leave with
Four foundational assets
- North Star
- Why the business exists and where it is going.
- Value Proposition
- The specific value customers can understand and act on.
- Audience
- Not just who the customer is, but what they want, fear and need.
- Brand Story
- The connective tissue that turns the first three into something people can remember.
The program estimated it was putting more than $250K of professional consulting into a six-week experience, then distributing the cost across a cohort rather than asking four small businesses to carry it themselves.
The real lesson
Change the economics before you cheapen the work
When a market cannot afford what you sell, the obvious move is to make a smaller version. Fewer hours. Fewer deliverables. Less strategy. Maybe knock something off the price and hope volume makes the math work.
Sometimes the better question is whether the transaction itself is wrong.
In Utica, the answer was sitting on both sides of it. Businesses needed the work. Local creatives needed the experience. An incubator needed stronger businesses. An arts organization wanted to strengthen the creative community.
Put them in the same room and suddenly one consulting engagement becomes something else entirely.
A classroom.
A working agency.
A talent pipeline.
Four client engagements happening at once.
The work did not get cheaper. The delivery model got smarter.
Same expertise. Different system. And that is usually where the interesting growth ideas are hiding.
Credit
CreditWith Real Useful Company, thINCubator and the Uptown Theatre for Creative Arts. Utica, New York, 22 March to 27 April 2019. Workshop keynote and curriculum © 2019 Real Useful Co.