Consulting — Katie Siff

Consulting

Brand work that makes people feel something.

There's a version of brand strategy that's mostly aesthetic. Pick a font, write a positioning statement, hand it over. That's not what I do.

I find what's actually true about a brand, the tension, the human story, the cultural moment it could own, and I build something around it that makes people feel something. Two founders have cried reading narratives I wrote. A 30-year-old sardine company landed in Fast Company and grew 669% after I rebuilt who they were from the ground up. A three-wheeled motorcycle brand that had never done anything culturally interesting got Migos, a campaign that ran across experiential, social, and earned media, and 193% sales growth. A regional craft brewery with zero national presence ended up on Good Morning America because I connected two ideas nobody thought to put together.

None of that happened because I ran a process. It happened because I can move from the strategic insight to the brand story to the creative idea without losing the thread, which is rarer than it sounds, and genuinely useful at a moment when most brands can't afford five specialists to hand the work between.

I work directly with founders and senior leaders who want to build brands that actually mean something. Not commodities dressed up in good typography. Not brands engineered purely for the bottom of the funnel. Brands with a real reason to exist, a story worth telling, and the ambition to show up in culture in a way that earns attention rather than just buying it.

669%
YoY revenue growth — rebrand and DTC launch
2B+
Campaign impressions — brand's first celebrity partnership
765M
Earned impressions, 500+ media placements — brand partnership conceived from scratch
600%
YoY growth, national retail distribution — women-owned CPG brand refresh

I work directly with founders and senior leaders. No account manager layer, no junior team doing the actual thinking. You get my full attention, and I stay until the work is done right.

Working with me also means working with my dog. He doesn't bill hourly but he does have strong opinions about the snack category.

What I do

01

Brand Strategy & Foundation

For brands just getting started, or needing to start over

I build the strategic foundation everything else runs on: positioning, naming, audience definition, messaging architecture, brand voice, and visual identity direction. Whether you're pre-launch, post-pivot, or sitting on something genuinely good that just hasn't found its story yet, this is where we start.

I've built brand strategies completely from scratch, named the brand, developed the positioning, wrote the narrative, and directed the creative, for founders who came to me with nothing but a product and an instinct that it could be something.

02

Creative Strategy & Concept Development

For brands that need sharper, braver ideas

This is the work that lives between positioning and execution. I translate what a brand stands for, what its audience actually cares about, and what the cultural moment is asking for into campaign territories, narrative platforms, partnership concepts, and activation ideas that feel fresh, specific, and earned.

I think in cultural tension first. I look for the unexpected angle, the audience everyone else is ignoring, the pairing that shouldn't work on paper but lands perfectly when the story is right. That instinct is what put Blockbuster — a defunct video rental chain — at the center of a local craft brewery campaign that had no business going viral but did anyway. It's what led me to cast Joan Jett, in her first-ever brand partnership, as the face of a motorsport campaign targeting an audience the category had completely written off. The brand captured their highest market share on record that year. Sometimes the most counterintuitive choice is the only one worth making.

03

Fractional Head of Brand

Senior brand leadership without the full-time hire

I come in as your Head of Brand or Brand Marketing Director, building the strategy, directing creative, managing partners, and making sure every touchpoint is telling the same story. I've done this for brands with no internal team, no infrastructure, and a lot riding on getting it right.

You get someone who treats your brand like it's their own, who pushes back when the work isn't good enough, and who brings a vetted network of designers, photographers, social leads, PR partners, and performance specialists when the scope calls for it. You don't need a full agency. You need the right people pointed in the right direction, with someone senior enough to know the difference.

What I bring

Range that's genuinely hard to find in one person.

I don't do generic. I've never handed a client something I wasn't proud of and I don't know how to half-ass creative work.

I talk like a real person. I explain strategy in plain language. I get genuinely excited about a good problem and that energy shows up in everything. I've been told more than once that working with me doesn't feel like working with a consultant. It feels like having someone deeply invested in your brand sitting at the table with you.

I can write the positioning deck and creative direct the shoot. Strategic rigor plus real creative instinct plus the ability to execute.

I can run a campaign that earns 2 billion impressions and also sit across from a founder with nothing but a product and help them find the one true thing their brand stands for.

I push back when the work isn't good enough. I don't let anything go out that I'm not proud of.

I come to your category without the blinders that come from spending a career in only one of them. CPG, lifestyle, beverage, wellness, fashion, consumer tech — I've worked across all of it.

That combination is what the brands I work with actually need, and it's increasingly what the market requires whether or not job descriptions have caught up yet.

This works
best when...
  • You're a founder or senior leader who's directly involved in brand decisions and wants a real collaborator, not someone to manage.
  • Your team is lean. You move fast, you hate unnecessary process, and you need someone who can keep up and make good decisions without hand-holding.
  • You have a product or business with a real story, some tension, some humanity, a genuine reason to exist, and you're ready to invest in telling it well.
  • You care about building something that earns people's attention, not just buying it.
  • You've been burned by agencies that overpromised, underdelivered, and sent a different team than the one that sold you.
  • You're not looking for the safest possible answer.

Building brands
people care about.

Serious about the work. Easy to be around. Let's see what we can make.