This is one of the core service categories we offer at Ogilvy Consulting, the strategic consulting arm of the Ogilvy ecosystem. In this blog we focus on this practice in particular, understanding that it is part of a broader portfolio of capabilities that work in an integrated way to transform organizations.
In a world where consumers are exposed to thousands of brand messages daily, relevance isn't inherited — it's continuously conquered. The brands that thrive aren't necessarily those that shout the loudest, but those that deeply understand how to create perceived value, how to structure their portfolios to maximize impact, and how to strategically invest in building connections that really matter.
Our Corporate Brand and Marketing Innovation practice works at the core of how brands create, communicate, and capture value in the market. It's not about isolated campaigns, but about designing coherent, dynamic brand systems that drive sustainable differentiation and maintain relevance over time.
Brand Innovation: Reinventing How Brands Create Value
Our brand innovation develops completely new ideas, experiences, or approaches that make your brand more relevant, differentiated, and attractive — reinventing how it connects with audiences, especially when market context or perceptions have changed radically.
At our sister agency, Interaction Ogilvy, we worked with Burger King on one of the most complex brand challenges: returning to a market after a disastrous exit. In 2015, Burger King left Costa Rica. That meant 29 closed restaurants, more than 400 people unemployed, and severe damage to the brand's image. Two years later, BK decided to return to the country. For a successful relaunch, it wasn't enough to simply reopen — we had to show people how much we missed them and genuinely reconcile with them.
Brand innovation came in the form of experience, not traditional advertising campaign. We created an ally character for the people: The Whopper Dealer. An "entrepreneur" who sold Whoppers identical to the originals, only through WhatsApp.
We spread the message organically using local Facebook communities to start the rumor. Influencers talked about it in private WhatsApp groups they shared with other influencers and journalists. To make it even bigger, after hundreds of real orders delivered, Burger King Worldwide "contacted" the Dealer — not to sue him, but to offer him a job at its first restaurant. A deal that was widely covered by the media and celebrated by the public.
The innovation wasn't an ad — it was a cultural experience that turned the brand's return into an event celebrated by the audience. Now that Burger King had cleaned its name and built genuine anticipation, it was ready to return. That's brand innovation: creating new ways to connect that transform perception and generate relevance where there was once rejection.
Portfolio Strategy: Capturing Market Territories That Others Don't See
Our portfolio strategy designs the optimal architecture of brands and products to maximize impact, eliminate confusion between offerings, and capture market territories (segments, occasions, channels) that the competition hasn't seen or is ignoring, where your portfolio can win without direct competition.
At Interaction Ogilvy we worked with Alimentos Jack on a case that perfectly exemplifies this principle. Picaritas, produced since 1972, are one of Costa Rica's flagship snacks. Historically, their target was children and teenagers. Over the last decade, a series of variables hit them directly: a trend toward consuming healthier foods, and a ban on sales in educational institutions. Their brand presence in the consumer's daily life dropped dramatically, losing purchase consideration. Imported snack competition further fragmented the category.
When comparing 2012 sales versus 2016, they observed a significant drop. They had tried everything: brand extensions with new flavors (Picarita cool, Picarita with tomato sauce, Picaritas ardientes), changes in packaging image. Nothing managed to increase sales. The traditional portfolio approach — more SKUs, more flavors — wasn't working.
The innovative portfolio strategy came from an unexpected place: in December 2016, Jacks received a call asking them to sponsor a stand to sell "Caldosas" at the Palmares festivities. Caldosas were a product sold since around 1990 at the Fory Fay Bar and Restaurant in Palmares — a seafood dish prepared with Picaritas that was locally famous.
The strategy was brilliant in its simplicity: "Bring Caldosas to the entire country and position them as made with Picaritas." Instead of creating new products, they captured a completely different market territory that was empty: food service and preparation. After the initial acceptance, in 2018 they began a pilot plan in Palmares and Naranjo, focused on the Caldosas recipe being exclusively made with Picaritas. They offered not only the product but a full communication support plan.
Seeing market acceptance and quick expansion in the area's seafood restaurants, in 2019 they structured a national plan. Leveraging Jacks' strong direct distribution across the country, they brought this recipe to all of Costa Rica, supporting entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized business owners.
The result: instead of fragmenting their portfolio with more variants competing among themselves, they captured a completely new market territory — different consumption occasion, different channel, different experience, with the same base product. That's portfolio strategy: maximizing impact by finding empty territories others don't see.
Brand Architecture: Clarifying Relationships to Maximize Value
Our brand architecture practice clearly defines how brands and products relate within an organization. It determines what shares the corporate name, what operates independently, and how sub-brands are organized, so customers can easily understand the relationships among the different offerings and the value of the portfolio without confusion.
Organizations face fundamental decisions in brand architecture. They must define whether each product requires an independent brand or whether all offerings should live under a shared corporate brand. They must also decide when it makes sense to create sub-brands versus line extensions, and how to balance each brand's autonomy with the efficiency and coherence of the full portfolio.
An effective brand architecture answers these questions strategically, not arbitrarily. It considers how different the target segments of each product are, whether one brand's associations strengthen or weaken another, where the greatest brand equity resides, and how the chosen structure facilitates or limits future extensions, alliances, or acquisitions.
We work with organizations to audit their current architecture, identifying confusions, redundancies, or untapped brand value. From this diagnosis, we design the target architecture that best supports the business strategy and build a transition roadmap that allows evolving from one structure to another without destroying value in the process. The goal isn't the most elegant architecture, but the one that maximizes clarity for customers and efficiency for the organization.
Marketing Investment: Investing Where It Generates Real Return
Our marketing investment strategy allocates financial resources to initiatives that maximize return and impact, identifying where each dollar generates more measurable business value, eliminating waste in ineffective tactics, and reassigning budget toward channels and programs with demonstrable ROI.
The reality is that most organizations don't really know which parts of their marketing investment are generating results and which are essentially waste. They invest in channels because "that's how it's done" or because the competition does it, without clear evidence of effectiveness.
Strategic marketing investment allocation requires three fundamental capabilities: rigorous measurement of what's working (not just vanity metrics but business impact), marketing mix modeling that isolates the contribution of each channel and tactic, and the courage to reallocate budget from the familiar but ineffective to the new but promising.
We work with organizations to build evidence-based investment frameworks: identifying which initiatives generate the highest ROI, which channels have room to scale versus which are saturated, how to balance investment in brand building (long-term results) versus activation (short-term results), and how to build flexibility to reallocate resources nimbly when market conditions change.
Marketing Planning: Translating Strategy into Executable Action
Our marketing planning approach establishes clear objectives, concrete actions, timelines, and budgets to reach business goals. It translates brand strategy into an executable plan with defined priorities, clear owners, and metrics that allow measuring progress and success consistently.
Effective planning answers fundamental questions. It specifically defines what you're trying to achieve, for whom you're creating value, what the differentiated proposition is, and what channels and tactics will be used — along with the reasons behind each decision. It also establishes how success will be measured and, equally importantly, which initiatives you'll decide not to pursue to maintain strategic focus.
The most common challenge isn't lack of ideas, but lack of prioritization. Weak plans try to do everything at once. Strong plans make clear bets, concentrate resources on a limited number of high-impact initiatives, and understand that every decision means consciously giving up other options.
We work with marketing teams to develop plans that are simultaneously ambitious and executable. We design objectives that challenge the organization without losing realism, clear strategies that guide daily decisions, specific tactics with defined owners and timelines, and metrics that enable continuous learning and course corrections. The plan isn't the end in itself, but the mechanism that turns strategy into real momentum in the market.
Corporate Brand and Marketing Innovation isn't a beautification practice but a value-creation one. In saturated markets where attention is the scarcest resource, the brands that thrive are those that constantly reinvent how they create relevance, structure their portfolios strategically, and invest their resources where they generate real impact.
Ready to explore how we can help you build sustainable relevance for your brand? Let's talk.
Written by Daniela Laclé
Head of Consulting
