INTERBRAND
From Brand Consultancy to Audience Growth Platform
Turning a global brand system into a business performance platform
Client: Interbrand Global
Sector: Marketing & Advertising, Brand Consulting
Role: Director of Experience Design (Interbrand Global/London)
$16.5M+
Attributable incremental revenue over 12 months
+32%
Increase in qualified leads via DotCom properties
2.8×
Revenue attributed to digital campaign channels
2.5×
Traffic growth to key DotCom pages and sections
Situation
Interbrand was repositioning, but its own brand experience hadn't made the journey.
Interbrand was mid-repositioning. The business was moving from pure brand consultancy toward consulting, IP, and thought leadership, but its own marketing hadn't made the same journey.
Campaigns, website, and content were running as separate efforts. The identity system that Interbrand applied to clients with rigour wasn't being applied to itself with the same discipline.
The result was a brand experience that contradicted the ambition it was trying to communicate. For a business whose commercial proposition rested on brand authority, that gap was a growth problem.
Approach
I rebuilt the platform, the content system, and the campaigns as one connected design problem.
The mandate covered the full surface of how Interbrand presented itself to the world: identity, digital platforms, content, and campaigns. I directed the redesign and development of the website, rebuilding it not as a brochure but as a modular product. Components and tagging gave global and regional teams the ability to publish and localise independently, without triggering redesign cycles each time. That structural decision was about delivery as much as design.
Alongside the platform work, I co-created and launched Arena Thinking, a thought leadership ecosystem organised around thematic lenses rather than service categories. The logic was deliberate: content mapped directly to Interbrand's offer, so that attention from the right readers converted into commercial conversations rather than simply traffic. I also directed Best Global Brands across its full channel spread, from the annual report and social content through to keynote decks and the Nasdaq activation.
Throughout, I worked with global executive teams on design operations and experience maturity, building shared standards and asset libraries that reduced the rework that had been quietly absorbing time and budget.
System
The website became the operational backbone. Arena Thinking closed the gap between content and commercial conversations.
What the work produced was a functioning brand experience system. The website became the operational backbone: modular, governable, reusable. Teams across markets stopped rebuilding from scratch and started working from proven components.
Best Global Brands reinforced its industry global standard for brand valuation. Directing its brand experience and multichannel campaign system, from the annual report and social content through to keynote decks and the Nasdaq activation, was about making the world's most closely watched brand ranking feel as authoritative in execution as it was in methodology. A coherent brand experience and multichannel campaign running from a single toolkit regardless of format or geography.
Arena Thinking did something more specific. By mapping articles, videos, and data stories directly to service offers, it closed the gap between the client experience of reading Interbrand's content and the service design of how new business conversations actually started. Readers landed on material that spoke to their problems, and the journey from that content into a commercial relationship became shorter and more legible.
Shared governance across content, campaigns, and platform work meant the whole system reinforced itself rather than pulling in different directions.
Note: the website described reflects the version I directed between 2021 and 2025. The current site was updated independently.
Best Global Brands (2020–2023) reinforced its role across channels as the annual ranking that identifies and analyses the 100 most valuable brands in the world.
Breakthrough Brands (2023)
Arena Thinking connected thought leadership to offers, via thematic areas with cultural, social, and economic lenses
Shared content campaigns used by multiple teams
Outcomes
Marketing shifted from expression to performance, with numbers to prove it.
Experience Systems held the work together here: the brand equity Interbrand projected publicly, the client experience of navigating its content and offers, and the service design logic that made the whole thing governable at scale across teams and markets, all moving in the same direction.
- +$16.5M attributable incremental revenue in 12 months
- +32% increase in qualified leads via DotCom properties
- 2.8× revenue attributed to digital campaign channels
- 2.5× traffic growth to key DotCom pages and sections
Curious how this approach might apply in your context?
Ale
Chief Experience & Design Officer
Design is an act of attention.
For the people. For the business. For the system that connects them.
Based in London
Open to relocation across UK and EU
Fractional, Interim, Permanent