Focus: A shift in design strategy

As part of a focus on major global brand consultancies, Andrew Thomas speaks with the leaders of Start Group. Change in culture and in the ways in which design is viewed at the corporate level has spurred the 20 year-old agency to reimagine its brand architecture

Start Group is an agency which has made much of the concept of transformation; the word appeared often in its marketing collateral and a butterfly was integral to its recent advertising campaign. This year, the agency – formerly known as StartJG – turned the transformation tables on itself. It is undergoing a repositioning, an interim rebranding and has brought in a new global CEO to help with, what Mike Curtis, co-founder and now president of Start Group, describes as the process of redefining the next 20 years.

“If you go back to why clients go to agencies, it’s because there is something the agency can provide that the client isn’t doing,” Curtis says. “That tends to be innovation or because they need help in taking their organisations closer to their customers and to help them grow either differentiation, consideration or preference. Commercial creativity has underpinned everything we’ve done, but over time, as things become more successful you find yourself working in similar spaces to other agencies. Agencies lose differentiation. We had to reposition our agency and offer things differently to keep us away from our competitors.”

This year is the 20th anniversary of Start, originally framed as a ‘digital transformation agency.’ A four year working courtship with retail environment agency Judge Gill led to a full merger in 2011 and considerable growth; through global expansion, innovation and acquisition. Part of the repositioning is to provide the Start Group with a brand architecture that properly houses the brands it has developed over the years. These include Zeitgeist, a cultural innovations firm, and software outfit Connected Retail – both of which have resulted from organic growth – and Discovery, a brand tourism specialist in which Start is the second largest investor. Start still sits alongside these, broadly redefined as a brand experience business.

The concept of brand experience is a recurring theme for Start. “We live in the experience economy,” says newly- appointed global CEO Mac MacDonald, “Millennials are changing consumption. They don’t acquire things, they acquire experiences. It isn’t about selling things anymore, it’s about developing experiences.”

MacDonald joined in February this year, having run the Dutch office of North American creative agency Sid Lee. He hasn’t eased himself in gradually. By March his roots were already planted and the first shoots of the new agency positioning showing. “All progress relies on the unreasonable man,” he says, quoting George Bernard-Shaw. “We have to push. It is in our nature. It’s our passion. It’s why we do this for a living – because we love the possibility of change.”

Curtis considers the initial changes taking place within Start as an interim step in what he sees as quite a fluid process, “We want to create a greater sense of purpose between the various initiatives we’ve invested in or created. We then want to create global deployment, which is why we brought in Mac.”

MacDonald relishes the challenge ahead of him. He says, “Nothing has changed in the mainstream advertising, communications, brand space for 50 years. It’s still a media- predicated inventory-based delivery business to support the status quo of the media companies, advertising agencies and ancillary services agencies that support them. We think there are better ways to connect human being with brands.”

As MacDonald points out, however, its easier to make change happen for an agency that has already proven itself. “If we were sitting here and we didn’t have Adidas, Barclays and Dyson, Yas Island, Tesco and Dubai Airport, all these great brands it would be much harder to tell the story of how we were going to change the world through commercial creativity. But we have proof of concept,” he says.

A 20 year tenure at the helm of Start hasn’t made Curtis jaded. He’s excited about the new plans and about brand design in general, “The world’s brands are building large in- house design capabilities, to the point where they’re putting design leaders on boards. Design is defining their futures. It’s exciting times.”