Speaking and workshops
A different format. The same way of thinking.
I speak about the problems beneath the obvious brand problems — the assumptions, tensions and patterns that keep organisations circling the same answers.
Sometimes that means an hour on stage. Sometimes it means a day in a room working through a real problem together.
Agencies bring me in for their teams and clients. Companies use me with leadership and marketing teams. Institutions bring me in when a room needs to see a problem differently before it can agree on what to do.
English or Turkish.
The aim is rarely to give people more information. It is to change what they notice.
Talks
Roughly an hour
A keynote, conference session or internal talk designed to shift how a room sees a problem.
The best talks do not leave people with ten more things to remember. They leave them unable to look at something in quite the same way again.
Sessions are usually followed by questions and discussion.
Best when the objective is a change in perspective.
Workshops
Half a day to a day and a half
Working sessions built around the organisation’s own material, tensions and decisions rather than case studies about somebody else.
Depending on the problem, the room might leave with a position, narrative, set of messages, strategic choices or simply a much clearer understanding of what has been getting in the way.
Longer formats are useful when the group needs to align as well as think.
Best when the objective is a decision people need to reach together.
Training
Half a day
Practical sessions for teams that want to become better at communicating strategic ideas.
The emphasis is on skills people can use immediately: how to build an argument, tell a story, present an idea so it survives the meeting, and communicate expertise without hiding behind jargon.
Best when the objective is a capability people need to carry forward.
What I tend to talk about
The problem under the problem
Why organisations often spend enormous energy solving the question they were given rather than the one that matters.
Why brands lose their way
What happens as brands grow, age, fragment or become trapped by the very things that once made them successful.
Culture, psychology and choice
Why people do not experience brands as spreadsheets — and what psychology, culture and behaviour reveal that conventional marketing analysis often misses.
Story, meaning and memory
Why some ideas travel through organisations and others die in the meeting where they were presented.
Places, groups and shared identity
What changes when the “brand” belongs not to one company but to a city, district, institution, family or community with competing ideas about what it means.
I do not deliver the same deck to every room.
Tell me who is in the room, what they are wrestling with and what you would like them to see, decide or do differently afterwards. I will shape the session around that.
Who brings me in
Agencies
For strategy teams, creative teams, agency offsites, client sessions and events where a different way of looking at a brand problem can unlock the work.
Companies
For leadership and marketing teams that need to challenge assumptions, align around a strategic question or communicate an idea more clearly.
Institutions
For governments, universities, associations, tourism organisations and other groups dealing with questions of identity, place, culture or collective choice.
Where I’ve spoken
TAIDER Annual Summit
Depodone Connect
McGill University
Morgan Stanley
From family businesses and global companies to universities and public institutions, the rooms change. The questions underneath them tend to be surprisingly familiar.
Practicalities
Based in Brussels and available to travel.
Sessions can be delivered in English or Turkish.
Fees depend on the format, preparation, audience, travel and whether the session is being built around a specific organisational problem. Tell me what you have in mind and I’ll quote accordingly.
Tell me about the room
Thirty minutes is usually enough to understand who will be there, what they are wrestling with and what you want to be different when they leave.
No charge and no obligation.
Strategist first. Speaker second.
I speak for the same reason I do strategy work: to help people see a difficult problem differently enough to move.