The Value Engineers

The Value Engineers is a global brand strategy consultancy that reports more than 40 years of experience working with ambitious brands. It organizes its work into three practices, strategy, innovation and design, and has teams in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

The strategy practice supports organizations at pivotal moments by combining customer understanding, organizational culture and market context in a brand-first approach. Innovation work identifies where a brand can play and turns that into concepts, propositions and plans, while design carries strategic thinking into creative work. The firm describes a six-stage method: discover the business, category and customer; define where the brand has the right to play; develop usable strategy; design ideas and propositions; deliver plans, tools and prototypes; and drive the work into processes and teams. Leadership includes Dr Fleur Horner as CEO and Kara McCartney as President North America, and the team includes an analytics group of data scientists.

• Growth strategy: opportunity mapping and commercially grounded roadmaps
• Brand strategy and positioning: defining where a brand competes
• Portfolio and proposition strategy: structuring offers and ranges
• Customer and audience definition: segmentation frameworks built on research and immersion
• Go-to-market and launch strategy: including phased trials before wider rollout
• Innovation and design: concepts, naming, visual identity and launch support

Published case studies name Bang & Olufsen (luxury audio positioning), Brittany Ferries (repositioning around sea travel as part of the holiday), Bakkavor (a new ready meals brand taken through to launch), Jabra (innovation opportunities from trends such as AI and hybrid working), Sky (strategic guidance behind the That Sky Feeling campaign) and Starbucks Reserve (a brand role and roadmap for EMEA). Other examples include a hard seltzer trial for Carlsberg in Norway and Singapore, a global audience segmentation for TikTok embedded across content, product and communications teams, and six innovation territories for Unilever's hair styling products.