/ Kelde / is brand strategy from the source.

↓ the source is below ↓


Methodology



While working in London for R/GA, I got to collaborate with Ingka Group, the corporation behind the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA.The project was formative in more ways than one.Our aim was to re-imagine the IKEA Family membership program that counts more than 200 million people among its ranks. The name was a legacy from founder Ingvar Kamprad and couldn't be changed, but the program needed to feel more IKEA and offer more value to the many people.Heeding the advice of one of my mentors, we started by chatting with staff.*I quickly fell in love with the collaborative, consensus-building style of Scandinavian business and just how deeply staff lived the brand. From retail to food development, product design to marketing, this exercise showed me that great brands start inside.This idea of starting inside, alongside the philosophy of brand as an operating system** guides what we do at Kelde. Everyone across the business is a stakeholder and every single touchpoint creates the perception of the brand.This approach led us to our name and logo.In Old Norse, a root shared by modern Scandinavian languages, the word kelde means a spring, well or a source of water.For our brand strategy work, the people inside the business act as a spring. They hold the history and the skeletons, the killed ideas and the whispered ambitions. They also hold the culture required to implement the ambitious ideas.Our logo also has Norse origins. It is an abstracted image of the rune Laguz. This rune also relates to water and flow, and speaks to our aim to understand the flow of business.So that is where we work, at the source to understand the brand and work with its flow.*Duke Stump | **R/GA.

Services



Brand & Strategy Projects
Focused, deeper engagements lasting two weeks or multiple months.For specific brand questions that need a clear answer like who you are, where you stand, how you go to market.

  • Brand Strategy & Positioning Mission, Vision & Values

  • Audience Identification & Insight Category & Cultural Analysis

  • Brand Trust Analysis

  • Messaging Hierarchy & Communications Framework

  • Go-to-Market Strategy

  • Membership Program Development





On-Call Brand Counsel
Ongoing fractional or one-off engagements for general advisement.Think of it as an on-call Head of Brand Strategy, whenever you need one.Kelde can offer fractional/embedded strategic counsel for teams who need senior thinking on tap. This could be applied to creative brief development, partnership identification, content strategy, community engagement, or just as a sounding board for the decisions that don't fit neatly into a single project.





Workshops & Facilitation
Task-based engagements with defined outputs lasting a defined period of time.Executive presentations, tailored points of view on culture and technology, and workshop development and facilitation designed to get a room aligned, unstuck, or moving in a new direction.









Sample Projects



IKEA Family



Asked to reimagine a loyalty program for more than 100 million members, the easy path was to start with the mechanics like better discounts, simpler tiers. Instead, the work started with the people who lived the brand every day: retail staff, the sustainability team, the people closest to where IKEA's value actually gets made. That's where the real opportunity was.In the end, we reimagined the program from transactional discounts toward delivering more value on multiple fronts to align with IKEA's aim to deliver a better everyday life for the many people, including enabling circularity.The source held the answer the brief hadn't asked for yet.





#TurnYourBack for Dove



When a viral filter blurred the line between real and digitally altered beauty, the instinct was to treat it as a crisis to manage. The better read was that it was already a grassroots cultural moment, it just needed to be found and amplified, not invented.From insight to a fully briefed global campaign took under three hours.The strategy went on to win a Cannes Lions Gold in Creative Effectiveness, proof that going to the source isn't always slow; sometimes the source is already moving, and the job is to recognize and support it.





Brand Trust for Visa EMEA



Visa sits behind most of your everyday transactions, yet almost nobody thinks about Visa directly. For the world's largest payment network, that invisibility had quietly become a liability.Rather than treating it as a marketing problem, the real question was structural: Visa isn't a single brand relationship, it's a marketplace, connecting merchants, banks, and cardholders at once.Looking at how digital-first marketplaces like Airbnb had already solved multi-directional trust gave Visa's EMEA CMO a new way to see the brand's own architecture and a clearer answer than any single campaign could have offered.

Please Note: Projects were led by Rick Evans as lead strategist prior to founding Kelde.

About

The strategist behind Kelde is me, Rick Evans.Over the past two decades, I've worked both brand side and agency side in marketing, innovation and brand strategy roles in the US and UK. This includes stops at R/GA, Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi and Virtue, working with brands including Airbnb, Cazadores Tequila, Unilever, ASICS and many more across a range of categories.My strategy practice comes from my training as a journalist, where I learned to let the story reveal itself. This happens through deep and thorough research that surfaces an authentic, credible narrative before a single word of strategy is written.
This practice has created work that earns both business results and recognition, including a Cannes Lions Gold in Creative Effectiveness.You can find more about my individual work at RickEvans.Work.You can find more of my thinking below:

Contact

You can contact Kelde by sending Rick an email by clicking here or using the handy form below. Either way, we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

/ Kelde / is brand strategy from the source