/ Kelde / is brand strategy from the source.
↓ the source is below ↓
Methodology
While working in London for R/GA, I collaborated with Ingka Group, the corporation behind the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA.Our aim was to re-imagine the IKEA Family membership program that now counts more than 200 million people worldwide 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 customer service, product design to marketing, this exercise showed me that great brands start inside.This idea of starting inside guides what we do at Kelde. Everyone across a business, including the customer, is a stakeholder and every single touchpoint creates the perception of the brand. Surfacing this knowledge creates a powerful self-awareness and understanding of what the brand actually is, what it aims to do, and who it actually serves.This approach led us to our name and logo.Kelde is the English variant from the Old Norse kelda, meaning a spring, well or a source of water.For our brand strategy work, the stakeholders inside a business are our source. They are our starting point and are key to success. They know what’s working, what’s broken, and what usually gets swept under the rug. I build the trust required to bring those honest insights to light and lay the groundwork for implementation.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 a business.So that is where we work - at the source, understanding the brand and working with its flow. A strategy built from there is one the company can actually stand behind, because it is intrinsically true before we write a word of it.Read more about the specific services we offer below.*Duke Stump
Services
Brand & Strategy Projects
Focused, deeper engagements typically 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
Research: Investigation & Recommendations
On-Call Brand Counsel
Ongoing fractional or one-off engagements for general advisement.Think of Kelde 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.This includes everything else a brand leader might need some help with - 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, we had to figure out in three hours how the champion of real beauty would respond authentically.Working with TikTok creators and a clear understanding of the brand, we developed a genuine grassroots approach that went on to win a Cannes Lions Gold in Creative Effectiveness.Being responsive rather than reactive starts inside with the brand knowing what it is and what it stands for.
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 Patrick Evans as lead strategist prior to starting Kelde.
About
Kelde is a solo strategy practice led by me, Patrick Evans.I partner directly with organizations to help them see themselves clearly.My practice is built on a simple premise: the best strategy isn't invented by an outside guru or hot trend, it’s extracted from the collective intelligence already inside your company.Over the past two decades, I’ve brought this collaborative approach to both brand and agency roles across the US and UK. My toolkit is built on senior roles at R/GA, Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Virtue, shaping strategies for brands including Airbnb, Cazadores Tequila, Unilever, and ASICS.My practice is rooted in my foundational training as a journalist. I don't arrive with pre-packaged answers, I let the strategy reveal itself by listening to your people and conducting deep, objective research. Together, we uncover the unvarnished insights that already exist within your business before a single line of strategy is written.This focus on shared honesty and rigorous truth has consistently delivered sustained business results, including a Cannes Lions Gold in Creative Effectiveness.You can find more about my individual work at PatrickEvans.Work.Some of my thinking:
Does your brand learn from its past? / Kelde.co
'The Future of Creativity is Found in Nature' / Presented at Cannes Lions
'In a fast world, we need more slow brands' / Written for Campaign
Ecosystem Member / A podcast project examining the relationship between humans and nature.
Contact
You can contact Kelde by sending Patrick an email by clicking here or using the handy form below. Either way, we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
