Case Study: Running with Mushrooms.
Creating a new business positioning, capable of leveraging the ‘Shroom Boom’ without our client selling her soul in the process.
Jess has a decade of experience in marketing insight. She’s explored the edgiest of cultural trends and human behaviour, all over the world.
She also loves mushrooms. Like, REALLY loves mushrooms.
From self-funded ethnographic trips across sub saharan Africa to meet with growers, to her writing and podcasting. She’s gone all-in on exploring every part of the product, the community and the culture, way beyond what’s currently discussed in the mainstream.
She absolutely wanted to build a business around this passion, but she needed help to land a killer positioning that would be commercially fire, as well as giving her a business with room for growth.
The Challenge:
The mushroom industry is booming; brands are clambering to capitalise and the industry is predicted to be worth $136bn in eight years.
Mushrooms the product, are the obvious part of this, but it was the CULTURE of mushrooms and what they can teach us about new ways of being in the world, that really lit a fire in Jess.
Uniqueness is a killer ingredient for a powerful business, but it also needed to be beautifully rooted in a clear business need.
The APPROACH:
We went deep into mushroom culture to pull out the key, most thought-provoking themes.
We played with possible use-cases for this work. The who, the what and the why… and although this would be a category of one vibe, we explored the existing industry we would be anchored in.
We obsessed over the assets we could build in the business to take ownership over this space and to protect her IP.
The POSITIONING:
What?
We are a FUTURES company, powered by NATURE 🌳
We partner with VISIONARY BUSINESSES to inspire the products, services and systems capable of transforming people and the planet.
How?
We blend STRATEGIC EXPERTISE with an ADVENTURER’S MINDSET.
We use the world of MUSHROOMS: their biology, their culture and their organisational structure as a framework for a new way of thinking.
We LOVE it because, it’s big, fresh and totally different and we get to tell a beautiful story about how the world needs bigger, more radical thinking, a totally new context… to really land it in a high energy, emergent space.
THE STRATEGY:
The business model will make this real and commercial.
Jess will connect her clients with immersive, mind expanding (in the non-psychedelics sense!) experiences into mushroom culture, wrapped in futures-style consultancy and workshops.
At the heart of the business will be two proprietary assets that make the themes and network owned and protected. This will position her as the go-to expert for other agencies and client assignments.
The business itself will walk the talk, operating around a core code of ethics (our ‘Mush Code’) and it’ll shape everything about how it operates and grows.
Jess has a killer positioning and a Strategy Playbook for how we’ll land this in the real-world, across the six spaces of her brand and business. Most importantly she’s full of fire for making it happen. Watch out world, the fungi are coming.
THE RESULTS - IN JESS’S WORDS
As a strategist who’s spent a career helping brands to shape their positionings, I never realised how hard it would be to articulate my own. Emma is brilliant. She has helped me to shape my business proposition; mainly, by really listening. She ‘gets’ me, is genuinely passionate about my idea and has been able to refine my ramblings into a succinct, radical and exciting thing that I can’t wait to release to the world. I’d highly recommend working with her!
