Total Brand Clarity & Understanding

CAT SAT ON THE MAT is a brand research and strategy consultancy that exists to help businesses understand their brands better.

The Brand As Foster Child

Whether you’re a CEO or a junior brand manager, you’re the temporary custodian of the most precious asset of your business – the brand(s). You have to cherish and nurture them so they can deliver growth both now (on your watch) and in the future (when you hand them over).

But just like children, you can only nurture them and do the right thing by them if you really, really UNDERSTAND them - what makes your brand unique and special and what makes it tick. This is often hard to see when you’re living and working with your brand day in day out and there are plenty of businesses wasting time and money because they haven’t properly understood their brands.

Perhaps the most compelling way we can convey what we do is to share our own brand.

The reason we exist

PURPOSE

To fuel business growth via greater brand understanding.

The space we occupy in clients’ heads

POSITIONING

The straight talking brand experts (no jargon, no trademarked tools, amazing instinct).

What we offer

PROPOSITION

Actionable, brand clarity.

Why we can offer this

REASONS TO BELIEVE?

25+ years of brand building experience from multiple perspectives – as brand marketer, business owner, agency planner and qual researcher.

What drives our behaviour

VALUES

Straight talking, wood for trees thinking, beyond the Powerpoint (actionable), nurturing and building (brands and the people that work on them).

CAT SAT ON THE MAT was founded by Karen Waring who has a career building brands that spans over 25 years.

Client-side in senior marketing roles for both Diageo and AB InBev – building big successful, brands.

Agency-side in senior planning roles at top London creative agencies including Lowe, AMV, Havas and 101 – building brands through creative ideas.
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As a managing partner at a boutique qualitative research agency and the last 10 years running Cat Sat On The Mat – building brands with consumers.
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As co-founder of Scrubbingtons, a start-up FMCG brand of children’s personal care products – creating and building her own brand from scratch.

Prior to corporate life, Karen was an academic qualitative research practitioner with an MA in Social Psychology.
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Consequently, she can appreciate the perspective of virtually every stakeholder sat round the client’s table as well as the consumer outside the room.
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She works with a network of equally impressive associates.

This is where we’d normally stick up an array of logos but we thought it might be more helpful to share some of the more recent challenges we’ve been wrestling with…

Nando’s is an incredible brand that’s been built from its culture and is an absolute joy to work on.

The business is still owned by the original shareholders who have an amazing instinct for the brand they created.

But… the business is growing rapidly and they can no longer rely on shareholder intuition.
Our challenge was to harness it and distil it into a definition of the brand that honoured its richness but was simple enough for everyone to understand and act upon from the global board to the guys working on the grill.

The Royal Photographic Society were struggling with their vision for the future.

There appeared to be quite a division between the ambitions of many of the trustees to reform the image of the society into a more progressive force in British arts culture and the needs of the more conservative, membership base seeking support for their hobby at a local level.

We utilised semiotics and qualitative research to find a future fit brand positioning and proposition but that more more importantly, helped to bridge the gap between these two ’factions’.

A leading international paints brand were looking to launch a new brand they’d acquired into the renovation space in the midst of Covid. They came to us with a seemingly straight forward research brief to evaluate some new packaging.

We used online ethnography to really understand the behaviours and emotional drivers behind renovation and found that the pandemic meant it had become a more complex decision with more emotional drivers than had been assumed.

This provided really clear guidance for the ideal positioning of the brand at a strategic level but also at a more practical, detailed level, the on pack visual hierarchies.

This is where we’d normally stick up an array of logos but we thought it might be more helpful to share some of the more recent challenges we’ve been wrestling with…