Matt Davies
Most leadership teams cannot articulate, in one clean sentence, why their company should be chosen over the next one in the category. Marketing decks fill the gap with purpose statements that sound interchangeable across competitors, and the result is a brand that crowds rather than commands its market. The commercial cost is invisible until growth stalls.
Matt Davies is a brand and culture strategist who helps leadership teams sharpen positioning, build a story their organisation can actually live, and turn that clarity into commercial growth.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Matt Davies
- He has built positioning work for both regulated giants and founder-led companies, including Nestle, Boots, Specsavers, Virgin, Nikon and Capital One, so the methods have been tested across categories rather than refined inside one.
- His Brand Strategy Triangle gives executive teams a single shared structure for four arguments they usually have separately: why we exist, who we serve, how we show up, and what we offer.
- He pushes back hard against generic purpose statements. His “Purpose Fatigue” argument is built for boards tired of green and social washing being mistaken for strategy.
- He sits inside the practitioner conversation, not above it. Co-hosting the JUST Branding podcast with over 500,000 downloads means the frameworks he brings into a room have been pressure-tested against the working strategists who use them.
- Operator credibility: he founded, scaled and sold a branding agency, then ran an in-house creative function at Capital One UK. He has been on the buyer’s side of brand work, not only the consultant’s.
Biography highlights
- Author of Storyategy, a six-step process for building a brand strategy on story foundations.
- Co-host of the JUST Branding Podcast with Jacob Cass; 500,000-plus downloads, guests including Marty Neumeier, David Aaker, Denise Lee Yohn and Chris Do.
- Named Top 50 UK Advisor by Enterprise Nation in 2019, 2020 and 2021, in the branding and design category.
- Certified Level C Brand Specialist, Strategist and Architect; Silver Star recipient in the 2020 LEVEL C Metaskills Challenge.
- Founder of Matt Davies Consultancy Ltd; advisory and fractional roles at Newfound, Motto and ikon.
- Earlier career: founder of Attitude Design (2008 to 2017, acquired); Creative Department Manager at Capital One UK, where he established the in-house Creative Studio.
Biography
Most companies do not have a positioning problem. They have a clarity problem. The leadership team cannot agree, in plain language, on the answer to why we exist, who we serve, how we show up and what we sell. Marketing fills the gap with purpose statements that could belong to any competitor in the category.
That is the gap Matt Davies works in. His Brand Strategy Triangle reduces a year of internal debate to four questions a board can actually answer in a room together. His book Storyategy sets out the six-step process behind it, built on the argument that a brand is a story an organisation has to live, not a statement it has to write.
The credibility comes from having sat in every seat. He founded the branding agency Attitude Design in 2008, ran it for nine years and sold it. He then built and led the in-house Creative Studio inside Capital One UK, learning what brand work looks like inside a regulated business with operational constraints. Today he advises CEOs, CMOs and founders through his consultancy and fractional strategy roles at Newfound, Motto and ikon, with named clients including Nestle, Boots, Specsavers, Virgin, Nikon, Fred Perry and Experian.
He also keeps one foot inside the practitioner debate. The JUST Branding podcast he co-hosts with Jacob Cass has passed 500,000 downloads and put him in conversation with Marty Neumeier, David Aaker, Denise Lee Yohn and most of the working canon of brand strategy. Enterprise Nation has named him a UK Top 50 Advisor for three consecutive years in branding and design.
Key speaking topics
- Brand positioning and category differentiation
- Story-led brand strategy
- Purpose, meaning and the limits of purpose marketing
- Customer experience and brand alignment
- Leadership vision and internal brand
- Culture and brand as one strategic asset
- Brand-led growth for founder and scale-up businesses
Ideal for
- CEOs, founders and MDs leading a repositioning, a rebrand, or a category shift
- CMOs and brand directors are trying to land a single positioning argument across a leadership team
- Boards and ExCos are tired of generic purpose statements and are looking for a more commercial alternative
- Marketing and design leaders inside large or regulated organisations who need their work to be understood as strategy, not decoration
Audience outcomes
- A working answer to the four questions of the Brand Strategy Triangle, applied to the audience’s own business
- A sharper view of where the company’s positioning is generic and where it is genuinely defensible
- A clearer language for talking about brand inside the leadership team, beyond logos and taglines
- A practical critique of purpose-driven messaging and a workable alternative built on customer-centric ideas
- Confidence that brand strategy is a commercial growth tool, not a marketing afterthought
Talks
A working session on brand positioning, built around the question of what the audience’s company is genuinely the only one of in its market.
Key takeaways:
- A definition of positioning that holds up under board scrutiny, not just marketing review.
- A drafted “onlyness” statement leaders can refine against the rest of their strategy.
- A clear test for distinguishing real differentiation from category-standard claims.
A direct critique of generic purpose marketing and an argument for replacing it with customer-centric ideas that earn attention.
Key takeaways:
- Why “green washing” and “social justice washing” damage trust faster than they build it.
- A framework for testing whether a purpose statement is actually doing commercial work.
- An alternative model built on the “big idea” rather than the corporate value statement.
An introduction to story theory as a working tool for managing meaning and building brands that travel.
Key takeaways:
- Why human beings remember stories and forget claims.
- The structural elements that make a brand story land internally and externally.
- A practical approach to using story to align teams behind a strategy.
A talk for leaders on how to build a vision their organisation will actually follow.
Key takeaways:
– The seven elements Davies argues every credible vision needs.
– Why most corporate visions fail the “would anyone follow this” test.
– How to connect a personal leadership voice to an organisational story.
A walk-through of Davies’ core framework for aligning a leadership team behind a single brand strategy.
Key takeaways:
- The four questions every leadership team should be able to answer in one room: why exist, who serve, how show up, what offer.
- Where most strategies break down between these four answers.
- How to use the Triangle as a recurring decision tool, not a one-time exercise.