Mickey Wilson

Why organisations work with Mickey Wilson

• She runs a working brand consultancy, not a speaking practice with an agency name attached. The frameworks she presents are the same ones Firestarter applies inside Tesco, Samsung, CIMA and Ocado engagements.
• The DARE Formula gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary for brand decisions: Differentiation, Authenticity, Resonance, Expression. It replaces the design-led conversation most boards default to with a commercial one.
• She works the B2B scale-up problem specifically. The advice is calibrated to founders who have product-market fit and need brand to do the next stage of commercial lifting, not to consumer giants polishing an existing position.
• Paired with co-founder Dr Chris Endersby, a business psychologist, she brings behavioural insight into brand decisions where most agencies bring only aesthetic judgement.

Biography highlights

• CEO and founder, Firestarter (est. 2015), a London-headquartered brand consultancy with a studio in Cape Town
• 30+ years in brand strategy and creative leadership; launched her first agency at twenty-one
• Client engagements include Tesco, Samsung, CIMA and Ocado
• Creator of the DARE Formula and Firestarter’s Brand Maturity Model
• Co-author of forthcoming book BRANDFIRE with Dr Chris Endersby
• Featured in Authority Magazine, Startups Magazine, BMmagazine, WeAreTheCity and Talented Ladies Club

Biography

Most B2B scale-ups treat brand as a downstream problem. They build the product, win early customers, then commission a logo refresh when sales plateau. Mickey Wilson’s argument is that the plateau is the brand problem, and that treating it cosmetically is what causes it to harden.

Firestarter, the consultancy she founded in 2015, sells against that pattern. Working with clients including Tesco, Samsung, CIMA and Ocado, the firm built a proprietary framework, the DARE Formula, around four ingredients its analysts argue brand-led growth depends on: Differentiation, Authenticity, Resonance and Expression. It is the spine of how the firm diagnoses why a B2B business is not converting at the rate its product would predict.

What separates her work from generic brand consultancy is the partnership with co-founder Dr Chris Endersby, a business psychologist whose background sits in behavioural change rather than design. Together they pair brand strategy with cognitive insight into why buyers respond, hesitate, or commit. That joint authorship runs through Firestarter’s BrandSight:360 assessment and through BRANDFIRE, the book the two are preparing for publication.

Wilson started her first agency at twenty-one and has spent more than three decades in brand strategy and creative leadership. The corporate client list is the credential most senior buyers will check first. The more telling proof is that scale-up founders, who tend to be sceptical of agency theatre, hire her to turn brand from a marketing line item into a commercial growth lever.

Key speaking topics

• B2B brand strategy
• Differentiation in saturated markets
• Brand-led growth for scale-ups
• The DARE Formula
• Behavioural psychology in branding
• Brand resonance and emotional connection
• Founder-led brand building

Ideal for

• Founders and CEOs of B2B scale-ups in series A through C
• CMOs and brand directors at mid-market businesses
• Sales and marketing leadership teams aligning on positioning
• Industry conferences in B2B technology, professional services and SaaS

Audience outcomes

• A diagnostic for where their brand is losing commercial ground to competitors
• The DARE Formula as a working vocabulary for cross-functional brand decisions
• A clearer view of how psychology shapes B2B buyer commitment
• Practical pointers on translating founder conviction into a brand position buyers remember
• A challenge to the assumption that brand is a marketing function rather than a commercial one