Sheepdog was founded to offer promising startups and transforming brands a modern solution to navigating marketing complexities and positioning their brand for growth.
Understanding your customer, developing a brand, effectively going to market and driving sales are hugely important to a company’s success, yet decisions in these areas are often made tactically because the organization isn’t ready or able to bring a full-time marketing leader on board.
We are typically hired by Founders and CEO’s of emerging and growth businesses to work with their teams on a Fractional CMO basis. We focus on the foundational brand positioning and go-to-market strategies essential for differentiation and creating lasting brand value. And we do it as a member of your leadership, accountable for moving your marketing system and team members along (that’s the sheepdog part, get it?).
Sheepdog’s founder, David Sigel, brings a 30-year track record of high profile success with global power brands and startups alike. David’s broad experience spans consumer and B2B categories, with a concentration in sports-tech, food-tech, financial services, business services and distilled spirits.
Through Sheepdog, David works with a few companies a year over typically 3 to 12 month engagements, and uses a best-of-breed teaming approach to engage elite strategic and creative talent for key initiatives.
Even for an early stage startup, a strategically sound brand is critical for clarifying purpose, mapping out a differentiated proposition, and cultivating market demand. Agility and collaboration are at a premium at this stage as business models and product forms shift quickly. Sheepdog uses scrappy, but proven, approaches to establishing foundational brand strategies and executing marketing plays that help startups reach their next milestone.
For the company transitioning from early stage proof of concept to prime time scale up, it’s essential that the brand keep up with the business. Yesterday’s “good for now” marketing assets need to evolve into a playbook grounded in rigor, with a path to sustainable growth. Balancing awareness and acquisition takes a thoughtful prioritization of initiatives and creative execution at least as original as the product itself. Sheepdog brings decades of expertise at making new brands famous.
Even more established brands with a strong marketing infrastructure in place can sometimes benefit from an infusion of expert outside perspective. Sheepdog works side-by-side with marketing leaders to attack new markets or evolve their brand strategies, creative campaigns, and agency relationships. And since building any brand starts inside, we help organizations embrace and operationalize brand strategies, whether existing or new.
In addition to broader based fractional CMO engagements, Sheepdog contracts on a project basis around specific activities or deliverables. We purpose build teams of elite talent, usually drawing from independents or specialized creative collectives. You access best-of-breed skill sets, on a highly efficient, flexible basis.
We have nearly 30 years experience helping lead the brand voice of world-class consumer and B2B brands, as well as high growth startups. Along the way we’ve driven awareness, engagement and spectacular business outcomes, and made creative work that has won just about every form of industry recognition.
Below is a sample of creative assets developed to tell the stories, and propel the sales, of our client’s brands.
I started Sheepdog to help the next generation of world-changing companies tell their stories and reach their unlimited commercial potential. Whether you have fundamental brand challenges, or just want an outside perspective on part of your marketing system, I’d love to talk about it.
David Sigel, Founder & CEO