About us - Seventy Agency: Brand and Business Design

Pioneering Brand
And Business Design

In the beginning, there were management consulting firms and there were creative agencies. Each home to a specific set of skills but both limited in their approach. In 2012, we saw an opportunity to bring the two worlds together and founded Seventy, a brand and business design agency equal in its reach for analytical depth and creative heights.

CALLING ALL
BRILLIANT MISFITS

Our award-winning team of strategists, analysts, film geeks, writers, and designers are not defined by their roles. They’re people too. That’s why we encourage Seventy co-workers to bring themselves first: their interests, passions, side-hustles, and even their pets. Diversity drives innovation and it’s what powers our success at Seventy.

Smooth makes
us worried

Business design isn’t manufacturing. We don’t try to remove friction. In fact, we embrace it, even thrive from it. That means crashing ideas, roles, and processes right into each other. Friction brings the energy needed to create and provoke change. A state when creative ideation nurtures strategic thinking and vice versa.

We live by
the codes

At Seventy, we have developed seven codes to help us engage our hearts and brains, and flip between local and global perspectives as we deepen our understanding of brands, businesses, and cultures. They are the defining DNA of our thinking and working, guiding us in our creative and analytical pursuits.

Be a tourist

We’re no big fans of benchmarking. Emulating success factors of industry leaders only makes sense for a follower. Instead, brand leaders need to adopt the mindset of a tourist, and travel to whole other worlds for inspiration. What can cars learn from media? What can fashion learn from food? What can banks learn from video games?

1

Hit the streets

Although tempting to believe, powerful brands are not created in meeting rooms and workshops. Authentic experiences with real impact require deep insights from real situations. That’s why brand leaders spend more time where their culture is lived and their products consumed.

2

Make friends

Businesses are programmed to compete with each other like teams in a sports league. But there’s an important difference: one company’s win is not necessarily the other’s loss. That’s why brand leaders focus less on their competitors and more on their customers.

3

Be media

Media spend accounts for the lion’s share of most marketing budgets, but its return becomes increasingly unclear in times of ad blockers, multitasking and message overload. That’s why brand leaders are shifting mindset – from buying media to being media – creating their own stories instead of breaking into others’.

4

Love Yourself

“We need to think more outside-in” is an often repeated mantra among marketers: listen to the customer and give them what they want. Only problem is that customers often don’t know what they want, and they don’t want to be patronized about it. Luckily, we know something that all people want: brand that are proud and passionate about what they do.

5

Never grow up

Stagnation is the greatest threat to any brand. That’s why brand leaders of all sizes think like startups – constantly challenging their own truths, experimenting to create new values and collaborating with other brands in other sectors sharing that same mindset. Because they know that there’s no such thing as a mature market, and that leadership is nothing you can defend.

6

Lead with purpose

There’s a famous saying that “people don’t buy what you do, but why you do it” and it has never been more true than now. The concept of CSR as a separate department is becoming a thing of the past, as today’s brand leaders integrate their higher purpose naturally and seamlessly in everything from R&D and product development to recruiting and business models, and then communicate it as a matter of fact rather than an added value.

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