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  • Magda Dickens
  • Anthropos Brand Strategy
  • Johnny Johnson
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WHO WE SERVE

Brands are dynamic and need to evolve to suit the lifecycle of the enterprise they serve.

Where you are today shapes what keeping your brand promise actually looks like. Find the path that matches yours - so here's how we work with you, specifically.

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Founders & Entrepreneurs · Scaling-Up and MSME's · Purpose-Driven & Scaled-Up Organisations

Not sure which one fits? Book a Strategy Conversation and we'll help you find out

We have had the privilege of helping to create, build and protect brands across industries and across Africa. Here are some examples
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IN THEIR OWN WORDS

What it's like to work with us

Richard Parker - Altydgedacht

Thanks very much for a great brand and general business session. It surpassed my expectations of what it would achieve and I am really glad we did it, and did it with you.

Tumi Tsehlo - South African Mint

You guys did an amazing job on our employee engagement plan. I am really excited about what we will achieve through the work.

Malcolm Westmore, Westcor

I’ve worked with Johnny for twenty odd years in developing both our national accessory brands & exclusive brands for our retail clients. His superpower is taking a collection of ideas and instincts from "the room" and funnelling them into a clear, concise brand strategy & his process has never failed me. Johnny is a hands-on business guy who delivers rather than consults - - - he uniquely understands brands + business + execution — that combination has made him a trusted strategic partner for me for over two decades.

Kai Bockarie Saquee -
Sierra Leone National Tourism Board.

Seventeen years in Communications and PR. I have met several Brand Strategists, but the later was too outstanding, his zest, brilliance and care is compared to non. Explore Freedom is his mindset. 150 thousands tourist from 60,000. You did us well. Johnny Johnson is the brain.

Andrew Ihsaan Gasnolar -
Mandela Washington Foundation

The Embassy was very impressed with the work done and were highly complimentary of the thought that went into it.

Shane Pereira -Lesedi Nuclear Services

Johnny is an exceptional Brand and Communication Strategist whose expertise played an instrumental role in aligning our leadership teams through holist brand evolution and value proposition changes, delivering strategic insight, professionalism, and outstanding results throughout.

FOUNDERS & ENTREPRENEURS

You are the Brand.
Right now, is that deliberate? 
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You are the brand, whether you've decided that on purpose or not.

 

Investors, your team and your customers aren't just buying your brand — they're buying you: what you stand for, what you're promising them, and whether you'll live up to your brand promise

 

Most founders never get the chance to work that out properly before they're already pitching it.

#founders
Our approach:

 

We start with your personal brand and with the end in mind. This approach recognises that you are the personification of the brand, but at the same time it anticipates that as your business grows, your brand will evolve to represent more than you - strong brands outlive their founders. Your personal brand ensures authenticity, the foundation you’ve built on, but your vision of the future ensures relevance over time.

What Shifts?

 

  • A brand story built on a real person has built-in authenticity.

  • Your purpose and values are a blueprint for employees.

  • People, whether they are investors, customers or suppliers, feel greater affinity for another person than they do for an organisation.

  • As the business scales up you provide consistency.

See how we build a brand promise

The brand promise usually exists somewhere - in some document, in the founder's head, in the way things have ‘always been done’. The problem is rarely that it is missing, it's that it’s been forgotten in the hurly-burly of work, and so it isn’t lived consistently. As the business grows leadership must be empowered to inspire their teams and the organisation as a whole to live up to the brand promise as committed brand ambassadors.

 

That's the leadership team brand alignment gap: the promise and the day-to-day behaviour drift apart, quietly, long before anyone names it.

 

Employees say communication is the thing most likely to be missing, and they say they want to hear from their own leaders, face to face - not from a poster in the break room. 

Scaling-Up MSME's

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The Promise exists 
but do your people
know it and live it?
#scaling-up MSMEs
Our approach:

 

In our Brand Strategy we articulate your outward facing brand promise based on a competitive positioning statement. From your positioning statement and brand promise we extrapolate your inward facing purpose, vision, mission, core competence, values and greater good. We do a Leadership Brand that identifies how your brand ambassadors should behave to deliver on the brand promise. Living the brand is what your Employee Engagement should be all about. What we have learned from the privilege of working on strong brands is that brand loyalty is earned by living the promise you make.

What Shifts?

 

  • A genuine brand promise that resonates across all your stakeholders, internally and externally.

  • Leadership behaviours defined clearly enough to coach, measure and hire against. 

  • Aligned internal and external communications that finally say the same thing. 

  • An engaged workforce of brand ambassadors that understand the promise, can articulate it and know how to deliver on it. 

  • A brand that helps you retain and attract the talent you're competing for - integrity is the top trait employees say they want from leaders (Grant Thornton Business Leadership IBR, 213 - citation from the Book of Anthropos)

Explore Leadership Brand & Employee Engagement

What we do
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Purpose-Driven and Scaled-Up Organisations

Growth is when a promise
may be lost...

Growth is exactly when a brand promise is most at risk of quietly becoming hollow.

What was authentic at ten people can start to feel performative at a hundred, not because anyone decided to fake it, but because nobody was deliberate about keeping it true as the organisation scaled up. This is the core of purpose-driven business branding done properly: It isn't a campaign, it's a discipline that has to scale within you.

 

Stakeholders - customers, employees, communities - notice the gap before leadership does. 

#purpose-driven
Our approach:

 

This is where our full methodology earns its keep: asking, listening, interpreting and articulating an authentic promise that can resonate across every stakeholder group you're accountable to, not just the ones closest to you. We build brand and culture together, deliberately, so the purpose that got you here doesn't get diluted as you grow - treating both as ongoing discipline rather than a one-off campaign. 

What Shifts?

 

  • A brand promise robust enough to survive scale, not just launch. 

  • A culture that reinforces purpose instead of quietly drifting from it as headcount grows. 

  • A communication approach built for continuous effort - because brand isn't a project with an end date, it’s an ongoing evolution.

  • A brand strong enough to extend into new markets, geographies or offerings without diluting what made it trusted in the first place. 

Different starting points. Same discipline: ask, listen, interpret, articulate — then help you keep the promise once it's made.

Which of these sounds like where you are right now? 

Still not sure where to start, let's start with a conversation.

What is a brand's greater good?

It is how the efforts of the enterprise represented by the brand make the world a better place.

What is the benefit of having a personal brand?

A personal brand helps us understand ourselves in terms of strengths, challenges and purpose. If we know this about ourselves, we can be more confidently authentic — which helps others trust us.

What are the benefits of having a strong brand?

A strong brand gives you a wide range of benefits that evolve over the lifecycle of your enterprise: • It is a repository of value that can be measured. • Enhances value by building trust. • Promotes common understanding. • Provides purpose, direction and motivation. • Retains and attracts talent. • Stimulates innovation. • Demands market share. • Creates barriers to entry. • Extends more easily into other areas: product, geography. • Has lower price elasticity. • Demands a premium. • Can handle market disruption.

What is a personal brand?

In the same way that a product or service is represented as a brand, a person is represented by their personal brand. Although we tend to describe a person by name, demographic character, personality and style, it is useful to describe a person as a brand because that helps us understand ourselves and others.
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FAQ

Questions worth answering upfront

The things people usually want to know before their first conversation with us.

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