Let’s Meet
How It All Began
I have always been curious about how the human mind works, what drives us, and how we decide. That curiosity brought me to brand strategy while I was already working in advertising, and it eventually let me fulfil my biggest wish: to study psychology.
The backstory
It started with a degree in Political and Business Journalism. The question behind it was always the same: what's really behind the headline? Politics taught me to look behind the main story, to understand what is really going on, what the main characters want us to see, and what story they want us to believe.
Before I finished my course, I was already working in advertising. That is exactly why brand strategy caught my eye. In advertising, we were really fulfilling the strategist's goal: how to position a brand and change people's perception of it. It is the most fascinating manipulation, built into an industry worth millions.
But over 17 years in this industry, at big international agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi and McCann Erickson and at small local design studios, a new question started to challenge my mind: what is behind a client's decisions? There was a lot to discover, from internal company politics and tensions to the personal psychological traits of the decision-maker.
At that point, I simply had to study psychology, to understand how things work inside our minds. I trained at the Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis in Gestalt-based counselling techniques, which turned out to be surprisingly universal: the same for companies, individuals, or even brands. We all share the same process of building a "self", and that is the root of how things break down and stop working seamlessly between people, between departments, or between brands and their target audience.
How I work
Whether I'm helping an organisation with a brand or communication challenge, or an individual through a personal transition, my approach is the same. First, I discover what's really going on. Then, together, we build a solution that fits.
Listen. Before any strategy, I listen to the team, or the person in front of me, without rushing to impose a framework.
Assess. Market research, competitor mapping, internal dynamics, or simply what keeps repeating. I dig in with the right questions.
Find direction. From there comes a positioning, a name, a strategy, or a next step. I don't impose ready-made solutions. I build direction together with my clients.
What I believe
Curiosity before assumptions. We all arrive with our own ideas. I hold on to my curiosity deliberately, so I never walk in with a conclusion I made before investigating and taking in all the information.
There is always a solution. Clients, brands and companies know it better than I do. They just need help discovering it, and I never impose a solution myself.
I'm based in Lisbon and work worldwide.
