Brand consulting at Planner At Large.
Not just the what, but the when and the how.
An effective brand strategy makes the brand more likely to come to mind when a relevant buying situation arises, ahead of competing alternatives.
We help identify a credible competitive edge plus the moments in which that advantage matters.
Our job is to make the brand easier to recognize, retrieve and buy (of course) — but equally, to make clear what the strategy requires the organization to do to build and maintain that advantage.
Why “Planner At Large”?
Planning isn’t prediction. It’s the work of making possibility practical. Our role is catalytic: we help organizations recognize opportunities, make choices they believe in, and commit to the actions those choices require. The business owns the decisions and delivers the change; our contribution is to help make that change possible.
And At Large isn’t about being everywhere. It’s an unconfined way of working.
We follow the problem before we follow the category. That matters because the wrong frame can make the real issue harder to see. Sometimes the frame is a sector convention, a familiar model, a departmental brief, or the kind of answer the organization already knows how to ask for.
The more useful clue may come from the client’s own conversation, another market, buyer behavior, history, culture, or a constraint no one thought to include in the brief.
Expertise matters. So does the freedom to look somewhere else.
But the point isn’t to keep looking for its own sake. It’s to find a path the organization can act on.
How we work.
The work is active, questioning, and deliberately participatory.
Not just because participation is polite, but because strategy is stronger when the people who can make or break it help test it early.
We ask difficult questions in a way that keeps people engaged. We bring skeptics in while their objections can still improve the thinking. We facilitate what one client called “a democratic evolution of ideas.” We test assumptions, implications, tradeoffs, and points of failure before they become expensive surprises.
The goal is not agreement for its own sake. It’s confidence in the path: enough shared understanding, enough tested logic, and enough readiness to act.
What this asks of our clients.
Not conversion, nor surrender to a proprietary model.
We simple ask clients to commit to a way of working long enough for previously unrecognized commercial possibilities to become visible.
That means being open to unfamiliar questions, uncomfortable implications, outside perspectives, and the possibility that the current way of seeing the problem may also be obscuring it.
It’s not about replacing your assumptions with ours.
It’s about examining what your assumptions make visible, what they obscure, and what other possibilities appear when we look differently.
Judd Labarthe
More creative than the typical management consultant. More commercially savvy than the typical brand consultant.
Judd is the founder of Planner At Large and author of Swimming Downstream. His work combines commercial realism, evidence-based marketing thinking, creative strategy, and a deep interest in the questions organizations have not yet learned how to ask usefully.
Clients tend to value the questions as much as the answers: the way a conversation opens up, the useful thing someone says without hearing its significance, and the path that becomes visible when the frame widens.
It’s a rewarding path: Judd has helped his clients win 77 awards for marketing effectiveness. So far.