To mark the first look at Savage’s new brand, Bethany Andell, Steven Leeper, Dahlia Salazar, Heather Manes, Sarah Haasis and Care Gerland sat down to talk about what has changed in our business, in the market and in what clients need from us.
They discuss the thinking behind our new positioning, how the visual identity brings that strategy to life and what the process reaffirmed about who we are. The conversation also looks ahead to what this evolution means for our clients, our community and the future of Savage.
Q: WHY WAS THIS THE RIGHT MOMENT TO EVOLVE THE BRAND?
Bethany
As a company, we evolve all the time. In fact, I joke that we have to reinvent ourselves every five years or so. But we haven’t taken the time to really think through our brand and how that aligns with who we are as a business and where we’re headed. It’s been a “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” kind of thing.
We are not who we were 50 years ago or even five years ago. So much has changed in the world, and especially with how business functions, so thisfelt like a really good time to go through the process. And it’s our 50th year as an incorporated business, and so it also felt like the right moment in our history.
Q: WHAT HAS CHANGED ABOUT THE BUSINESS AND SAVAGE’S OFFERINGS IN RESPONSE TO SHIFTS IN THE MARKETS AND WHAT CLIENTS NEED?
Bethany
Two things. In the market, I think the role of brand, marketing and culture has changed inside business. It’s being seen more as a value driver than a nice-to-have. These are conversations not just in the C-suite but also in boardrooms – people are really paying attention to the intangibles of the business to drive enterprise value and reduce business risk. That’s really important because now we’re starting to see real measurable impact of the work that we do. We’re in the business to solve business challenges, not make things look pretty or produce “things.”
The other big change is how we solve clients’ branding challenges by looking at the strengths of an organization. When we went through this process for ourselves, we didn’t look at it like we were fixing a problem or what was wrong with Savage. We were saying, what strengths are already here? Maybe even hidden in plain sight. How do we bring those to the surface? And how can the brand catch up to what our strengths are? We do that for our clients – it’s a different way to look at branding.
Sarah
Building on Bethany’s first response, much of what drove the shift in our brand strategy is that brand and culture have historically not been understood as value drivers. Nothing could be further from the truth. As organizations apply more scrutiny over spending and seek to understand the ROI of every penny, it’s requiring a lot more education and reframing how we talk about these things, speaking in a language that boards, private equity firms, CEOs, and CFOs can really understand to support investment in these things. Our new brand seeks to speak to this audience in that language.
I’ll add that, historically, we have been what I would call a “full-service agency,” handling everything from strategy to concept to implementation. But now more of the implementation, meaning the execution of things, is being done in-house, namely by AI, for better or worse. But we’re seeing that a lot of organizations can’t do that upfront strategy themselves. There’s a quote, “You can’t read a label from inside of the bottle,” that’s applicable here – it’s nearly impossible for internal teams to do the type of strategic branding that we do for companies, and AI will fail there, always.
Our offerings have evolved along with our brand, too. We’ve noticed that a lot of companies aren’t ready or really willing to spend on consultancy firms or traditional agencies and prefer what I’ll call a lower-commitment solution. Our brand launch includes a more formal introduction of our fractional talent offering, which allows clients to get the strategic depth and experience of Savage without the complexity and cost that comes with full-time hires or fully retained agencies.
The last thing is around the shift in who and what people trust. Look at any Gallup or Edelman report and you’ll see that people are turning to CEOs as a trusted voice. And so, we have shifted and shaped what we’ve done for decades into a new executive brand voice offering to increase visibility and build trust in those people as leaders.
Dahlia
I think the way clients work has become more systematic, whether it’s their internal teams or through AI. So, we’ve had to approach our work more systematically. We’ve got to arm teams with what they need, and sometimes these teams don’t have the ability to think everything through from start to finish. Even our design and creative solutions have become more systematic, so they have the tools they need for cohesion throughout.
Heather
I’ll add three things to what’s changed and how we’ve responded. First, clients no longer need us to just create things. They need us to help them decide what’s worth focusing on. Over the last few years, we’ve moved from executing campaigns to functioning as an embedded marketing team, setting strategy, building the measurement infrastructure, and running the day-to-day so lean internal teams can operate with the capacity of a much larger one.
Second, clients are under real pressure to defend every line of their budget, so we’ve put far more rigor into what we measure and what we promise. That’s meant moving away from vanity metrics and lead scoring toward audience quality and benchmarks.
And last, the biggest shift is that search has fundamentally changed how buyers find and vet companies. In a growing share of that, discovery now happens inside AI tools rather than on a results page. So as far as our offerings, we’ve rebuilt our approach around that reality by auditing how clients actually show up in AI-generated answers, restructuring content so it could be found and cited, and shifting the conversation from lead volume to whether we’re reaching the right audience as well.
Q: WHAT ARE LEADERS ASKING OF THEIR STRATEGIC MARKETING PARTNERS TODAY THAT THEY MAY NOT HAVE ASKED FIVE OR TEN YEARS AGO?
Steven
What I’ve observed is leaders saying they want to scale and they’re ready, they have the resources and the budgets. And yet, to Sarah’s point, the trust ratings among their employees are so low that if they try to scale, it’s going to break and expose things and it’s not going to be good long term for businesses. So they’re asking us, “What should we do?” and usually the answer is not to scale without thinking of that trust problem. Usually there is an order of operations, and sometimes it can happen in parallel paths.
I also see leaders who are evolving and innovating their companies because it’s required to meet this moment of so much change that they’re doing that in a way that isolates them from the rest of their employees, and in a lot of these companies, it might just be four, five or six leaders that know what’s really happening and why, and that leaves a lot of people who are not being communicated with, and they don’t know what’s happening. In turn, that creates a sense of dislocation, fear and lack of security, which again feeds that lack of trust.
The last thing I would say is leaders we work with often have started to view us as a safe place to discuss these pivotal moments and envision what it looks like to move through them and gain traction with this big initiative. That’s a fortunate role that we’re able to play with them, being thought partners.
Bethany
There’s a little bit more vulnerability in how clients ask questions – mostly based on what they are experiencing. Today we get questions like, “How would you navigate this situation?” “How would you deal with that?” “I’m trying to grow in a healthy way.” Not, “Hey, I need a new logo design.” “Hey, I need a website design.” “Hey, I need a marketing campaign.” And nine times out of ten it’s something to do with people.
All this AI, all this technology, sure, we’re all using it in our businesses. It’s advancing everybody; it’s making us more effective. People are trying to figure out how to leverage it, but with all of that, it’s becoming more of a human, people and behavior conversation, whether it’s marketing and we’re talking about customer experience or it’s internal, like you are saying with real people.
Heather
We are now doing more consultative strategy. The ask has shifted from execute this to sit in the room and help us decide. It’s a different level of partner and a different kind of trust.
Sarah
Agree, Heather – particularly with spend under the microscope, with limited funds and the requirement to prove ROI, finding the right-fit solution is even more important.
Bethany
Well, this may be more with our private equity-backed clients, but this idea of velocity, which is they don’t have the luxury of taking time with things, of hiring or developing the capacity over time to navigate and solve these challenges, and now they can rely on partners like Savage to help navigate that and plug us in quickly to help move the needle without big issues, budget or time because you’ve got this external macro pressure to deliver and deliver quickly.
Steven
I see that. The time squeeze is real. The ability to get it and get it quickly and hit it with some quick, on-point wins. They need you to understand the game that they’re playing.
Care
I think the biggest shift is that leaders are asking us to come in further upstream than they did five or 10 years ago. It used to be, “Here’s the problem we’ve already defined. Can you build the campaign, the website, the brand?” Today, it’s often, “We know we need to grow or change our strategy. Help us figure out the opportunities and map out a plan.”
Today in business it feels like the stakes are higher. There’s more pressure around growth, more scrutiny on spend, and more technology and AI changing how businesses operate. Leaders need velocity, but they also need confidence that they’re solving the right problem. So they’re asking their partners to understand their business. That requires a different level of trust and understanding. Not just a marketing vendor, but a strategic partner who can help them navigate change.
Q: THE NEW POSITION DESCRIBES SAVAGE AS A STRATEGIC PARTNER FOR PIVOTAL BUSINESS MOMENTS. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN TO YOU?
Sarah
I’ll take this one. Savage cannot simply be defined by a list of our services or capabilities. Clients come to us to solve real business challenges. We’ve spent a lot of time discussing what those challenges are and narrowed them down to five pivotal moments that 99% of our clients are experiencing when they come to us. So lensing how we solve problems through those has been a very powerful way for us to reframe our solutions and how we connect to our clients’ pain and how we solve that pain.
Bethany
It goes back to people. When we say pivotal moments, what I’m thinking of are mission-critical moments, like if these things don’t make it, it’s no longer a company that’s built to last. It can be catastrophic if the leadership team can’t move its company through these. We see them as opportunities.
Steven
These are existential inflection points.
Bethany
Yes, inflection points in a business where you need people rowing in the right direction with you, on the same bus going to the same place. Where those show up more often than not is leadership alignment, whether that’s making sure that the executive suite is all on the same page, or that could be succession. Making sure that somebody is successfully moving into a role and that the people of the company or even outside the company, whether that’s investors or customers, accept that.
Heather
No one wakes up needing a brand architecture or marketing. They wake up having bought a company, entered a new category or lost a founder.
These moments change what the business is and when the business changes, but the story doesn’t, a gap opens that customers, employees and competitors all fill in themselves. This creates branding, communication and marketing implications because the effects cascade further than the leader expects. For example, one decision like adding a product forces naming, branding, architecture, domains, website, sales collateral and employee training all under deadline pressure. And those implications cross functions. So a moment like the ones we’ve named can’t be handed off in pieces to a naming shop or comms firm or digital agency. It needs one partner holding the whole thing.
Q: SAVAGE HELPS CLIENTS BUILD AND EVOLVE BRANDS EVERY DAY. WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO TURN THAT INWARD? WHAT DID THIS WORK REVEAL OR REAFFIRM ABOUT THE COMPANY?
Sarah
Oh, it was a blast. This may sound weird, but it was easy. And the reason why is, in my career, I have found that the best brand stories and strategies are developed when leadership teams are aligned, and that was fully the case with us.
The truth is that we’ve actually been operating and thinking this way for years, and our brand is just finally catching up.
Bethany mentioned the cobbler’s shoes, which is very true.
I would also say that going through the process has changed us all in some ways. You know, we always tell our clients and our prospects that having a leadership team in the same room around a table co-creating this type of work is critical because there’s something in that process of hearing others say things, adding, clarifying, shaping that creates ownership and strengthens the belief in it, and I feel that within our team. It’s truly been invigorating and fun co-creating our new brand strategy and system with the team.
Bethany
Sarah, do you feel like we did a good job focusing on our strengths and not trying to use brand as some sort of tool to fix anything?
Sarah
One hundred percent. In fact, one of the things that brings that to life for me was birthing the five beliefs. It was such a light bulb moment for me. You kept pressing, “What makes Savage different? Why us? Why would anybody choose us?” and those beliefs have always been part of our philosophy and lexicon, but never cemented in this way, carved out and named as the thing that shapes how we develop our offerings, how we treat each other, the counsel that we give our clients, and how we design client experiences. The ideology surrounding those five beliefs has endured for as long as Savage has.
Dahlia
Going through this rebranding was completely reaffirming in terms of the value of our process. We have never taken the time to do this, literally from discovery through strategy through creative to treat ourselves as a client. This is the first time that we have truly done this, and it completely reaffirmed why we do it. It’s so fun! At the end of the day, whether it’s the community or it’s our relationships or it’s our planet, we create value.
Q: COMMUNITY EMERGED AS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE BRAND. WHY DOES THAT MATTER TO SAVAGE?
Bethany
Something very interesting out of this process was this abiding sense that we have a responsibility to build community. We’ve done it because that’s the type of people we are. We love our relationships, and we are honored with longstanding relationships, whether that’s with employees or clients or suppliers or friends of Savage. Then Steven, with you coming on and bringing more intentionality around it, I never thought about that truly as a big part of the brand, kind of this tribe of Savage.
Now we’re super intentional about it. And it’s really interesting because it so seamlessly fits with our values and behaviors. Like it’s a thread that goes all the way across this community building. It’s not a revenue generator; it’s not an offering; it’s not what we do; it’s just a natural extension of who we are.
Steven
It does feel important to name how important creating that space is, especially if you can do it for people in times like these. To come together, and that we feel like it’s helping to fill each other’s cup by connecting. You are right; that was something important to me coming into Savage. It was to keep bringing together people in meaningful ways with meaningful experiences. And Savage had ‘Human’ as one of its three core values, and so it kind of just puzzled together beautifully, and so it’s something we’ll keep doing.
Bethany
It’s about taking the time to slow down for those conversations, to go meet somebody in person. That’s trust building. That’s relational. That’s lost somehow these days.
Sarah
Steven, for people reading this who have not experienced a gathering or been to a Shine event, can you talk a bit about what we mean by community?
Steven
Sure. Community is people like us coming to experiences. They come to connect. They come to learn. They come to see. We think one of our responsibilities as Savages is to be curious and to help others be curious. I think in the speed of society right now, we run the risk of not being able to see what’s happening, and being able to see people helps us see more of the heart of what is happening. And so a big part of this is to help us all to see. So we come together and we listen and we learn, and we come out of there just a little bit wiser and a little bit better, and a little bit more hopeful. It’s a gift we give to the community in the brand, marketing, communication and leadership space in Houston. It’s an invitational thing. It is not a coercion thing.
Bethany
So, y’all know this, but when I was 16, nobody showed up at my birthday party. My mom rented a beach house in Galveston, and it rained and no one came. And I know that my logical adult brain says it was raining. Of course, they weren’t driving down to Galveston. The sixteen-year-old girl is soul-crushed and takes it personally. And I’ve had a couple other experiences in my life where I’ve had a feeling that I maybe don’t belong. And so when I think about community, and I think about the time we each give to the companies that we work for, that feeling of belonging, having a place, a space, a community or tribe of people that you feel like you belong to is so important.
And I feel like we do that in our work for clients. They want employees that are excited to come to work on Mondays and feel safe doing so and feel like they belong in those companies because you are giving more than half your time to those companies. But we also pay that forward when we have these gatherings or events where some of these people may not be getting that in the companies they are at, or even at home.
Steven
Or they’re in transition and we can feel really good saying, hey, out of anything at least you know, once a quarter or once every other month, there is a place you can come and I guarantee you are going to feel like you belong. You are going to feel good.
Bethany
That’s really important to me personally because we’ve all been in that, we’ve all had that. And I think it is so important to those individuals.
Dahlia
They have a space where there’s optimism and there’s what’s possible and they can be fed basically because they’re not getting that.
Bethany
That’s right.
Sarah
Bethany, I love that you are healing your childhood wounds through our Savage gatherings!
Bethany
You’ve got that right!
Q: WHAT INSPIRED THE NEW VISUAL IDENTITY AND HOW DOES IT BRING THE STRATEGY TO LIFE?
Dahlia
We asked ourselves, “How are we going to take Savage forward? How are we going to interpret meeting these moments for our clients?”
We wanted to make sure we didn’t lose sight of our heritage but lean more into the soul of the company.
It was not a revolutionary change; it was more evolutionary. We do meet our clients at really big, important times. And so our brand needed to project that. It needed to feel like an “I am safe here, I am taken care of here.” So, we took the identity and evolved the best parts of it. It was not like starting from ground zero. The deer evolved, which has been a part of our identity since inception. It was the entire deer, and we evolved it to just the antlers and deconstructed that into a flexible identity system that reflects how we partner with our clients. There are different ways we help clients, and we used that to tell the story and evoke the strategy.
Bethany
Antlers symbolize strength, renewal and connection. They’re also a symbol of regeneration and transformation, which is the work we do for our clients. I also think it’s interesting to think about the symbolism of the shedding of antlers, which is letting go of the old to make room for new growth. That’s the moment Savage is in. That’s the moment a lot of our clients are in.
Dahlia and I are part of Savage’s original history. We asked ourselves: How do we honor the 50 years of history that we have without feeling too nostalgic, and being really modern and about the future? I feel like the antlers are that piece of the deer that has the strength and power, and they bring growth and symbolism that makes sense for our business, which felt very primal.
Dahlia
Again, core to our heritage, but in a very future-forward way.
Bethany
I’ve dreamt of a flexible brand for Savage for years! I love that no two antlers are ever the same. They regenerate and they look different every time an antler sheds and regrows. They’re perfect for that year. I just love that we are not beholden to one set or one shape of antlers, just like we always have, we continue to regenerate, grow and evolve.
Sarah
I think the same is true for how we frame our pivotal business moments. They will change as the world does. Think about the moment businesses were in six years ago, post-COVID.
Dahlia
That’s a great point. There is lots of flexibility across all aspects of our brand.
Q: AS PEOPLE GET THEIR FIRST LOOK AT THE NEW SAVAGE NOW AND DISCOVER THE FULLER STORY IN OCTOBER, WHAT ARE YOU MOST EXCITED FOR THEM TO UNDERSTAND OR EXPERIENCE?
Bethany
I want people to feel like Savage is an experience. That a relationship with us is not a transaction; that it is something that grows and evolves and creates meaning for their business, for their profession, for their lives. And I mean that for employees as much as I mean that for clients or for the great partners we work with. We talk about experience as evidence of a brand promise being delivered, and it’s really hard to communicate that. It is something that has to be experienced. I am just hoping that people get to see and feel and notice that our rebrand doesn’t just consist of new colors and a new logo and some words on the wall.
Heather
What I am most excited for is when a CEO or leader reads our site and content and thinks, “That’s exactly where we are.” Growth is what brings companies to us, whether they are experiencing a new category, an acquisition, or a market that shifted under them. Every one of those changes has implications that most leaders don’t see coming until they’re in them. This refresh says that we’re the partner you bring in when the business is changing, and you want an experienced team you can trust.
Care
I’m most excited for people to understand that we’ve been in their shoes. When a leader comes to us during a moment of change or growth, we don’t just understand the challenge; we understand what it feels like to be sitting in their seat. And we’re excited for the opportunity of helping them work through it.
Dahlia
I want them to feel that need to connect with this group. I want them to feel optimistic about whatever it is they’re going through. We’re going to ground them and help them through that. That’s what I am excited about.
Steven
I am excited about helping them see the possibility in seeing what we’re putting out there and then living it out by way of experience, give and take, two-way community working with us as a client. They see the power and impact of some of these transformational moments, and they also take hold of this moment that we’re living in. That has a lot of opportunity, but it’s also a time where a lot of people risk shrinking back. And so that they take hold of that, and when it makes sense, partner with Savage because they are savvy, they’re wise; they know we’re going to make them look really good, and help them think through all of the places that things can get off the rails and be thinking quite a ways ahead. And they have a safe place to do some of that thinking. I hope that at a visual and gut level, they get a sense of the depth of the brand and that it’s connected to something that’s more than a pretty logo or some words.
Dahlia
I feel like the strategy and the brand is very resonant with what people are going through right now. And that it visually imparts that as well.
Sarah
It’s a relief to have our external expression reflect who we really are. To know us is to love us. But to know us, you’ve had to be a client, be part of our community or have prior experience with us. When our outside reflects our inside, more people will understand us, and hopefully our tribe grows, and we can help more people by doing the work that unleashes possibilities and real value.
Bethany
My hope is that business leaders around the world come to better understand that brand, culture-building and marketing deserve a seat at the table. When done well, they do create enterprise value. They do de-risk the business in a measurable way. I hope it furthers the cause for our industry and the people in it.
Steven
One other thing I would say is, I hope for us it’s now given us a very true and accurate representation of who we are because it didn’t come overnight. This was introspection. These conversations and this pulling out. And so, I hope we stay the path. I hope we see that north star, we take hold of it, and by doing that, we have comfort in saying no too, and we know what we’re great at. We lean in hard on that because I think there’s a way in which we can utilize it to be more impactful, efficient and effective from a growth standpoint.
Dahlia
I think there’s already evidence of that. But that’s the spirit.
Steven
Thank you all – this was great.
