The bottleneck is the thinking. Not the budget. Not the brief. The thinking.
Most strategy produces ideas no one hates. No one loves them either. They arrive on time, stay inside the guardrails, and change nothing.
Plan B exists for the work that has to change something. Growth and margin for organisations at inflection points. New markets, corporate reinvention, AI disruption, sustainability under real scrutiny.
Get in touch →Fortescue had grown two companies the market was pricing apart. Fortescue Metals Group, the iron ore giant. Fortescue Future Industries, the green energy contender. Investors could not hold them together. The fix was not messaging. It was architecture.
A new green circle mark. Metals, energy, and technology read as one identity. Delivered across ninety-plus countries on a disciplined budget, well below the industry norm for a program of this scope. The architecture is still in use. It was built to be.
A global brand is not a central-office instruction. It is a grammar other people can speak fluently. Build the grammar, not the sentences.
New energy brands do not arrive with permission. They earn it, or they do not.
A Rick and Morty partnership placed Fortescue inside one of the most connected media properties on the planet. The brief was simple: make a green hydrogen company feel real to an audience that had never heard of it. It reached 5 million consumers in a category with zero prior cultural currency.
Where the audience has no relationship with you, cultural permission comes before commercial permission. You cannot fake either.
MINEX is the largest mining event in the world. Fortescue used it to launch the T236 electric mining truck with Liebherr and present the unified brand to the global mining audience for the first time.
The inherited plan was a small booth and a fifty-inch screen. The reframe was to arrive like a tech company at a heavy equipment show. Stark white. A Formula E simulator in Fortescue livery. Eye-level alongside Liebherr's supersite.
Operators who had been sceptical of the brand came to the stand. They did not leave sceptical.
Fortescue's green energy position required policy that did not yet exist. Over three years, the brand and advocacy work carried the argument from the Pilbara into the US conversation on clean energy, alongside climate advocates, legislators, and media shaping the Inflation Reduction Act.
The IRA passed on Joe Manchin's decisive 50th vote. Credit belongs to many. Brand and advocacy were two of the instruments. The following year the work reached the UN General Assembly.
Positioning, when it is serious enough, is not a communications exercise. It is a commercial and political one.
Ovato was Australia's largest print conglomerate. The category was contracting year on year. The question inside the business was not how to grow but whether growth was still possible.
It was. Marketing and innovation delivered the first period of sustained client growth the company had recorded in a decade, against a market that kept shrinking around it.
The lesson is transferable. In a declining category, brand work is not a luxury. It is the mechanism that buys the business time to reinvent.
Mid-2000s. A wholly foreign-owned enterprise. A publishing operation built to read the market from the inside.
For 42 Below entering China, the working principle was to find where a brand can earn genuine cultural permission before it tries to compete. Emerging artists, architects, and advertisers. Moments that made the local audience feel at home and Western competitors feel exposed.
The brand took hold. The competitors noticed. Twenty years later the principle has not changed. Cultural credibility comes before commercial credibility, and a market does not respond to translated assumptions.
If you want to understand what this looks like for your problem, the best place to start is a conversation.
Get in touch →The bottleneck is never the budget. It is rarely the brief. It is almost always the thinking that happens before either of those things exists.
Plan B works across three modes, depending on what the problem actually requires.
Sharp, focused, fast.
Ninety days or less. Deep immersion in the challenge, the market, and the organisation, including the competitive forces reshaping both. The work surfaces the drivers of growth and the emotional reason to believe that repositions the brand with commercial credibility. It ends with a clear point of action and the tools the team needs to carry it forward.
Maximum impact, not maximum headcount.
A talented team of strategists, researchers, and makers, assembled specifically for the problem, briefed to make a difference everywhere the brand turns up. Work that moves markets looks nothing like what came before it.
High-bandwidth strategic support for the problems that do not fit inside a neat brief.
This is a full embed: present, invested, and accountable to a clear set of goals. The thinking stays sharp because it is never divided. Ben takes on two engagements of this kind at any one time.
With one of the best conversations you have had about your business. From there, Ben scopes a proposal specific to the problem. No standard packages. Every engagement is defined by what the work actually requires.
Size matters less than the stakes. Plan B works with large corporates navigating transformation and ambitious founders scaling into new territory. The right fit is an organisation with a complex problem that needs genuine strategic thinking, not a template.
The Right Hand is an ongoing engagement built around a clear set of goals. It operates as a full embed, not an advisory arrangement at arm's length. Two at any one time. Beyond that, Plan B works on a project basis: scoped, delivered, and closed.
An Edge Study completes in 90 days or less. A Market Intervention is scoped to the scale of the idea, but urgency is built into how Plan B works: assembled fast, focused hard, delivered clean. The Right Hand runs for as long as the work requires. Timelines are defined by what the problem needs, not what is convenient.
Twenty years figuring out why some brands take hold and others do not.
It started in Shanghai. A wholly foreign-owned enterprise, a publishing operation, and years of working out how brands earn permission in a market that does not respond to Western assumptions. The lesson was the same in every case. Cultural credibility comes before commercial credibility, and you cannot fake either.
From Shanghai into agency leadership. Hill+Knowlton across APAC for Coca-Cola, Roche, Air New Zealand, Optus. Cannes Lions Judge, 2015. Then Ovato through structural decline, delivering growth against a category that kept contracting.
The Fortescue years defined what Plan B became. Global Head of Brand through the repositioning from iron ore giant to green energy contender. Two businesses, one brand, ninety countries, one architecture. Advocacy work that contributed to the conditions enabling the US Inflation Reduction Act. The lessons of holding a position when the easier path was to hedge.
Plan B exists because that kind of thinking rarely survives inside a large agency, organisation or opportunity.
Based in Sydney. The work is not.
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