How does an engagement start?

With one of the best conversations you have had about your business. From there, Plan B scopes a proposal specific to the problem. No standard packages. Every engagement is defined by what the work actually requires.

Plan B works across brand strategy, positioning, creative direction, and market entry, for businesses where the stakes are real. The work starts with research and market understanding, not messaging. The output is a clear commercial position and the tools to hold it.

What kinds of organisations does Plan B work with?

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.

Does Plan B offer retainers?

The Right Hand is an ongoing engagement built around a clear set of goals. It operates like a full embed, not an advisory arrangement at arm's length. It is one of two at any one time. Beyond that, Plan B works on a project basis: scoped, delivered, and closed.

How long does a project take?

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 always defined by what the problem needs, not what is convenient.

What is Ben Shipley's background?

Ben Shipley has twenty years of creative strategy experience across three continents. He led global brand strategy at Fortescue through its transformation from iron ore giant to green energy contender, across 90 countries and through one of the most complex repositioning challenges in Australian corporate history. Before that: building a brand and culture consultancy in Shanghai, leading creative and digital strategy across APAC at Hill+Knowlton, and running marketing and innovation for Australia's largest print company through a period of serious disruption. Curiosity built it. Curiosity keeps it sharp.

Here for your unfair share.

Brand strategy that moves markets, numbers, and governments.

Of the market. Of the conversation. Of the future your competitors think belongs to them.

The bottleneck isn't the budget. It isn't the brief. It's 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.

Get in touch →

The work.

Every problem is different. So is the path. But the pattern holds. Here are some examples.

If you want to understand what this looks like for your problem, the best place to start is a conversation.

Get in touch →

How we engage.

Three modes, depending on the shape of the problem.

Edge Study

A testable edge for your business. In ninety days or less.

The purpose is a system-sized idea. Not paid discovery. Not a deck of insights. An idea big enough to reorganise how the brand creates value, specific enough to test, and sharp enough to act on.

Market Intervention

A superhero landing for your brand, anywhere on earth.

A small, assembled team of strategists, researchers, and makers. Scoped to the scale of the idea. Delivered with urgency.

The Right Hand

For the problems that don't fit inside a neat brief.

A full embed. Present, invested, accountable. Two engagements of this kind at any one time.

Start a conversation

Writing.

Unpacking context until the brand opportunity becomes obvious. That's the work, and the writing is where it happens in public.

All writing →

Me, an Empty Room, and 85 Miles of Red Wool

An agency I once heard about had a wall of business cards and red wool. Their whole business, visible. The idea stuck. This is what happened when I tried to build one.

19 May 2026 · 9 min read

The measure is not the thing

The field's loudest advocates for creative thinking have applied almost none of it to the definition of creativity itself. They've taken one expression of the thing, the short emotional film, and built an entire measurement infrastructure around it. Then they've defended that infrastructure as though it were the thing itself. Creativity isn't a format. It's the discovery or invention of meaning.

10 April 2026 · 5 min read

On Judgement

Judgement is not what you have when the answer is obvious. It is what you need when it is not.

8 April 2026 · 3 min read

The Compounding Problem

Before that, you are making deposits. After that, you are drawing interest.

1 April 2026 · 3 min read

Obey the Brief, or not.

The brief is not the starting point. It is the first hypothesis. Treat it like one.

23 March 2026 · 3 min read

The Encode Layer

Most brand strategies are written for humans. The problem is that the things executing them now are not.

16 March 2026 · 5 min read

Inside Five Corporate Rebrands: Five Rules for Making Brand Change Work

Most rebrands are a mistake. After working inside five corporate rebrands across technology, agencies, media, and heavy industry, one lesson is clear. A logo change means nothing unless the company itself changes.

9 March 2026 · 5 min read

Brand inside the machine

The brand book sits in a shared drive. Polite. Unopened. Meanwhile the tools hum. Here is what to do about it.

4 March 2026 · 13 min read

Your Instincts Are Wrong

I booked a one-way ticket to Shanghai with a beginner's Mandarin and no plan. What I learned there still shapes everything I do.

25 February 2026 · 4 min read

Curiosity Without End

It starts with Bayes in seventeentwentysomething. Why the habits of an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister still explain how the most powerful AI systems in the world actually work.

22 November 2025 · 6 min read

Ben.

Twenty years figuring out why some brands take hold and others don't.

It started in Shanghai. A wholly foreign-owned enterprise, a creative boutique, and years of working out how brands earn permission in a market that doesn't respond to Western assumptions. The lesson was the same in every case. Cultural credibility comes before commercial credibility, and you can't 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, leveraging Quantium data and a data science team built in Chennai to drive revenue 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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