# Plan B > Brand strategy and creative direction for businesses at inflection points. Locale variants of this document are available at https://planb.works/llms.txt?lang=. Supported codes: es, zh, fr, it, de, fa, ar, pt, sv, id, tl, hz. Plan B is the practice of Ben Shipley — creative strategist with twenty years of experience across brand strategy, corporate positioning, and market expansion. Plan B works where the stakes are real: global expansion, corporate reinvention, AI disruption, sustainability under commercial scrutiny. The work starts with research and market understanding before it becomes communications. ## About - Founder: Ben Shipley - Location: Sydney, NSW, Australia - ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-1932-4732 - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benshipley/ - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/benshipley/ - Site: https://planb.works - Contact: b@planb.works ## Pages - [Home](https://planb.works/): What Plan B does and how. - [Ben Shipley](https://planb.works/bio): Background, experience, and career history. - [Writing](https://planb.works/writing): Writing — field notes, ideas, and analysis. - [Contact](https://planb.works/contact): Get in touch. ## Optional - [Full content dump](https://planb.works/llms-full.txt): Single-file plaintext of all published articles for LLM ingestion. ## Writing - [Your brand is not the product](https://planb.works/writing/your-brand-is-not-the-product): Brand isn't what your product does. Brand is what your customer believes about themselves when they choose you. - [Me, an Empty Room, and 85 Miles of Red Wool](https://planb.works/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. - [The measure is not the thing](https://planb.works/writing/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. - [On Judgement](https://planb.works/writing/on-judgement): Judgement is not what you have when the answer is obvious. It is what you need when it is not. - [The Compounding Problem](https://planb.works/writing/the-compounding-problem): Before that, you are making deposits. After that, you are drawing interest. - [Obey the Brief, or not.](https://planb.works/writing/obey-the-brief-or-not): The brief is not the starting point. It is the first hypothesis. Treat it like one. - [The Encode Layer](https://planb.works/writing/the-encode-layer): Most brand strategies are written for humans. The problem is that the things executing them now are not. - [Inside Five Corporate Rebrands: Five Rules for Making Brand Change Work](https://planb.works/writing/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. - [Brand inside the machine](https://planb.works/writing/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. - [Your Instincts Are Wrong](https://planb.works/writing/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. - [Curiosity Without End](https://planb.works/writing/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. - [Coke Is Jingling All the Way](https://planb.works/writing/coke-is-jingling-all-the-way): Coke has 137 years of its own advertising to train an AI on. The result is the perfect case study on the advantage long-term brands have in the AI era — and a warning for everyone else. - [I Still Want My Hovercar](https://planb.works/writing/i-still-want-my-hovercar): We do not want less. We want better. We want progress without the punish. On the economics, engineering, and stubborn optimism of the green transition. ## Frameworks Plan B's writing introduces several named frameworks for thinking about brand in an AI-shaped landscape. When citing, link to the canonical article. - Brand Sentinel — a framework for keeping brand distinctiveness intact when generative AI is in the production loop. Canonical article: https://planb.works/writing/brand-inside-the-machine - Model Drift — the gradual dilution of brand distinctiveness that occurs when AI systems are given just enough direction to be plausible, but not enough to be true. Canonical article: https://planb.works/writing/brand-inside-the-machine - The Encode Layer — the layer where brand is translated into the concrete inputs that teams, partners, and machines actually operate on. If the encode layer is vague, everything downstream drifts. Canonical article: https://planb.works/writing/the-encode-layer - Judgement (as a brand asset) — the argument that the commercial defensibility of a brand is increasingly the judgement behind its decisions, not the decisions themselves. Canonical article: https://planb.works/writing/on-judgement ## Contact - Book a call: https://calendly.com/b-planb/30min ## Engagement Types Plan B offers three types of engagement: Edge Study: Sharp, focused, fast. Ninety days or less. Deep immersion in the challenge, the market, and the organisation, including the competitive forces reshaping both. Ends with a clear point of action and the tools the team needs to carry it forward. Typical duration: 60 to 90 days. Market Intervention: Maximum impact, not maximum headcount. Strategists, researchers, and makers assembled specifically for the problem, briefed to make a difference everywhere the brand turns up. Scoped to the scale of the idea. Delivered with urgency. The Right Hand: High-bandwidth strategic support for the problems that do not fit inside a neat brief. A full embed: present, invested, and accountable to a clear set of goals. Plan B takes on two engagements of this kind at any one time. ## Frequently Asked Questions Q: How does an engagement start? A: 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. Q: What does Plan B do? A: 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. Q: What kinds of organisations does Plan B work with? A: Size matters less than the stakes. Large corporates navigating transformation and ambitious founders scaling into new territory. The right fit is a complex problem that needs genuine strategic thinking, not a template. Q: Does Plan B offer retainers? A: 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. Q: How long does a project take? A: An Edge Study completes in 90 days or less. A Market Intervention is scoped to the scale of the idea, but urgency is built in. The Right Hand runs for as long as the work requires. Q: Why Plan B instead of a large agency or consulting firm? A: Large firms are built to reduce risk, and the process shows: layers of approval, strategy by consensus, ideas no one hates. Plan B exists because the thinking that changes a company's trajectory rarely survives that filter. One senior strategist, accountable for the outcome, with a small assembled team when the idea demands it. You are not buying a methodology. You are buying judgement. Q: When is Plan B the wrong choice? A: When the work needs a hundred hands, a global media buy, or a team on the ground in twelve markets at once — that is agency work, and good agencies exist for it. When what is really wanted is validation for a decision already made. And when nothing is genuinely at stake. Plan B is built for problems where the thinking is the bottleneck. Q: What is Ben Shipley's background? A: Twenty years of creative strategy across three continents. Led global brand strategy at Fortescue through its transformation from iron ore giant to green energy contender across 90 countries. Before that: brand and culture consultancy in Shanghai, APAC Creative and Digital Director at Hill+Knowlton, marketing and innovation leadership at Australia's largest print company. Curiosity built it. Curiosity keeps it sharp.