We illuminate a new sense of what’s possible.
Some of the most dramatic opportunities to create enterprise value are hiding in plain sight — in things already known, valued, and put to work every day.
Look at something familiar from a higher and more far-reaching strategic perspective and greater potential can emerge.
Brand is a prime example.
Elevate it from the brand - a critical business asset typically centered in Marketing - to Brand as a core element of CEO and Board strategy - and the opportunity becomes much larger.
Understood and applied in its fullest strategic dimensions, Brand becomes a powerful lens through which to shape and steer much of the enterprise. It unlocks new dimensions of differentiation, innovation, and growth — and creates high-level strategic alignment around a more robust, more valuable path forward.
Marketing remains critically important. But the relationship changes.
Marketing operates within the strategic umbrella of Brand, rather than Brand primarily within the domain of Marketing.
The larger opportunity is to elevate what is already there — reaching beneath the brand to its still-untapped source of power, harnessing it to make that brand exponentially more powerful, and putting that greater power to work creating more meaningful differentiation, customer motivation, profitable growth, and enterprise value.
Elevating untapped power within the familiar is at the heart of MMA’s work.
We help businesses unlock the full potential residing within their brands.
Seeing greater potential is one thing. Realizing it requires going much deeper.
MMA guides business leaders and carefully selected cross-functional, cross-level teams through a journey to identify, synthesize, and precisely articulate the multidimensional — functional, emotional, and deeply psychological — lifeforce of their brands.
Going far beyond conventional views of Brand DNA, the journey reaches the brand’s animating core — its source of optimal meaning, valuableness, differentiation, and behavior-driving power.
We call the map of that lifeforce the Brand Genome™.
At the heart of the journey are two deceptively fundamental questions:
How can we be as valuable as possible to as many people as possible? And, once we understand that, how do we go about making it real?
The answers are discovered by the team through disciplined exploration of what already resides in the brand and the company behind it. The work does not stop at an answer simply because it seems highly insightful. It keeps going until it reaches what lives at the deepest levels — of the product or service, the business’s history, core competencies, and culture, and the people who have made it what it is — uncovering potential that has yet to be fully recognized, realized, or leveraged.
The journey makes that source of power visible, comprehensible, and ownable.
As the team discovers, challenges, and ultimately recognizes what the brand can most meaningfully be and become, intellectual agreement can give way to something much more powerful:
Shared Ownership.
At its fullest, the brand’s mapped Genome becomes an enterprise-wide Guidance & Control Mechanism — a high-level lens through which leadership can consistently shape what it creates, produces, and does.
MMA's results are not just impactful -- they are durable and transformative.
The brand’s Genome does not change unless the business itself fundamentally changes. But its manifestations continually evolve, enabling every function to create progressively more valuable outputs — across Product, Service, Customer Experience, Marketing, Technology, People, Operations, and the organization’s Culture.
Each evolves along its own Genome-rooted path while progressively becoming a mutually reinforcing manifestation of the same deeper strategic idea.
Together, those enterprise-wide manifestations become a force multiplier, creating a whole exponentially greater than the sum of its parts — more coherent, more difficult to replicate, and, most importantly, more meaningfully and sustainably differentiated — and giving the business greater power to turn those advantages into growth and enterprise value.
AN EXTRAORDINARY OPPORTUNITY - AND A CONTEMPORY RISK
The combination of digital capabilities and AI driving Performance Marketing has revolutionized the how of marketing, creating rapidly expanding possibilities for reaching, understanding, engaging, and motivating people — and for measuring the results of those activities with ever-greater precision.
Within a Brand with a capital B™ strategy, Marketing occupies a unique position. Like every function, its outputs become more powerful manifestations of the brand’s Genome. At the same time, Marketing almost always owns a higher-order responsibility: integrating and projecting the much larger enterprise-wide whole into the world.
As Performance Marketing becomes more powerful, the distinction between what it can do and what must guide it becomes increasingly consequential.
Performance Marketing strategy is not Brand strategy!
Performance Marketing gives Marketing an arsenal of tools for making its own work more effective. But Marketing’s much larger opportunity depends upon something Performance Marketing cannot itself create.
The exponentially greater whole that Marketing is uniquely positioned to project can only come into being when enough of the enterprise is truly grounded in the brand’s Genome.
Only then does Marketing have that much greater whole to integrate, project, and amplify.
Performance Marketing can then do more than multiply the effectiveness of Marketing. It can multiply the impact of an already more powerful enterprise by projecting and amplifying that greater power through a now more powerful brand — increasing its potential to create higher-order meaning, valuableness, and differentiation that drive desired business results.
That is how Performance Marketing can convert the greater strategic power unlocked by Brand with a capital B™ into long-term growth and enterprise value.
IN PRACTICE
Every engagement begins with the business itself — and a deep, multidimensional understanding of what makes it what it is.
For established businesses, MMA experiences the products or services as customers do and examines the company’s history, strategy, and performance, competitive landscape, customers and research, people and culture, and how the brand and its owner are expressed and perceived. For developing and early-stage companies, MMA experiences their products and services as fully as possible, with greater emphasis on leadership interviews, business plans, competitive and financial realities, investor perspectives, funding materials, emerging marketing, and customer learning.
The objective is to understand enough of the whole, deeply and quickly, to engage leadership in focused, grounded-in-reality conversations and shape the proposed path forward with precision. The process itself surfaces valuable insights and opportunities even before the larger strategic work is fully underway.
MMA both guides and becomes deeply immersed in the work — continually moving between the 40,000-foot strategic view and the boots-on-the-ground realities of making powerful ideas actionable.
Because strategic advancement creates value only when it changes what the business actually does and produces tangible results, the work continually moves toward application.
Across functions, applying that lens can mean creating something new, strengthening or rethinking what already exists, significantly modifying it, or dropping it entirely. In most engagements, all four occur. By this stage, leaders are already seeing how those individual decisions can work together to strengthen the greater enterprise whole.
Increasingly, it can also mean helping ensure that Performance Marketing’s expanding capabilities are guided by overarching Brand strategy and amplify its impact, rather than being mistaken for the strategy itself.
At Panera Bread, as a highly successful multi-regional growth company, the challenge was as fundamental as it was consequential: “How do we keep Panera special as it rapidly scales?”
Genome-level mapping uncovered and codified the deeper multidimensional source of power already at work in the business, making it visible, comprehensible, and actionable. Leadership used that deeper understanding as a common strategic lens across the company and franchise system, bringing it to life throughout the organization and connecting people to both its strategic and human power. Michael subsequently transitioned from consultant to Panera’s SVP/Chief Brand Officer and became a key member of leadership as sales doubled from $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion and EPS increased 24% annually.
At Anheuser-Busch, the challenge was to counter the most serious competitive threat Budweiser had faced in a decade.
The work went beneath the surface expressions of Miller Brewing’s Red Dog to the deeper psychological source of its appeal, then helped rapidly develop and execute a new brand — Red Wolf — to challenge it at that level. Within 18 months, Red Wolf generated more than two million incremental barrels while reversing Red Dog’s momentum and effectively eliminating it as a significant threat to Budweiser.
At UK-based Hawksmoor, the opportunity was hidden within an already successful, admired, and unusually self-aware business.
Brand with a capital B™ and Brand Genome™ mapping, together with qualitative and quantitative research driven by them, revealed the unseen emotional and psychological benefits that, beyond exceptional food, drink, and environment, made Hawksmoor especially valuable to its heaviest users. That understanding revealed opportunities to increase frequency across its customer spectrum and take share from a wide range of competitors — providing a strategic underpinning for growth initiatives and decisions that investors and management viewed as significant contributors to increasing enterprise value.
Across MMA engagements, the objective is concrete, measurable business impact. The results have consistently driven profitable growth, created enduring value, and, in the majority of cases, proved transformative.
Services
Brand Strategy Consulting
For business of all sizes and stages
• Development • Evolution • Acceleration
Brand with a capital B™ & Brand Genome™ Workshops & Coaching
Helping leaders and teams put the thinking to work in their own businesses
Leadership & Board Advisory
Multifaceted strategic guidance for executives, boards, and investors
Performance Marketing Strategy
Aligning performance marketing with overarching Brand strategy to increase effectiveness and ROI
Non-Executive Board Director
Independent, high-level strategic perspective and experience brough to board decisions
Advanced Custom Market Research
Custom qualitative and quantitative research designed to answer consequential strategic questions
Michael Markowitz, Founder and President
The thinking described here demands an unusual combination: the ability to see a business from 40,000 feet while understanding what it takes to make consequential ideas work on the ground.
Michael Markowitz has spent his career doing both.
A seasoned strategist and boots-on-the-ground pragmatist, he works comfortably with CEOs, their teams, boards, and investors while immersing himself in the realities of a business — becoming a trusted guide and catalyst for moving it forward.
That combination began with intensive entrepreneurial experience and progressed through the advertising industry to leadership of Ogilvy agencies in the U.S. and Africa. Client relationships increasingly extended beyond Marketing into broader strategic counsel, ultimately leading to the founding of MMA and decades of work at the highest levels of business strategy.
Panera Bread became the first major application of the comprehensive thinking that would become Brand with a capital B™. Engaged to help address how to keep Panera special as it rapidly scaled, Michael’s deep immersion in the business produced breakthrough thinking with implications across virtually every function.
That experience validated and advanced the perspectives and methodologies at the heart of MMA.
Michael developed Brand with a capital B™ and Brand Genome™ as the practical means of elevating Brand beyond its conventional Marketing-centered role and unlocking its greater potential as a source of enterprise-wide differentiation, profitable growth, and enduring value.
His role also differs from that of the conventional strategy consultant. Michael does not arrive with predetermined answers to be adapted to the situation. In MMA’s work, they emerge from deeply understanding the business itself — challenging assumptions, contributing ideas, and working alongside leadership and their teams to discover what will create the greatest value. Throughout, he maintains the objectivity of an outside expert while investing himself with the commitment and responsibility of a key stakeholder.
The altitude may be strategic. The standard is always pragmatic: What will make a meaningful difference, and how do we make it happen?
Michael and MMA’s seasoned network of subject-matter experts remain focused on that standard: achieving concrete, measurable outcomes and leaving leaders and their organizations better able to use an elevated understanding of Brand to continually create competitive advantage and increased enterprise value.
Clients
Non-confidential details of our work for these and other clients are available.
Testimonials
Michael is without peer in his understanding of how brands work and how to make them work better. He’s a substantive storyteller, gifted at getting to the root of the best expression of a brand and the best way to bind a customer to that brand. I’ve been his colleague and his client over a span of 20 years, and he’s perennially at the top of my “people I need to work with again” list.
Neal Yanofsky
Independent Strategy Consultant & Board Member
