Naomi A.
A working framework for the brands I take on, and the questions I ask before I touch anything.
Strategy is the part nobody wants to do — so I do it first.
Six years in the trenches of brand strategy and growth ops — agency-side, then in-house at two consumer companies that scaled from seed to Series B. I learned strategy by watching what broke when there wasn't any.
At Mitra I run audits before campaigns. Positioning before pixels. The work I'm proudest of is the work that prevented a launch from happening — because the launch was wrong.
Background: BA Economics, NUS · Strategy lead at two DTC brands · ex-McKinsey BA. Based in Singapore, working across SEA and ANZ.
"The brief is rarely the problem. The brief is what the client thinks the problem is."
I start with a 5-day diagnostic — stakeholder interviews, customer call audits, last 12 months of analytics, and the actual product. The deliverable is a one-page restatement of the problem. Half the time the original brief gets thrown out by week's end.
"If your brand sounds like five competitors, you don't have a brand. You have a category."
A positioning workshop with the founder, head of product, and head of growth. We map the competitor set on two axes — usually utility vs. identity — and find the empty quadrant. Then we test the new statement against three customer personas before locking it.
"A messaging architecture is not a tagline. It's the rules for how every line gets written for the next two years."
Three tiers: master narrative, audience-segment narratives, and channel briefs. Each tier feeds the one below. Writers, designers, and paid-media leads all pull from the same deck. The point is not control — it's coherence.
"You cannot launch a brand and a product feature and a price change in the same quarter. Pick one. Defend it."
A 12-month sequencing plan with explicit trade-offs. What goes first, what waits, what gets cut. Each milestone has a single owner and a leading indicator. No vanity metrics in the deck — only the two or three numbers that actually move strategy.
"Strategy that lives in a deck is decoration. Strategy lives in the calendar, the brief template, and the hiring profile."
Final week: I rewrite the team's creative brief template, draft the next two job descriptions, and sit in on the first three weekly stand-ups after handoff. Strategy compounds when it touches the operating cadence — not before.
Three things I always find.
The audience the founder describes is not the audience that's buying.
Nine times out of ten the actual customer is older, higher-income, and more pragmatic than the persona on the wall. The brand is talking past its real demand.
Internal teams have already solved it — but no one wrote it down.
The clearest articulation of the strategy usually exists in a Slack DM from six months ago. My job is to find that message, dust it off, make it the official document.
There's a sacred cow that's quietly killing growth.
A pricing tier, a hero SKU, a founding-team narrative — something the company refuses to revisit because it feels like betrayal. Naming it is half the work.
Let's get into it.
- naomi@mitra.studio
- Booking
- Two-week diagnostic · five-week full audit
- Based
- Singapore · SEA + ANZ engagements