Like any discipline, the field of strategy evolves continually. During the course of working with clients, Burns founders Johnny Johnson and Kate Clayton found that their brand strategies often made their clients re-think not only their existing marketing strategies, but also their business strategies.
“We began to realise that in order to make brands work harder, which is our mission, we needed to get involved higher upstream in the strategic process,” says Johnson. “Ultimately, brand is a business tool.”
Johnson says that in many companies the business strategy is divorced from the marketing strategy. Yet marketing accounts for a huge proportion of any business plan. Business plans are typically developed at board or exco level, then a set of objectives is handed down to the marketing department. Johnson says, however, that the business plan and the marketing strategy are deeply entwined and should be developed in an integrated manner.
With a BCom (Marketing & Business Administration) from KwaZulu-Natal and an MBA from Henley (UK), Castle joins Burns from Rainbow Chickens where he was group head in charge of trade marketing. He also served on the Rainbow Foods as well as divisional executive committees where he was responsible for managing its retail, wholesale and food services markets, among a number of other responsibilities. He has worked with Kimberly-Clark Corporation as national sales and marketing sanager, and started and later sold his own strategic marketing consultancy business. He began his career at Hunt Leuchars and Hepburn Group where he rapidly rose through the ranks from a market analyst position to group marketing manager for HL&H Timber Processors (now Mondi).
A start-up company six years ago, Burns was founded by advertising strategist, Johnny Johnson and strategic communicator, Kate Clayton. To date they have consulted to a number of leading brands including Allan Gray, Brait, Distell, Nedbank, Nissan, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), Parmalat, Metropolitan and KTV.
