Founder & CD at White Bear 🐻‍❄️ | Top 22 Female Founder 2022 ⚡️| Small Agency of the year 2022 🥇| CP Top 5 Agencies in UK ✏️ | Speaker and Host 🎤 | 16x Award winner 2022 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

Kelly Mackenzie is a two-time founder, creative director, and unapologetic brand obsessive. She leads White Bear, the award-winning creative agency with studios in London, Dublin, and South America, recognised as Agency of the Year 2022 and winner of multiple DBA, Transform, Pent, Mobius, IDI, Creativepool, and Red Dot awards for work with brands like Red Bull, Netflix, Bold Bean, Tom Parker Creamery, and The Kerry Group.

She’s also the founder of People Like Me – a growing community for women in marketing to make real, meaningful connections in person, cutting through the algorithm and digital noise to create friendships, share challenges, and help each other shine.

Named one of Startup Magazine’s Top 22 Women of 2022 and a Creativepool Leader of 2023, Kelly is passionate about design thinking, education, and championing women in leadership. She has lectured at IADT and NUA, served on the board of The Big Idea, and mentored start-ups with Bethnal Green Ventures, Enterprise Nation, and SeedLegals.

Her philosophy? Build unforgettable brands, disrupt industries, and make people feel something – and have the craic while doing it.

Learn more at 
http://www.whitebearstudio.com
http://www.peoplelikeme.io


Subscribe to our newsletter at: https://mailchi.mp/whitebearstudio/newsletter
Or contact me directly at kelly@whitebearstudio.com

Kelly Mackenzie 🐻‍❄️

Your brand problem is not the same as your branding problem. 

They might sound similar, but they're not. 

Shout out to Jo Bird ✨ for this carousel, it breaks this idea down perfectly!

I spend a lot of my time speaking to founders who are looking for a full rebrand.

But once we sit and look at where the faults are,
it's immediately clear their branding isn't the issue.

While brand and branding get bundled together all the time.
They're not the same thing.

And it's often where founders spend hundreds on solving the wrong problem. 

This is what you need to know about the two: 

Brand is who you are.
Branding is how you express it.

Brand is your positioning.
Branding is your identity system.

Brand lives in people’s minds.
Branding lives in your assets.

Brand is the decisions you make.
Branding is how those decisions show up visually and verbally.

If you're still not sure exactly which you're struggling with,
here's what to look out for ↴

You probably have a brand problem if:

1. Your sales and leadership team can’t describe the business the same way.
2. Your proposition keeps expanding to please everyone.
3. You’re attracting the wrong type of client.
4. Internal debates keep circling back to “what are we actually trying to be?”

You probably have a branding problem if:

1. Your visuals don’t reflect your level of ambition.
2. Your tone feels inconsistent across channels.
3. Your website feels disconnected from your pitch.
4. You’ve evolved, but your identity hasn’t.

While it might all sound simple, you need to be 100% clear on which problem you're looking to solve before you put the time and money behind it. 

Because they require very different work and efforts. 

And you don't want to polish surfaces of shaky grounds. 

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Kelly ‍️

Brand vs Branding

The fastest way to lose someone's respect isn't being wrong.

It's wasting their time and acting like it doesn't matter.

I've sat through countless meetings where people were there physically but clearly somewhere else mentally.

It's saying: "This dinner with friends matters less to me than whatever's in my inbox."

When someone gives you their time, they're making a choice.

They chose you instead of being with their family or finishing another project.

How you honour that choice shapes everything that comes next.

These are 5 ways to show someone their time actually mattered:

1. Put your phone face down before they arrive
→ This shows them that you care about the conversation.

2. Ask what would make this time useful for them
→ Show them you care enough to let them shape the agenda.

3. Remember what they have told you in the past
→ Nothing says "you matter" like proof you were listening.

4. Wrap early if the conversation's done
→ Stretching a 20-minute chat to fill an hour just wastes their time.

5. Do what you said you'd do
→ Follow through without reminders to help build the trust.

I'm not alwasy great at this myself, I find it so hard to focus...

In the past I've treated meetings like transactions.

I didn't realise the impact until I saw someone else do it to me and felt how it landed.

Now I'm more careful because people who make time when they're stretched are worth keeping.

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I studied 4 of the worst rebrands:

These are all the bad practices that I noticed ↴

Every brand change gets backlash.

That's just part of the journey.

People don't like change. 

But I've watched and delivered enough rebrands over the years to know that not all backlash is the same.

Sometimes people resist change because it's new and uncomfortable and they need time to adjust.

Other times, people reject what's happened because something they cared about has actually disappeared.

That's one of the hardest pieces of feedback a brand needs to deal with.

Here's what I've noticed after watching the 4 worst rebrands unfold:

1️⃣ HBO Max → Max

HBO has always wanted to appeal to a broarder audience. 

But when they dropped the one word that signalled premium, they lost of customers.

Nobody was willing to pay more for a service they didn't associate with exclusivity.

Your strongest asset is having a name that people recognise.

Don't throw away your equity. 

2️⃣ Twitter → X

Elon Musk deleted the vocabulary people had built around the product for nearly two decades.

The brand that was related to the word "Tweet" disappeared overnight.

There was no longer a term to solidify X's position as a leader in the market. 

Always think about how your audience talks about your brand and use it to your advantage.

3️⃣ Jaguar (2024/25)

I firstly want to say I absolutely loved their original leaping cat logo...

It was instantly recognised across 60 years of automotive history.

They have now stripped the one thing making their brand unique by jumping on the minimalistic logos trend. 

I get that they wanted a new audience but they went to far. 

Don't distroy your legacy.


4️⃣ Cracker Barrel

"Uncle Herschel" had been on the logo since the opening of the store. 

Honestly, most customers didn't consciously notice him until he vanished from the branding.

Always test core design changes before applying them to your brand.

The pattern across all four brands: deletion > replacement.

They removed the distinctiveness of their brand before creating a new lasting connection with their audience.

That's asking your audience to forget everything and start over.

And most people won't just continue trusting your brand the same way immediately.

With over a decade building brands at White Bear, 
and a decade before that some of the biggest agencies in the world,
I've learned that evolution works when it understands what people value.

Change feels like growth when it builds on what came before.

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World's Worst Rebrands

Doing everything yourself doesn't prove you're committed.

It proves you haven't learned to trust anyone yet.

I've noticed a pattern with every project I've ever done:

When I'm working solo everything takes 2x as long as it should.

I'm carrying everything myself and it's exhausting.

But the second I bring someone else in (that I trust) things start happening.

Once you trust each other that movement becomes real progress. 

There's a clear difference between working alone, working together, and actually trusting the people around you.

And each of the 6 levels unlocks something different:

1️⃣ Alone means full control but half the speed
→ You make every call but you're also the bottleneck for every decision.

2️⃣ Together means ground gets covered faster
→ Two people can spot what the other misses.

3️⃣ Trust means you stop second-guessing every step
→ When you trust someone their judgement becomes as good as yours.

4️⃣ Trust lets you divide the work and multiply the output
→ You're not managing them you're building alongside them.

5️⃣ Speed comes from working together and results come from trusting your team
→ One gets you going the other gets you there.

6️⃣ The more you trust the faster things work
→ Waiting to see if someone proves themselves just delays everything.

I spent the first five years of White Bear building it completely on my own,
because I thought that's what serious founders did.

It worked, to an extent, but everything moved at half the pace it could have.

When I brought my husband, David Endersen in as MD and as a partner the real shift happened and I stopped over thinking.

That's when I realised I was the one holding everything back by refusing to let go.

AND THEN, I saw proof of this once again bringing in Steven Mzar and Ben Parish as ACD's. 
(insert the magic sprinkles).

Trust changes what you perceive as actually possible.

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Leadership is a superpower.

Learn it and you can achieve just about anything.

Since starting White Bear, I've put a lot of thought into my leadership style. 

And I've got it wrong A LOT! But I've learnt and every day I'm learning more. 

And something I learned almost immediately was there was 2 paths I could take:

1/ Become a leader because I have the right title.

Or 

2/ Become a leader a team would actually choose to follow.

The difference between these two is found in how you show up,
AND how people feel when they're working with you.

These are the 5 levels of becoming a more impactful leader:

1️⃣ Role
↳ People follow you because it’s their job to. 
↳ You have authority on paper, but very little trust yet.

2️⃣ Safety
↳ Once your team feels safe (respected, heard, human), 
they follow you more closely. 

3️⃣ Impact
↳ This is where your team sees and feels your impact. 
↳ Works moving forward, better decisions are made, there's real momentum. 
↳ Now people want to follow you because you make things better. 

4️⃣ Care
↳ This shows up a few ways, when you invest in your team, you back them, you challenge them. 
↳ This is where they follow you because they believe you will make them better. 

5️⃣ Trust
↳ Now your team knows you, and sees your consistency. 
↳ Now they follow you because of who you are and what you represent.

Most leaders get stuck at Level 1 or 2, and let their ego get in the way. 

But if you're leading a team right now, ask yourself: 
↳ Which level do I want to be at?

The gap between 1 and 5 is where the real work lives.

Leadership isn't about just a position or performance.

It's about how you treat people when things go wrong, and when no one else is in the room.

By building this trust, more people will follow you, because they actually want to.

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If you want better conversations, change the environment.

People respond to context, not instruction.

Last night People Like Me hosted 24 women for a cook-along with a Michelin-starred chef!

But it wasn’t positioned as just another “networking” event...

There were no job titles on our name badges, no panels, or awkward circling of the room.

Just a small group of women who are into brand and marketing cooking together.

And almost immediately, the tone changed!

No one was leading with their job role.
Or subtly scanning for who might be “useful.”
Or trying to sell a polished elevator pitch.

Because when your hands are busy and you’re working on something together, you stop that usual networking performance.

That's where the conversations move naturally from surface to substance.

From “What do you do?”
To “What are you figuring out at the moment? I’ve been navigating that too.”

I started People Like Me because I was tired of rooms that reward polish over honesty.

Because behaviour follows design:

If you want depth
↳ Design for shared experience.

If you want honesty
↳ Remove the stage.

If you want connection
↳ Give people something real to do together.

Cook, build, walk, create.

Because activities build the kind of relationships introductions rarely can.

So a massive thank you to every woman who came and made the room what it was.

To Chef Hazel for setting the tone so beautifully!

To Clarisse Fraisse Fraise and Ellie Harrop, who, without their amazing support there would be no community. 

AND, finally to Mission Kitchen who provided a beautiful place for us all to get messy.

These events are exactly what I hope networking can become. 

Next up: breakfast at Ozone Coffee on 27th March...

If you’re ready for conversations that actually go somewhere and you want to chat to women obsessed with brand and marketing, you’ll want to be there.

Details in the comments 👇

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Calling all foodies in California next week!

We are officially on our way to Anaheim 🙌

Natural Products Expo West, we're coming for you...

For anyone who doesn't know it, this is the world's BIGGEST natural and conscious products event. 

Where thousands of the most interesting food and drink brands will all be under one roof.

So, for someone who obsesses over brand and packaging in this space, it's honestly some of the best few days of the year.

Because there is nothing like being surrounded by people who actually care about what they're building, and seeing how this space is continuing to evolve every year.

Now, me being me, I've already got a very serious list going for the trip beyond the expo floor.

(Let me tell you that WholeFoods and Erewhon are non-negotiable 😂)

But I'd also love to be pointed in the direction of any other recommendations you might have?!

And if you're heading to the event, old friends or new ones, DROP ME A MESSAGE!! 

Would love to grab a coffee and talk ☕️

Who's going to be there? 

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