I work with Brand & Marketing strategy at the level where growth, trust, and brand meet.

With 20+ years of experience building and growing brands, I help companies and leadership teams make better marketing decisions by understanding how attention, perception, and trust actually work together over time.

I don’t see brand as visuals or campaigns.
I see brand as the trust layer inside marketing.

I believe marketing only works when it’s intentional.
Attention creates awareness.
Trust creates brands.

That means:
• using attention deliberately, not desperately
• building awareness without eroding credibility
• aligning what companies say with how they behave
• making marketing decisions that hold up long after the campaign is over

I’ve been leading strategy and brand marketing for Lantmännen- northern Europes leading cooperation in Food, Agriculture, Machine, Energy and awarded #1 Sustainable Brand in Sweden. Also awarded with Signum Award for long-term Brand building. 

I also done marketing for companies like Coca-Cola, Polaroid, LIDL and Volvo to food startups, energy companies, and EU-funded innovation projects. 

www.annelihansson.com

Anneli Hansson

Most designers start with the brief. The best designers question it first.

I know what you're thinking:

"But isn't it my job to solve?"

Yes. But not alone.

The best work happens in co-creation with the client.
Ask the questions together, and you already have buy-in before the reveal.

5 questions to ask:

- What problem are we actually solving?
- Who is this for?
- What do I want them to feel, think, and do?
- How does this stand out in our category? 
- What makes it recognizable? 

These are not design questions.
They are strategy questions.

Do you often have these conversations with your clients?

--------------------------------
I'm Anneli. I help designers become brand strategists- after 20+ years of doing it myself.

#brandstrategy

I teach designers how to lead with strategy — not just deliver design. 20+ years in brand strategy. Author at TheFutur. TEDx speaker. Join my community of designers turning strategists.💚

Designers. Start asking strategy questions.

Branding is not strategy.

I made this carousel because I keep seeing the same mistake.

New logo. New colors. New fonts.
Everyone gets excited.

Six months later?
Still no clarity. Still no direction.

Because they skipped the foundation.

Swipe through to see the difference between branding and brand strategy, and why it matters more than you think.

Save this if it resonates. Share it with someone who needs to hear it.

What's your take? Do most businesses confuse the two? Do you?🩷

#brandstrategy

Branding is not strategy

Brands don’t win because they post more content.
They win because they own something no one else can copy.

That “something” is IP — stories, characters, worlds, systems, and cultural assets that compound into long-term value.

Intellectual Property (IP) is becoming the core strategic asset behind modern brand entertainment and cultural ecosystems.

For over 20 years, I worked inside some of the world’s most influential entertainment and consumer brands — Disney, Warner Bros., Nickelodeon, PUMA — shaping global franchises, managing multimillion-euro IP portfolios, and learning how brands evolve when they move beyond campaigns and into entertainment, culture, and ownership.

Today, as the founder of unmtchd., I work at the intersection of brand, entertainment, and IP — designing IP-led, entertainment-driven ecosystems as long-term strategic assets.

My work sits at the intersection of three pillars:

→ IP & Brand Strategy
Identifying and structuring what makes a brand truly unmatched — its unique assets, meaning, narrative, and signature.

→ Brand Entertainment & Ecosystem Design
Turning IP into characters, formats, products, content, partnerships, communities, and scalable revenue streams that live far beyond social platforms.

→ Cultural Positioning & Future Readiness
Helping brands evolve intentionally so they remain relevant, differentiated, and culturally meaningful in a fast-shifting world.

The outcome?
Brands that don’t just participate in culture — they build it.
Distinct by design. Scalable through IP. Built to last beyond the algorithm.

If you’re a brand leader or founder exploring how to move from content to IP, from campaigns to owned worlds, let’s connect.

Oana Leonte 💬

I asked 150 social media professionals in Athens if they knew what their company stood for and 3 raised their hands.

Not 20. Not even 10. 
Three.

That's not a knowledge gap. That's the gap between output and meaning.

I was invited to speak at the "All Things Facebook & Instagram Conference" in Athens this week. My talk was called "Scaling with Meaning in the Age of AI."

The core argument: AI scales output. It doesn't create meaning. And the brands that win in the next decade won't be the ones that post the most, they'll be the ones that own something nobody else can copy.

I walked the room through Honda vs. Harley-Davidson (same product, completely different meaning), Disney's empire (19 business lines, one piece of IP holding it all together), and Bad Bunny (a reggaeton singer who turned Puerto Rican identity into a global brand ecosystem).

And I left them with one filter to take back to their teams:
"Does this scale our meaning?"

Ask it before every brief. Every campaign. Every piece of content you approve. That one question will change more than any tool ever will.

Thank you to Dannos Tsakalos and OTEAcademy for having me. 
And to every person who came up to me afterward to continue the conversation — that energy is exactly why I do this work.

IP is the new influence. 
And if you want to talk about what your brand actually owns, my DMs are open.

Oana  Leonte

IP is the New Influence | Brand Strategist & Adviser to CEOs & Founders | Author | Speaker → How to Scale Your Brand with Meaning in the Age of AI

I'm in London next week and I want to try something I've never done before.

If you're a founder or brand leader, let's grab a coffee. No agenda. I just want to hear what you're building and what's on your mind.

Just got back from speaking in Athens and I'm still buzzing from the conversations that happened after the talk.

It reminded me that the best things in my career never started with a pitch. They started with a coffee and a good conversation.

So… DM me if you’d like to meet up.

Also — I’m thinking about hosting a small Strategic IP Masterclass while I’m there. 

A focused session on how to identify and build the IP that makes your brand impossible to copy. 

If that sounds like something you'd want in on, comment MASTERCLASS and I'll make it happen.

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Someone asked me yesterday what Strategic IP looks like for Coca Cola. 

And it’s one of the best examples to study because it’s not obvious.

And because most people look at it and still miss the point.

They point to the formula.
The trademark.
The bottle shape.

Those are real. Those matter.
But that’s not why people choose Coke.

Here’s the pattern I see:
In blind taste tests, most people prefer Pepsi.

But in the market, Coca-Cola wins.
That gap — between what people taste and what they choose — that’s where Strategic IP lives.

Coca-Cola owns a narrative no lawyer could file.

The feeling of happiness.
The ritual of gathering.
The identity of the person holding the can.

No patent protects belonging.
No trademark covers the sound of that bottle opening at Christmas.
But they own both.

That’s the difference between a product and Strategic IP.

One lives in a contract.
The other lives in people.

And the one that lives in people
is the one that survives everything else.

This is the pattern worth studying.
Not the formula. The meaning underneath it.

The real IP  Coca Cola 

Three sessions.
That’s it.

That’s all it takes to go from ready to quit to knowing exactly what you’re building and why.

I work with solo founders who are ready to quit — just “done” with it all. 

They have real expertise.
Real results behind them.

A business that should be further along than it is.

But they’re burnt out.
Demotivated.
Running on obligation instead of drive.

The thing they won’t say out loud:
“I don’t know if I can keep going”.

I’ve been there so many times too…

When a founder comes to me feeling like that, 
I don’t fix their marketing.

I don’t give them a new strategy right away.
I don’t optimize what’s already draining them.

We go to the root.

Session 1 — we uncover what’s actually wrong. Not the symptoms, the source. 
The clarity you’ve lost about what you’re building and who you’re building it for.

Session 2 — we rebuild the vision. 
Not a vague direction. 
A precise destination, one you can see clearly enough to want again.

Session 3 — we construct the roadmap. 
12 to 18 months. 
What gets built, in what order, toward what outcome.

You leave with:
✔️ clarity on what the business actually is
✔️ a vision precise enough to navigate by
✔️ a 12-18 month roadmap built around you
✔️ the meaning back in what you do

The motivation doesn’t return because things suddenly got easier.

It returns because you can see again.

It’s interesting because it’s a similar framework I use with larger organizations but applied to solo founders.

With one BIG difference.
I’m a solo founder too.

I know what it feels like when the business you built starts feeling like a job you can’t quit. 

I know the specific exhaustion of carrying everything alone.

That’s not a weakness in the method.
It’s why it works.

Most founders feeling drained think they have a business problem.

But I know they have a meaning problem.
The good news is, that’s fixable. 🤍

I’m writing my book with AI.
And I want to talk about what that actually means.

Because the conversation around AI and creative work keeps getting stuck in the wrong place.

People ask: is it still yours if AI helped?
But that’s not the right question.

40,000 years ago, someone pressed their hand against a cave wall and blew pigment around it.

The tool was bone and ochre.
The meaning was: I was here.

Then came oil painting.
Then photography.

Some painters panicked. 
Declared the medium dead.

But the medium was never the point.
The meaning was.

Photography didn’t end painting.
It freed it, to go deeper into what a camera couldn’t capture.

This is where we are now.

I’m writing this book with AI and a human editor.
What I’m putting into it is 20 years of pattern recognition.

The frameworks I’ve built inside some of the world’s most IP-driven industries.

A worldview I’ve spent a career testing, refining, and living.

Observations that can only come from someone who’s been in those rooms.

AI doesn’t have my experience.
It doesn’t have my failures.

It doesn’t have the specific way I see the relationship between meaning, ownership, and long-term power.

What it does have is speed, structure, and the ability to help me think out loud faster.

So I’m using it.

The same way a sculptor uses better chisels.
The same way a filmmaker uses better cameras.

The tools are evolving.
The intention and the meaning make the impact.

The question shouldn’t be “what are you writing with”?

But “what are you putting in”?
And everything I have is going into this book.

If you’re a founder, creator, or brand leader who’s been building for the long game, this book is for you. 

More soon 🤍

PS. This is an excerpt from my talk “How to Scale your Brand with Meaning in the Age of AI”. DM me if you’d like to hear more.

Most people think IP is a legal conversation.
Trademarks. Patents. Contracts.

Things your lawyers protect.
That’s one kind of IP.

But there’s another kind.
The story people tell about you when you’re not in the room.

The reason they come back without being retargeted.

The thing they’d miss if you disappeared tomorrow.

That’s Strategic IP.

And here’s the difference that matters:
Legal IP protects what you own.
Strategic IP is what your audience owns — about you.

You can’t file a trademark on meaning.
You can’t copyright belonging.

But you can build both.

The brands ahead of the curve aren’t just protecting assets.

They’re building narratives durable enough to travel without them.

Reach without that narrative is just noise.
And noise is expensive to maintain.

The question isn’t how much content you’re producing.

It’s whether anyone would notice if you stopped.

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