Become was built to do strategy differently.
Most mid-sized businesses don't have continuous strategic capability. They get strategy in bursts. A project, a deck, a flurry of energy. The slower work of executing that strategy, decision by decision risks getting lost in the noise of the everyday. Become exists to close that gap. A strategic partnership built for how mid-sized businesses actually operate, keeping strategy and execution moving together.
Why Become?
Become is an independent strategic consultancy led by Paul Stallard.
We work directly with founders, leadership teams and organisations facing moments of growth, transition and change.
Every engagement is led by Paul. Where projects require additional expertise we build bespoke teams from our trusted network of specialist collaborators and partners.
Clients benefit from direct access to senior strategic thinking, combined with the flexibility to bring in specialist expertise when needed.
The founding idea came from observing a familiar pattern. Most large organisations have continuous strategic capability built in. Internal teams, retained agencies, advisor networks and board level strategic expertise. Most mid-sized businesses don't. What happens instead is strategy in bursts. A project, a deck, a flurry of energy, then long stretches where nothing changes while the market still does. Thinking that should be continuous is delivered as a series of one-offs. The strategic perspective these businesses need in the room every month gets parachuted in every few years.
Working as a partner with mid-sized businesses over the last decade and supporting them through founder transitions, growth phases with multiple changes of direction, the development of new and complex business models and international expansion I watched this play out repeatedly. Real businesses with real ambition, doing genuinely interesting work but getting strategy that didn't move with them.
Become exists to close that gap. A strategic partnership designed for the way mid-sized businesses actually work. Ongoing support not occasional intervention. Senior strategic input without the overhead of a big consultancy. Depth, partnership and the focus to keep the thinking moving when the day job pulls everyone back into tactics.
Shaped by experience
Become has grown out of spending the last twenty five years in brand strategy working across agencies, client-side leadership and independent practice: Strategy direction in agencies for clients including Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Enterprise, The Scottish Government, HSBC, Molson Coors, The Tofoo Company and Morrison Bowmore. Marketing Director and Managing Director roles in functional health and nutrition businesses. Independent partnerships including long-standing relationships with Nordic Group, Nuzest and a range of other food, drink, health and cultural businesses.
Transformational commercial experience with academic foundations. My original training was in cultural geography and anthropology and my PhD involved exploring the relationships we develop with brands and the meanings they hold. Brands as a lived experience, part of our everyday life and culture, a philosophy that still shapes Become’s approach to insight and research. My academic practice today combines research, working with brands via knowledge exchange partnerships and teaching the next generation of marketing practitioners.
Categories where we’ve made a difference
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Fifteen years across supplements, personalised nutrition and genetic health, including MD-level leadership. The opportunity in this category is paradigm-shifting. Tools powerful enough to change how health works. But only if practitioners understand them and consumers can be brought along. Market-building through education, with thought leadership at the heart of the brand as the category evolves around it.
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Brand strategy for businesses defining and entering plant-based, alternative proteins and emerging functional food categories. The hard part isn't selling plant based to people who already believe in it. It's making an unfamiliar protein part of everyday repertoires through passion, craft and joy. Earning a place in the rituals people already love.
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Independent and multi-brand retailers, including the reinvention of a UK pet retail group. The experience here is about being in the vanguard of how consumer needs evolve. What it means now for a pet to be part of the family, what differentiates one shopper from the next and what a store actually feels like when it's designed around the animal as much as the owner. Retail also has to keep up with two kinds of motion at once: the emotional bond people have with their pets, and the operational reality of e-commerce, delivery and digital service.
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Behaviour change and brand strategy work across health, public safety and economic development. Smoking and alcohol consumption. Drug and knife crime. Helping a national enterprise agency focus its support on the businesses genuinely on the runway to fly, not the ones that would stay the same whatever happened. The interesting question across all of it: how can communications shift behaviour in a way that feels liberating rather than coercive and how do you make change happen in environments structurally designed to resist it.
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Brand and audience strategy across festivals, film and major cultural institutions. A global research project understanding how audiences around the world perceive Edinburgh and its festivals. Work with film organisations using technology to create innovative live experiences. Strategy for a major arts venue thinking through how to deliver creative experiences at every touchpoint. Cultural organisations don't sell products, they sell what's possible in a space or a moment and the strategy work is figuring out how to make that legible to the audiences that matter.
How we think
Most brand strategy operates at the surface. It maps categories, segments audiences, articulates positioning. Useful, but not enough. The best strategic work reaches further: into the cultural ground the brand actually stands on and into the practical reality of what the business can genuinely build.
Brands are cultural forms. Categories are cultural fields. Markets are cultures before they are territories. Transitions are terrain, not moments. Innovation is answering needs the audience already has. Underneath: brand strategy is cultural work, grounded in what businesses can actually deliver.
Culture as strategic ground. We treat categories, markets and audiences as cultural contexts to be read, not commercial territories to be entered.
Reading both directions. Strategy that only looks outward produces propositions the business can't deliver. Strategy that only looks inward produces things the audience doesn't want. The work happens where what the audience needs meets what this brand can credibly offer.
Strategy as the art of the possible. Ambition matters, but strategy that ignores what the business can build produces wish lists, not roadmaps. Real strategic work finds the version of the ambition that's actually achievable and builds the plan that gets you there.
Cultural geography and anthropology give us a way of reading how meaning is made. Ongoing academic practice keeps our thinking sharp. Twenty five years of commercial work keeps it grounded in what actually gets built.
Global Team
Every engagement is led personally by Paul. Around each engagement we bring in senior associates and specialists where the work needs them. Researchers, brand designers, behavioural strategists, category experts. For international work we draw on a network of consultants and partners across the UK, US, Europe and increasingly South Asia. The team is tailored and scaled to the brief with deep senior expertise at the centre of every engagement, with the reach of an international network around it.
Working together
If something here feels relevant to a current question in your business, we’d love to talk. Most relationships start with a conversation and finding out more about each other.