Empirics - Insights & Brand Strategy

Client feedback

Empirics — Link Group

Mark's performance in creating a brand positioning and marketing strategy for Empirics was impressive. Mark took the time to truly understand our business and our clients and drew out the truths and values that lie at the very heart of what we do — resulting in a brand positioning that the whole company is proud of and buys into every day. The marketing and PR schedule that Mark arranged has also been successful and has provided a solid basis we can use for years to come. Mark was so proactive and well organised throughout the whole process — we felt in safe hands all the way and have ended up with a great result.

Empirics - Turning data capability into a distinctive market position

The Challenge

Empirics was a specialist data and analytics business operating within the Australian financial services and superannuation sector.

Its capabilities were sophisticated: data integration, analytics, predictive modelling, data visualisation and customer intelligence. The business had deep expertise in helping financial institutions understand behaviour, identify opportunities and make better decisions from their data.

But in a market increasingly crowded with businesses talking about data, technology, analytics and insights, technical capability alone was not enough to create differentiation.

The strategic challenge was to determine:

What was genuinely distinctive about Empirics — and how could that distinction become a meaningful position in the market?

This required going beyond a conventional marketing exercise.

The Approach

I led a strategic positioning programme built around two complementary perspectives:

Inside the business:
Understanding the organisation's capabilities, ambitions, expertise and beliefs through deep, structured interviews with key members of the leadership team.

Outside the business:
Interrogating the market in which Empirics operated — its competitive landscape, category language, customer expectations, emerging trends and the changing role of data within financial services and superannuation.

The leadership interviews were particularly important. Rather than simply asking executives what the business did, the process explored the underlying truths behind the organisation:

• Where did Empirics genuinely create value?
• What did the business know that others didn't?
• What problems was it uniquely equipped to solve?
• What did clients actually value?
• Where was the market moving?
• Which category assumptions were becoming outdated?
• Where was Empirics stronger than its existing positioning suggested?
• And critically, what could the business credibly own?

Finding the Truth

The research revealed that the opportunity wasn't simply to communicate Empirics' capabilities more effectively. It was to change the conversation.

Data and analytics were increasingly becoming expected capabilities rather than points of differentiation. Superannuation funds were accumulating enormous volumes of member and behavioural data, while the industry was becoming increasingly focused on using that data to improve engagement, retention, personalisation and decision-making.

Empirics therefore needed to move beyond what it did and articulate the value created by what it knew.

This distinction became central to the strategy. The work moved the positioning conversation from:

Data → Analytics → Technology

towards:

Insight → Understanding → Prediction → Action → Commercial outcome

The Strategic Opportunity

The resulting strategy established a clearer position for Empirics within the data and analytics landscape. Rather than competing simply as another technology or analytics provider, the business could occupy a more valuable territory at the intersection of:

Data + Behaviour + Insight + Business Decision-Making

This provided a stronger basis for communicating the company's expertise to senior decision-makers within superannuation and financial services.

It also created a framework for differentiating Empirics from businesses whose propositions were primarily built around technology, infrastructure or generic analytics capability.

Positioning Strategy

The strategy established the foundations for a more coherent market proposition across:

Positioning
Defining how Empirics should be understood within the financial services and superannuation ecosystem.

Differentiation
Identifying the capabilities, knowledge and experience that could create meaningful competitive advantage.

Value proposition
Translating complex technical capabilities into clear commercial value.

Audience
Understanding the senior stakeholders and decision-makers for whom Empirics' proposition had greatest relevance.

Messaging
Creating a hierarchy of messages capable of communicating sophisticated data capabilities without falling into generic technology language.

Marketing strategy
Defining how the positioning could translate into market presence, communications, content and commercial opportunity.

The Outcome

The work provided Empirics with a clearer strategic foundation for how it could compete and communicate within a rapidly evolving data and financial services market. More importantly, it shifted the focus from selling capability to owning a point of view. The strategy gave the business a stronger narrative around the value of data — and a framework for connecting its technical expertise with the commercial and strategic challenges faced by its customers.

The Strategic Principle

The work was based on a simple principle:

For Empirics, that meant moving the conversation beyond data and analytics as technologies — towards the intelligence, understanding and action those capabilities could create for financial services organisations.

My Role

Strategic Research · Leadership Interviews · Market Intelligence · Brand Positioning · Value Proposition · Marketing Strategy

I led the strategic process from market interrogation and leadership interviews through to the identification of strategic truths, positioning development and marketing strategy.