Liefe
Oorbals

The brief

Nobody set this one. I kept losing the same week to the same loop: find the relevant data, work out the "so what", make it presentable enough to show a client. The tools built for that job, Brandwatch and its peers, cost more than a junior strategist and are driven by Boolean queries that are wrong more often than they're right.

The signal

The bottleneck was never access. Every platform will happily give you ten thousand mentions. The bottleneck is relevance, and a firehose of mentions isn't research, it's noise with a subscription attached.

Watching where the hours actually went, almost none were spent thinking. They went on building queries, discarding irrelevant results, and rebuilding the query because the last one caught the wrong sense of the word.

What I made

Cero is a set of modules over one shared signal store, benchmarked openly against Brandwatch and built to beat it where it costs a strategist the most time.

• No Boolean. A client is set up from a plain-language brief and a few example accounts. A semantic classifier handles relevance from there.
• It corrects itself. One thumbs-down stops equivalent noise for that client permanently.
• Everything traces. Every number links back to the posts that produced it; every insight cites the signals it came from.
• Many clients at once. Live accounts and pitch prospects share one workspace, because that's the real shape of a strategist's week.

Where it stands

Running live across five modules: pattern recognition, listening, market analysis, research and reports, all over one shared signal store.

What it saves. The loop it replaces, scraping a category by hand and filtering it down to what matters, took a day or two. It now runs in under thirty minutes. That gap is the whole reason the tool exists, and it is why I could run a listening pass on Montblanc for a speculative pitch nobody was paying me for.

Three client workspaces are open in it: two active accounts and one pitch prospect, which is the real shape of a strategist's week. The skincare workspace is holding 12.4k documents from six live sources, and surfaces its own source health, so a scraper that has gone stale is visible rather than silently wrong.

The brief

WOW Services sells freehold suites in a Blue-Zone-inspired wellness and golf resort in Murcia to private investors. 275 suites with seven clinical longevity labs attached. My job was the customer and market research behind who that buyer is, and how the proposition should be put to them.

The signal

It was being sold as an investment, so the pitch led with the numbers. You own the suite outright, you rent it back to the resort for 99 years, you get a fixed 7% a year, and the payments during construction are guaranteed by a bank.

The problem is that those numbers are not special. The average rental yield in Murcia is 7.19%. Anyone who only wants a return can get that without tying their money up for 99 years, waiting for a building that is not finished until 2029, and buying something they have to fly to. The growth figures explain why this kind of development is spreading. They do not explain why you would pick this one.

What the others do not have is seven longevity clinics on site, four to six weeks a year in the suite yourself, and the right to pass those weeks on to your children. So the personal use is not a bonus attached to an investment. It is the thing people are actually buying, and the investment is how they pay for it.

What I made

A buyer segmentation that separates the two motives the proposition had been selling as one, and a repositioning that inverts the order of the pitch: open on the life the suite buys, close on the return that makes it defensible. Same facts, opposite sequence.

The practical consequence is that the personal-use clause stops being a footnote in the financial annex and becomes the headline, and that the buyer being profiled is a family making a decision about the next twenty years, not an investor comparing yields on a spreadsheet.

Where it went

The research was used in two places. The marketing team took the buyer picture and the positioning into how they talk to clients, which changed what a conversation opens on and what it closes on.

The market findings then went into the company’s investment deck, the one shown to investors. The same Murcia comparison that argues the region is underpriced against Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Marbella works as evidence for a buyer and as evidence for an investor, so it did both jobs.

Context

Altaona Sports & Wellness Resort, Murcia. 275 suites across 23,500 m², seven longevity labs, an 18-hole championship course, and 300+ days of sunshine a year. Named Best Leisure Development Spain at the International Property Awards 2025.

The development sells in phases, each at a lower fixed return as inventory tightens. Phase 1 closed at €52M in sales volume; Phase 2 is currently open at 7% NET, with Phase 3 triggered at €85M.

What I am not claiming

Those phase figures are the development’s, not mine. I have not tried to attribute any of them to the repositioning, because a sales phase moves for many reasons and I cannot separate them.

The brief

Take WOW Longevity's olive oil from plan to launch. I directed it end to end, built the product site from scratch with AI-assisted development, and worked with the marketing team on search: classical SEO and AEO both, positioning the content to be picked up in AI-generated answers as well as blue links.

The signal

Read as merchandise, an olive oil is a gift-shop line: a margin on a bottle, and a logo somewhere it doesn't belong.

The timeline says otherwise. The resort doesn't open until 2029 and the entry price is six figures, so for the next three years the brand can be admired but not bought. That is a long time to hold interest with nothing to sell, and every month of it is a month someone forgets.

Olive oil closes that gap for €28, and does something a brochure can't: it makes the longevity claim a daily habit rather than a clinical promise. The membership structure, a hand-thrown bottle that isn't for sale and is refilled monthly, is what converts the purchase into a standing relationship. By the time suites are selling in volume, the brand has a list of people already practising the thing it sells.

The category it enters is also moving. High-polyphenol olive oil is the part of the market that is growing, on the back of a widening body of research into what polyphenols actually do. The market research turned up the gap: most oils sold on a health story do not clear the threshold the health claim is written against.

The EU permits one claim here, under Regulation 432/2012: olive oil polyphenols protect blood lipids from oxidative stress. It requires at least 5mg of hydroxytyrosol and derivatives per 20g of oil. Most extra virgin on a supermarket shelf does not reach it. This one is built to clear it and prints the number on the bottle, which is what turns a wellness claim into a regulated one.

What I made

The launch plan, the product website, and the search strategy behind it, built and shipped inside the launch window.

Live

The product site is live, now running harvest 2026 pre-orders on a countdown, with members shipped first.

The page carries the proposition end to end: the cultural claim, the product at €28, the membership hook, and the polyphenol evidence with its EFSA-authorised wording. Every lot is lab-tested and dated on the bottle, so the health claim stays checkable.

The brief

Taolis sells The Art of Living in Spain, five villa projects plus the WOW hotel, through a network of more than 800 external partner agents. Everything those agents needed sat in email threads and shared folders: renders, floor plans, price lists, availability. The current version of anything was whatever a given agent happened to have received last.

But the deeper problem was what happened next. An agent with a live buyer doesn't need a folder. They need a brochure for this client, on this villa, today.

The signal

Talking to agents, the delay was never in finding a file. It was in the hour between a viewing and a follow-up, while an agent rebuilt the same brochure by hand, pulling renders from one folder, a price list from an email, and hoping both were current.

Across a network that size, every agent was solving that alone, repeatedly, for every client. The work was identical each time except for three variables: which project, which villa, which channel.

What I made

A partner portal built around generation rather than storage. An agent picks a project, a villa model and a format, and the portal composes the material, so they specify collateral instead of assembling it.

• Four formats, one flow. PDF brochure, email, newsletter or WhatsApp message, each written for the project and client in front of the agent.
• Correct by construction. Generation runs off live villa inventory synced daily, so prices and availability in a brochure can't drift out of date.
• The asset library underneath. Official photos, floor plans and brand materials per project, 658 of them on Las Vistas Altaona alone.
• Everything kept. Generated material saves to a personal library, searchable and filterable by format and project.

Outcome

The portal is live and covers five villa projects plus the hotel, with 749 photographs and the full official asset library behind one login. Inventory, prices and availability sync daily and carry a timestamp.

What it changed. 818 agents are active on it. They have one place to see everything and produce their own material, instead of waiting on whoever last emailed them a folder. The marketing team gained the oversight it did not have before: which projects and which agents are active, and what is going out under the brand’s name.

The brief

Nobody set this one either. Montblanc has sold writing instruments since 1906, and the Meisterstück has been its centre of gravity for a century. Handwriting, meanwhile, has been in structural decline for a generation. I wanted to know what a house sells when the activity its flagship product exists for is quietly disappearing.

The signal

The obvious answer is diversification, and the house has already taken it: watches, leather goods, fragrance, accessories. Reduce the dependency on a shrinking category.

That is a hedge rather than a strategy. It trades a house with a singular meaning for another luxury accessories brand, competing with houses that are structurally better at accessories, and it treats the pen as a legacy problem to be managed down.

Look instead at how these objects are actually acquired. Almost nobody buys a Meisterstück because they need a better pen. It is given: at a graduation, a first job, a promotion, a retirement, a father to a son. The purchase occasion is a threshold, and the object's job is to make that threshold permanent.

Which changes the size of the problem entirely. The decline of handwriting threatens the pen's function. It does not touch the reason anyone acquires one.

What I'd do

Stop defending writing and start owning thresholds. Map the moments a life turns on and a twenty-five year hole opens in the middle of it, between a milestone birthday and retirement. Things happen in those years. People become parents, start companies, buy houses, take citizenship. Nobody sells a gift for any of it.

What every one of those moments has in common is that something gets signed. A birth register, articles of incorporation, a deed, an oath. So the idea is simply this: Montblanc shows up when something is signed.

It ships as a concierge first, a pen delivered to a named venue on a named date in a milestone box with an engraving slip inside, booked through property brokers and private banks. That carries the volume. Boutique signing appointments carry the story. And where signing has gone digital, the friction is the product: clicking agree on a screen costs nothing, taking a pen out of a box to sign a deed has weight.

The test isn't whether people still write. It's whether, when something in a life is worth marking, Montblanc is the first place anyone thinks of.

Why it's here

Every other case on this site is client work with a commercial brief attached. This one had no brief, no client and nobody to check it, which is the closest thing to how strategy actually starts.

It is also where I think this job is going. AI is changing how strategy actually gets done, and if you want to grow in it you have to grow with it rather than wait and see what it does to you. Building the thing myself was how I chose to keep up.