Unlocking the power of

pioneers

Cutting through

junk thinking

Creating the

new icons

of culture and commerce

Untapped strategic thinking with real cultural impact

  • Working with teams across Nike on strategic positioning to unlock the power of Elite Athletes and Sports Partnerships, including Victor Wembenyama, Carlos Alcaraz, Jakob Ingenbrigtsen and FC Barcelona

  • Working with significant entertainment productions across Europe, including Ivo van Hove's Jesus Christ Superstar, to find strategic space with the potential to create real cultural and commercial impact.

  • Working with FinTech scale-up Hellas Direct to position the insurance brand as a cultural force for good, create new purpose for the organisation and enable the next phase of international expansion

  • Working with Ukrainian ballet dancers in exile, fighting the brutality of war with the beauty of dance, to develop a new strategic mission and identity to act as a defiant vote for life and humanity: You can’t kill the dance

  • "Nick has been a great partner to our team. A strategic, storytelling mind, working with us on mining insights to formulate brand values, positioning and storylines for some of our key athletes. Nick is rigorous, creative and a pleasure to work with. I would love to work with him again".

    Katerina Zherebtsova, Athlete Marketing Director, Nike

  • "Untapped Strategy came in at a turning point in the growth of our business and was a highly effective partner in helping develop and focus our overall brand marketing approach. Nick got right to the heart of our challenges, he delivered incisive, provocative thinking and he was instinctively collaborative. Most importantly his work has helped set us up for our next stage of international expansion."

    Alexis Pantazis, Founder, Hellas Direct

  • "Nick is one of the very smartest strategic thinkers I've come across in my career. He has the gift of translating complexity into clear and actionable insights, strategies and plans. Nick is always a pleasure to work with, he is very low ego, open and collaborative. He would always be on my shortlist of 'go to’ people for any significant piece of brand or marketing strategy work I need support with."

    Simon Groves, Director of Marketing., Virgin Media 02

  • “Untapped Strategy worked with us at a pivotal moment of a highly ambitious project to turn the convention of our category on its head. Nick broke down multiple challenges across consumer and category to create a clear and perfectly structured narrative around how we can occupy genuinely untapped space and fulfil our ambitions. This work has created the foundation for years to come and has given internal teams and partner agencies the clarity we need to deliver better experiences for our customers.”

    Jonathan Lloyd, Head of Gaming Brand and Propositions, Sky

EXPERIENCE

A powerful approach to finding

the untapped strategic space

your future needs

DISCOVER

Data X Humanity

Untapped Insight is how we cut through junk thinking to find the truth about the challenges and opportunities brands face. Employing an approach that is both data-driven and human-centric.

REFRAME

Commerce X Culture

Untapped Vision is how we give brands the strategic direction they need. Establishing a brand framework and iconic vision that is both commercially ambitious and culturally connected.

TRANSFORM

Strategy X Action

Untapped Impact is how we embed a pioneering new vision all the way through an organisation, from the inside out. Creating a strategic model that is internally transformational and externally actionable.

Fuelled by 20 years of brand transformation

Untapped was founded in 2020 by Nick Docherty, a Chief Strategy Officer with twenty years’ experience in global brand transformation.

Before Untapped, Nick worked as a strategy leader for some of the world’s most innovative agencies, including ten years for Wieden + Kennedy on both sides of the Atlantic, finding new opportunity for brands like Nike, Heineken, Booking.com and Bud Light. He’s won multiple effectiveness awards including IPA’s, EFFIE’s and the inaugural Cannes Effectiveness Grand Prix.

After living and working in the UK, US, France and the Netherlands, he’s developed a truly global approach to strategy driven by progressive values and a commitment to reconciling the needs of business, people and planet.

Depending on the project, Nick taps into his wide network of experienced strategists and creative partners with the proven ability to find opportunity everywhere.

He can currently be found amongst the canals of Amsterdam with his wife, two young sons, and three bicycles.

Some provocative

untapped thinking

  • The Future Is Old

    As birth rates decline, lifespans increase and health improves, people over the age of 50 now account for over half of all category spend and three quarters of the world's wealth. They also account for under 10% of all marketing investment.

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  • It's Time To Give Up Junk Thinking

    Junk Thinking is the fast food of the marketing world. It’s cheap, superficial, snackable, hideously addictive and leaves brands simultaneously empty, bloated and wanting more. And it’s the most insidious force in marketing today.

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  • Lego: What Not To Build

    Lego is everywhere in Billund, Home of The Brick. But it turns out that Lego House and Legoland may stand as the world’s finest close-proximity examples of exactly what a brand should, and also precisely what it shouldn't, do.

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  • Practice Makes Purpose

    It’s the run-up to Christmas and ’tis the season, it seems, for Campaign magazine to dust off the incredibly tedious, but seemingly un-killable, debate about Brand Purpose.

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  • Welcome To Scarcenomics

    Everything you need to know about climate change comes during a moment in Al Gore’s documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ ….

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  • All Hail Our Annoying New Robot Overlords

    Humanity has accomplished some pretty impressive things. The Internet. Man on the Moon. The Sistine Chapel. War and Peace. Everything about Lego.

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  • The Fake Truth Is Out There

    The Truth. Philosophers have fallen out over it, wars have been started because of it – and despite it, the entire legal system is based on it and Tom Cruise famously couldn’t handle it.

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  • Long Live Luddites

    Luddites. Those infamous, sledgehammer-wielding destroyers of industrial sewing machines. Ancient predecessors of all those who shun Tesla,…

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