Strategy service / Marketing Strategy

Marketing Strategy. Tested early.

From market signal to launch, with the assets to test it.

A client called last September. CPG brand, five-market launch the following spring. Briefed her agency in March. Four months later: a 60-slide deck. Good work. Nobody had tested a hook with a real buyer, and by then half of Q4 was booked.

The deck-only engagement is not on offer here. We close the loop in the same engagement: research, strategy, creative pressure test, GTM plan, launch pack. Weeks, not quarters.

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Shanghai studio / Strategy + launch creative

A marketing strategist at a long oak worktable in a Shanghai studio, surrounded by printed market reports, ICP cards and a laptop showing a share-of-voice chart. Studio work / Strategy floor

Why it matters

AI made research
a week of work.
Everything else changed with it.

hubStudio was founded by the former CEO of Publicis Commerce for China and North Asia (2019 to 2023) to rebuild the strategy loop. The old loop was research, strategy, creative, launch, learn. The learn step happened in market, six months too late.

Desk research, competitor teardown, sentiment analysis, ICP refresh. Work that filled three months of senior strategist time now fills three days, sometimes four if the category is messy. The real shift is not speed. Strategy can be tested empirically before launch, in the same engagement that produced it.

Studio samples include FMCG launches, luxury beauty, premium spirits, consumer tech and B2B SaaS positioning sprints. Most under NDA.

A Shanghai marketing strategy room: three strategists around a long worktable, surrounded by printed market data and pinned positioning maps.
The strategy room, Shanghai

Across roughly thirty strategy engagements over two years, first plans land in three weeks against a twelve-to-sixteen week industry baseline. Six creative variants tested before any launch decision, and a measurably higher hit rate once positioning is pressure-tested upfront.

0wks First plan delivered Vs 12 to 16 week baseline
0x Creative variants tested Before any launch decision
0 Strategy engagements Across two years

The work, defined

One engagement, the whole plan.

Studio flat-lay of marketing strategy research: a competitor teardown booklet, a market segmentation chart, three ICP behavioral persona cards, a share-of-voice bar chart.
Research and strategy

Coverage

The thinking, pressure-tested before launch.

Market and category research: competitor mapping, share of voice, desk research, social listening across Western and Chinese platforms, sales calls, reviews. ICP work rebuilt from behavioral signal, not a panel-of-six from five years ago. Synthetic respondent panels pressure-check variants before any live testing.

Positioning is the slowest part on purpose. Frame, promise, supporting proof, and the line that survives translation into five languages. AI generates the variants in parallel. The call on which one ships stays human.

In scope

  • Market research
  • Category mapping
  • Competitor teardown
  • ICP rebuild
  • Synthetic panels
  • Positioning frame
  • Voice and proof
  • Whitespace map
  • Social listening
  • Review mining
A studio flat-lay of an AEO audit: a printed brand citation ranking across five LLM platforms, a sentiment heatmap, and a laptop showing an AI search result page.
Share of Model, AEO and GTM

Coverage

The lane most strategy decks still skip.

Share of Model measures how often, prominently and favorably brands appear in AI-generated responses. The same brand can command nearly a quarter of mentions on one model and almost none on another.

We audit citation frequency, position and sentiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews, then benchmark against your direct competitors. Brand mentions on Reddit, niche YouTube and LinkedIn carry roughly three times the AI-visibility weight of classic backlinks. That changes where you spend.

Findings feed the go-to-market plan: launch sequence, channel mix, paid and organic split, a 90-day rollout with KPIs. Every engagement closes with a launch creative pack: three to five message variants rendered as ad creative, hero blocks, social posts and subject lines, ready for an existing team to ship.

In scope

  • AEO audit
  • ChatGPT
  • Perplexity
  • Gemini
  • AI Overviews
  • Citation frequency
  • Position and sentiment
  • GTM plan
  • Channel mix
  • Launch creative pack

Contact sheet

Selected proofs.

Strategy artifacts and launch specimens, authored in the studio. Brands are anonymised; the work is real.

A printed Aldair multi-market launch plan open to a five-market launch calendar, beside three ICP cards and a swatch row.
Aldair FMCG launch, Indonesia + Vietnam
A Norven positioning brief on a plaster surface, open at a DACH category whitespace map beside two velour swatch cards.
Norven Luxury beauty, DACH
A Pelora China GTM artifact showing a Douyin, Xiaohongshu and WeChat journey map beside a folded smartphone mock.
Pelora Consumer tech, China entry
A Mereth four-market launch sequence on dark stone, with a stacked-bar channel mix chart and three hook variants.
Mereth Premium spirits, four markets
An Astrel retail playbook on a sand stoneware tray, open at a channel matrix beside a SKU range card.
Astrel Retail private label GTM
A Vellen B2B SaaS positioning brief on a worktable, open at a seven-column category entry points chart.
Vellen B2B SaaS positioning sprint
Two marketing activation specialists at a long worktable with two laptops showing a paid-media dashboard and a launch calendar, behind them a wall of pinned campaign creatives.
Two hands annotating a printed launch calendar grid with a pencil on a warm oak surface.
2–4 wks Plan approval to first campaign live

Optional capability

Need the campaign
built too? We can run it.

Optional. Most clients activate with their existing team. The strategy, GTM plan and launch creative pack are built to be picked up by another agency or in-house studio on day one.

If you would rather we run activation alongside, we do that too. Paid media, organic and SEO, influencer and KOL, partnerships and trade, coordinated through one team using the same audience work and brand-trained models that built the platform. Plan approval to first campaign live in two to four weeks.

  • Paid media
  • Organic and SEO
  • Influencer and KOL
  • Partnerships

Social listening across Western and Chinese platforms. AEO tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews. We also watch Tencent Hunyuan and Alibaba Qwen because the Chinese models are catching up faster than most Western marketers realize.

The strategy, GTM plan, prompt systems and any brand-trained models are yours either way.

Our process

Research first.
The rest follows faster.

The gap between AI adoption and AI impact is a strategy gap, not a tooling gap. So we do the unglamorous work upfront, then move quickly because the research is already pressure tested.

First two steps are where it is won or lost. The rest is execution.

A marketing strategist at a worktable taking notes in a paper notebook beside a printed client brief and a laptop showing a sales dashboard.
Where it is won

Brief and immersion.

Objective, geos, current positioning, sales data, the brand book if it exists. A CRM extract if you can share it. Thin data is fine, we flag the gaps.

A strategist annotating a competitor share-of-voice chart on a laptop while three AEO citation printouts are pinned to a plaster wall behind.
Where it is won

Research synthesis. The step that matters most.

Competitor teardown, Share of Model audit, social listening, review mining, ICP rebuild. Work that used to fill three months of senior strategist time now fills three or four days, which is what makes the next step possible.

A senior strategist standing in front of three pinned positioning direction boards on a plaster wall, hand pointing at the middle board.
The rest is execution

Three strategic directions in parallel.

Three positioning routes, each rooted in a category insight, with frame, promise, supporting proof and a working tagline. You choose between strategies, not moodboards.

A printed synthetic panel scorecard beside a fabric board showing six campaign creative variants, three of them tagged with coloured stickers.
The rest is execution

Pressure test against panels and creative.

Each direction tested against synthetic respondent panels for comparative work, then rendered as actual creative so you see how the strategy lands as an ad, not as an adjective.

A printed 90-day go-to-market plan booklet open at a channel sequence calendar, beside a KPI dashboard sheet and a stack of launch creative variant cards.
The rest is execution

GTM plan and launch pack.

Final positioning, channel mix, a 90-day sequence with KPIs, and a launch creative pack ready to ship: three to five message variants rendered as ad creative, hero blocks, social posts and subject lines.

The new math

How AI changes
the math.

A CPG brand lands with a five-market launch brief, three languages, four product lines, a Q3 GTM. The same scope, run two ways.

The agency workflow Fourteen weeks
Research Five weeks Positioning Five weeks GTM plan Four weeks

Mid-tier agency timeline: five weeks for research and ICP work, five for positioning rounds, four for the GTM plan. Three rounds of revision, partner time billed at full rate, junior teams running the work. Heritage consultancies stretch the same scope across two quarters or more.

Our workflow Three weeks
First plan and creative pack Three weeks

Three positioning directions worked through in parallel. Synthetic respondent panels pressure-test before any live spend. Each direction rendered as actual creative so the room is choosing between strategies, not moodboards. GTM plan, channel mix and launch creative pack land in the same engagement.

Three weeks for a first plan and creative pack on a single market. Four to six weeks for multi-market or multi-product. Faster on extensions of an existing brand. Industry benchmark for agency brand strategy is twelve to sixteen weeks.

We quote project-based after the first call, once the brief and market list are clear. Pricing scales with markets, languages and asset volume. Retainer arrangements work for clients running multiple engagements per quarter.

First call within 48 hours of you sending the brief. Discovery begins the same week if there is a kickoff slot. We sign NDAs as standard before any data leaves your side.

A few things. Research is AI-led, which means the strategist spends time on judgment instead of data gathering. Every direction gets pressure-tested with real creative and synthetic panels before final selection, not after the campaign launches. And we ship the launch creative as part of the engagement rather than as a separate scope. The deck-only model is wasteful, especially now that AI has made the analytical work cheap.

Three. Most projects wrap inside two because the pressure-test step kicks the obvious objections out early. Round three is usually about fine-tuning a tagline or swapping one channel weighting in the 90-day plan.

Business objective, target markets, timeline. Brand guidelines if you have them. Sales data, prior research, customer feedback, support tickets. Competitor list. Current positioning and what is or is not working. CRM extract is gold. Thin data is fine, we flag the gaps.

Senior strategists with agency backgrounds (Publicis, Ogilvy, WPP) lead every engagement. AI specialists handle research synthesis and asset generation. The recommendation is always written by a named human. Creative talent for the launch pack comes from the client target culture.

A baseline audit across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews. How often your brand appears against category prompts, in what position, with what sentiment. We benchmark against your direct competitors. The findings shape the channel mix and the content architecture. Most brands discover their SEO authority does not translate cleanly to LLM citation.

For comparative work, yes. Which claim wins. Which price point maximizes intent. Which positioning resonates. The rank order tends to hold up against later human validation, which is the part most clients are surprised by. Synthetic work is weak on revenue forecasting and market sizing, and it gets unreliable in categories with thin model training data. We adjust the methodology where we know the bias is showing.

Yours. Frameworks are standard, inputs are not. We train our research on your category, your data, your competitive set.

Both. Some clients come for one repositioning in one geography. Others come with a launch across five markets, three languages, four product lines. AI handles the localization volume that used to need twenty strategists. We staff creative talent from each target culture.

Both. Every engagement includes a launch creative pack. Full campaign production is optional and scoped separately.

Shanghai. We staff senior strategists and creative talent from clients target cultures, so the people on your brief sit closer to your market. Day-to-day operations work to your timezone. Standing weekly calls and async docs cover the rest. We have delivered strategy into the US, EU, UK, Middle East and APAC.

Try us

Try it on a
real brief.

Send us a launch or repositioning brief. Inside three weeks you get a strategic direction, a 90-day plan and the launch creative pack. No retainer attached, no commitment to keep working with us. Whatever we deliver in those three weeks is yours regardless.

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