A new marketing consultancy, Think TRUE, launches today with the goal to provide brands advisory services for initiatives and activations focused on diversity and underrepresented communities. Longtime strategic consultant Vada Manager said that an increasing number of brands are seeking counsel on questions of diversity. “Companies are recognizing the landscape is shifting,” said Manager. “Consumers will think your brand is irrelevant if you’re not part of these discussions.” The startup firm is being incubated by experiential marketing agency On Board Experiential, which also owns a minority stake.
The agency is principally owned by Manager and experiential marketer Alvin Stafford, who will have the title of Chief TRUE Officer. “Not only are these communities underrepresented, but they’re also the influencers,” said Stafford. “You have communities that are under the title of ‘underrepresentation,’ but they’re also the trendsetters, they’re the culture creators. We’re making sure brands recognize that value in addition to the struggle.” Stafford believes the support from OBE will give Think TRUE scalability that isn’t typically possible: “Generally, minority-owned businesses are at capacity. The unique situation with this is that OBE is incubating (the agency), so it has the capacity to function as a large-scale agency.”
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Stafford has been OBE’s VP/Accounts since '15, and he said much of his recent work with clients like Nike and Facebook has been focused on questions of diversity and inclusion. Think TRUE will share clients with OBE -- initial plans include work on OBE client JPMorgan Chase’s “Advancing Black Pathways” campaign -- though the expectation is the agency will eventually develop distinct clients of its own.
Think TRUE’s board features four-time WNBA champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist Tina Thompson, in addition to OBE co-CEOs Dan Hirsch and Deb Lemon. “I think that people vote with their pocketbooks, they vote for brands, they buy brands because of what they believe,” said Lemon. “A while back, (brands) stayed out of that political fray. … Now, we see brands are welcoming that and are taking a position. We’re here to help guide them through that process.”
