Inhabit Brand

Brand strategy is stuck – trapped in outdated models and marketing silos. Inhabit Brand gets it moving again.

For decades, brand strategy has failed to evolve. Current approaches like purpose and positioning weren’t built for today’s complexity. The result: brands left strategically adrift, lacking both meaning and function, while organizations struggle to adapt, grow, and stay relevant in a fast-changing world. According to Interbrand, companies have lost trillions in brand value opportunity since 2000.

Inhabit Brand: Enabling Brands for What’s Next introduces a new way forward. Rooted in systems thinking, futures, and business design, it reframes brand as something to be inhabited across an organization – not just expressed in marketing.

At its centre is a new strategic imperative: enabling possibility. With practical frameworks and examples, the book shows how brand can operate at the core of business strategy and become a true operating system for growth and change. It features four modes of enablement, the Brand Operating Idea (BOI), and systems principles.

Readers will learn how to:

Build brand strategy that is coherent and adaptive
Use brand as an operating system for innovation and transformation
Enable alignment across people and operations
Design better systems with four modes of enablement
Lean into complexity for greater capacity and generative brand value
Make brand’s value more tangible and measurable

A guide for strategists, leaders, and brand-builders who know brand strategy should be doing more – and are ready to enable what comes next.

Author Biography

Esmé Rottschafer is an award-winning strategist, futures thinker, and founder of Inhabit Brand – a systems-based approach to brand, innovation, and business design. She has spent 25 years inside agencies, corporations, and consulting, working in the mess of brand and business and helping organizations navigate complexity while connecting meaning with function.Late-diagnosed and embracing her neurodivergence, she wrote Inhabit Brand: Enabling Brands for What’s Next to offer a meaningful way forward for brand strategy – one that moves beyond purpose statements to something people can truly inhabit.When she isn’t working, Esmé can be found creatively collaborating with her husband or slow living in Belleville – often in the company of her two cats, Hansel and Gretel.