For business leaders and board members leading mid-market and challenger brands in a competitive marketplace, Coologee is a brand transformation firm providing business consulting, integrated marketing and corporate communications services, and digital experience design solutions.
Unlike traditional consultants, agencies and communications firms who focus on decks without execution and creative instead of business strategy, Coologee works as an extension of internal teams to deliver integrated brand, marketing and communications strategies, brand platforms and customer experiences that make brand a business model.
By putting brand at the heart of business transformation, Coologee is redefining how companies profit and grow with integrity, clarity and purpose.
To redefine how businesses grow by making brand the engine of transformation, performance and purpose.
Brand is business — and these five say why. The sequence is the argument, which is the one place on this site where numbering carries information rather than decoration.
We choose our clients as carefully as they choose us. Real brand work that moves business outcomes is done with leaders, not for them. Brand management is a discipline they exercise alongside us, not a deliverable they buy. That partnership only works when both sides want the same thing, which means we say no to work where we would be renting our name to a decision we don't believe in.
Clients hear the bad news from us first, and they hear it early. Scope creep gets named the moment it appears. A number we're unsure of gets flagged as unsure. A recommendation we've changed our mind about is intentionally discussed and retracted. Trust is not built by being right — it's built by being predictable about what we do when we're wrong.
We cut through complexity so clients can see clearly — who they are, what they stand for, where they're going. Plain language, no buzzwords, no academic register when English works. If a decision doesn't make the reader's job easier, it's wrong.
Bold ideas, disciplined execution. Imaginative but grounded in strategy and evidence. We make the case emotionally and we make it in numbers, because the executives who need to fund the work require both and most firms can only supply one.
We help companies scale without losing their soul. Growth should reflect a company's values and culture rather than compromise them, which means we prioritize long-term impact over short-term wins, and we will tell a client when the fast version of a decision is the expensive one.
We work in your meetings, your tools and your constraints. A recommendation delivered from outside the organization is a document. One built inside it is a decision the team already owns.
A brand platform the executive group has not argued with does not survive the first budget cycle. We bring the disagreement forward rather than discovering it later.
Clarity, rigor and warmth, in that order. We stay through the part where the strategy has to work, because that is the part that determines whether it did.
Every person here has held the seat they now advise from, which is why we work inside your team instead of presenting to it.
Cat has run the marketing function from both sides of the table — head of marketing strategy at a Fortune 100 insurer, chief integration officer of a merged agency enterprise, and interim CMO inside client organizations. At Progressive she led strategy through the company's shift to high-value segments and its rise to #3 auto insurer in the U.S., built its first enterprise marketing scorecard, and created Dr. Rick. Earlier she launched Responsibility. What's Your Policy? for Liberty Mutual. She founded Coologee in 2021 on the conviction that brand is a business asset requiring executive governance. She is the developer of the Happiness Openness Index and the author of Brand is Business.
Emily works at the intersection of customer, category, and company — the place where a business decision becomes something a customer can actually feel. She spent a decade at TIAA leading brand strategy and innovation, evolving the brand position through the acquisition of a bank and an asset management firm and building the processes for naming, messaging, and creative briefs that the marketing organization runs on. Before that she led design-thinking work at SapientNitro and consumer segmentation at Allen & Gerritsen. Her work includes brand architecture for Xbox 360, positioning for Zildjian, portfolio rationalization for Burton, and naming a global health NGO.
Brian has spent nearly four decades turning commodity products into preferred brands. He led the public relations practice and new business team at one of the Midwest's leading brand-building firms, working with Duck Brand, FrogTape, Henkel Consumer Adhesives, and Forest City, and grew that practice from $300,000 to more than $3 million in net income — work that earned over 100 national, regional, and local awards. He later spent fourteen years as senior vice president at a Cleveland integrated communications firm. Earlier in his career he managed both Sherwin-Williams divisions and served as spokesperson for two Superfund sites, which is where he learned that the hardest audiences are the ones who live nearby.
For four decades Kevin has helped organizations protect their reputation through the events that threaten to define them. He has taken an airline into Chapter 11 confidentially, led cyberattack communications for two global manufacturers, run the on-site response to one of the deadliest mine accidents in U.S. history, and headed communications for a school shooting that reopened the school within three days. He supported an $8 billion acquisition that doubled a Fortune 500 aerospace business, and spent three and a half years as Midwest lead of reputational risk and crisis management at the world's largest insurance broker. A former broadcast journalist, he brings a reporter's instinct for what the story will become to the work of shaping it.
Dave builds the systems that make strategy operational. Over twenty years he has led product, program, and delivery work across financial services, insurance technology, wealth management, and the public sector — including a white-labeled SaaS insurance sales platform, an API-based comparative rate engine for large insurance partners, an enterprise data warehouse and data governance program at a global asset manager, and a multi-year digital interoperability platform connecting public agencies. He works where product design, data governance, and delivery discipline meet, which is usually where transformation projects succeed or quietly fail.
Tell us what you are working on. No qualification gauntlet — we qualify in the conversation, not on the page.