Melenberg Marketing Co.
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Brand strategy for Canadian founders and builders

Fortune 500 playbooks, for teams under 500.

Learn the processes the world’s biggest brands use to win, and the modern tools your team can use to put it to work faster than they ever could.

See how it works
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The problem

The best marketing science has always been kept behind closed doors.

The marketing science that actually moves the needle has been kept a secret for too long. It’s been locked behind boardroom doors and in courses that cost tens of thousands of dollars serving only teams with massive agencies and budgets.

So founders and lean teams get the leftovers: conflicting advice, a new “must-try” tactic every week, and no framework to tell what works from what’s just noise.

Time to level the playing field.

The solution

One week that shapes a year of smart marketing.

I bring the playbooks the world’s biggest brands run on directly to your team. Over one focused week, we’ll unpack the full marketing process from start to finish, then go deep on the pillar that matters most to your business right now.

Halftone illustration of a man with the top of his head lifted off, revealing marketing icons: charts, a target, a megaphone and speech bubbles

How it works

  1. Start with a conversation

    We’ll talk through your business, where your brand stands today and where you want to take it. Together, we’ll choose the pillar to focus on: Diagnosis, Strategy or Execution.

  2. Learn the full playbook

    Your team gets the complete big-brand marketing process, from understanding your customers to choosing where to win to running work that pays off. You’ll see how each step connects, so every decision builds on the last.

  3. Go deep where it counts

    We spend the rest of the week applying your chosen pillar to your actual business, working through real decisions with your team rather than hypothetical case studies.

  4. Leave ready to act

    You’ll finish with a clear plan for your focus area, the frameworks to keep using after we’re done, and a team that knows how to apply them.

The framework

The big-brand playbook, in three parts.

Big brands don’t guess. They diagnose before they prescribe, strategize before they act, and execute each campaign with intent. Each pillar feeds into the next. Below you can see what I cover under each and find where we can focus to enable 10X growth.

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Pillar 1

Diagnosis

Learn to get an honest picture of where your brand stands and where it needs to go.

Most brands skip this step and jump straight to tactics. That’s like a doctor prescribing before examining the patient. Diagnosis gives you the facts first: what your customers really think, how you compare to competitors, and where growth will actually come from. Every decision after this gets easier, and cheaper.

What we will cover

Brand fundamentals

The principles that drive brand growth at the world’s biggest companies, explained in plain language. We’ll cover how brands actually grow, and the core fundamentals you need to know.

Questions we will answer
  • What actually makes a brand grow, and what’s my role in building one?
  • Should I be focused on winning new customers or getting more from existing ones?
  • What’s the difference between brand building and sales activation, and do I need both?

Core research areas

A clear map of what you need to learn about your customers, your competitors and your own brand, so your plan is built on evidence instead of assumptions.

Questions we will answer
  • What do I need to know about my customers, competitors and brand before I make a plan?
  • What do I already know, and what am I just assuming?
  • Who are my real competitors in the eyes of the customer?

Qualitative research

Conversations with real customers (and the ones who got away) to understand the why behind their choices. Done right, a handful of interviews will tell you more than a year of guessing.

Questions we will answer
  • Why do customers choose us, or walk away?
  • What words do customers use to describe us, and our category?
  • What problem are they really hiring us to solve?

Quantitative research

Simple, affordable ways to measure where your brand stands with the market, from awareness to purchase. You’ll see exactly where people drop off, so you know what to fix first.

Questions we will answer
  • How many people know us, consider us and buy from us?
  • Where are we losing people between hearing about us and buying from us?
  • How do we compare to competitors on the things that matter most to customers?
Pillar 2

Strategy

Learn to confidently make the big choices that will set your brand up to win for years.

Strategy is about choosing what not to do. Big brands win because they make a small number of clear, deliberate choices and stick to them. We’ll turn your diagnosis into those choices: who you’re for, what you stand for, and what success looks like. The result is a plan your whole team can rally behind.

What we will cover

Targeting

Choosing the customers who matter most, rather than trying to appeal to everyone. We’ll find the segments where you have the best chance of winning and the most to gain.

Questions we will answer
  • Who should we go after, and where do we have the right to win?
  • Which customers are most valuable to us, and which ones are we chasing for no reason?
  • How broad or narrow should our target be at our size?

Positioning and brand codes

Defining what your brand stands for in a few words, then building the distinctive assets (colours, logos, characters, sounds, taglines) that make you instantly recognizable.

Questions we will answer
  • What do we stand for, and how will people recognize us instantly?
  • What makes us different in a way customers actually care about?
  • Which of our current assets are worth keeping, and which are just noise?

Brand objectives

Setting clear, measurable goals for your marketing that connect to the business, so you know what you’re aiming for and how to tell if it’s working.

Questions we will answer
  • What should our marketing achieve, and how will we know it’s working?
  • Which numbers should we track, and which are just vanity metrics?
  • What’s a realistic goal for the next 12 months, and for the next three years?

Brand architecture

Organizing your products, brands or sub-brands so they make sense to customers and give you room to grow without diluting what you’ve built.

Questions we will answer
  • How should we organize our products, brands or sub-brands as we grow?
  • Should a new product carry our name, or have its own?
  • When does adding a brand help us, and when does it spread us too thin?
Pillar 3

Execution

Turn your strategy into campaigns, creative and spend that actually pay off.

This is where the plan meets the real world. Execution is about spending wisely, briefing well and knowing whether your work is landing. We’ll apply the same disciplines big brands use, sized for your budget, so every dollar is pulling in the same direction, whether that’s $10K or $10M.

What we will cover

Creative development

Writing briefs that get great work out of your team, freelancers or agency, and keeping the creative tied to your strategy.

Questions we will answer
  • How do we brief our team or agency to get great work?
  • How do we make sure our creative builds the brand, not just this month’s sales?
  • How do we use our brand codes consistently across every channel?

Creative evaluation

A simple, repeatable way to judge ideas before they launch, so you can debate the odds of success instead of personal taste.

Questions we will answer
  • How do we know if an idea will work before it runs?
  • What should we look for in a first draft, and what should we ignore?
  • How do we give feedback that improves the work instead of watering it down?

Media planning

Deciding where to show up and how to split your spend between building the brand over time and driving sales now.

Questions we will answer
  • Where should we spend, and how do we balance brand-building with performance?
  • Which channels actually reach our target customers?
  • How long should a campaign run before we judge it?

Budgeting

Setting a marketing budget grounded in your goals and your market, then allocating it with confidence.

Questions we will answer
  • How much should we spend to hit our goals, and where should it go?
  • How do we justify the marketing budget to other leaders, investors or ourselves?
  • What should we cut first if the budget gets tight, and what should we protect?

Who I serve

Built for the teams the big playbooks forgot.

Halftone illustration of a woman looking through binoculars with the Melenberg brandmark in each lens

Founders and business owners

You need a foundation in marketing to build your business.

How it helps
  • Skip the expensive trial and error. Learn what actually drives growth before you spend on what doesn’t.
  • Make marketing decisions with confidence. Know which advice to follow and which to ignore.
  • Build a brand that lasts beyond the launch. Lay foundations now that still work when you’re 10 times bigger.

Small marketing teams

You’ve got big goals and a small budget, where every effort and dollar counts.

How it helps
  • Know which tactics will work before you try them. A clear framework shows you where to focus, and what to say no to.
  • Connect your marketing to business results. Set objectives that matter to the business, then build marketing that delivers on them, and show it.
Luke Melenberg, smiling, photographed outdoors
Luke Melenberg, Toronto. Works in English and French.

About

Meet Luke

I’m Luke, a Toronto-based marketer with nearly a decade of experience building brands at every scale.

My approach is grounded in the brand-building disciplines of McDonald’s, KFC and PepsiCo, sharpened through partnerships with Google and Facebook, and informed by extensive training in marketing science and effectiveness research.

I’ve also applied these frameworks where resources are tighter. At Float, one of Canada’s fastest-growing fintechs, I built the brand and marketing function from the ground up, and I’ve advised businesses across a wide range of Canadian industries.

The fundamentals that build global brands apply to growing businesses as well, when they’re sized correctly. My work is helping teams do exactly that, in English or French.

Want to learn more?

Every business is different, so the best place to start is a conversation. Tell me where your brand is today and where you want to take it, and we’ll work out the right next step together.

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