Case: MINI A TURE Creating a Global Brand Strategy for a progressive Kids' Outdoor Brand

A Winning Game Strategy & Playbook. How to Build a New Global Brand Direction for a Progressive Kids’ Outerwear Brand.

MINI A TURE is a progressive Scandinavian children's outerwear brand, trusted for its combination of design, functionality, quality, and a deeply embedded sustainability mindset.

But growth creates an interesting brand challenge. The wider the range becomes, the more markets you enter and the more people who communicate the brand, the harder it becomes to maintain one clear identity and direction.

I was brought in to develop a new brand direction for MINI A TURE and to define what outdoor should mean for the brand, translate that into a distinct position, and create a practical playbook that could turn strategy into marketing and commercial decisions.

The ambition wasn't to reinvent MINI A TURE. It was to make what was already strong more distinct, connected, and easier to activate. Below is my case of developing the new MINI A TURE's Brand Strategy as a Kids' Outdoor Brand, doing it the MINI A TURE way.

The Challenge: What Does Outdoor Mean for MINI A TURE?

Outdoor is an interesting space for a children's brand because children don't experience life through the categories the industry has created. Their world moves naturally between school and forest, playground and pavement, rain, snow, weekends away, and ordinary afternoons outside. Modern family life does the same.

Outdoor isn't necessarily somewhere you travel to. Increasingly, it is simply part of how you live. MINI A TURE already had strong credentials in Scandinavian design, technical protection, and responsible thinking. The opportunity was therefore not simply to become more outdoor, but to define an outdoor territory that felt authentic to MINI A TURE rather than borrowed from the traditional outdoor industry.

That gave us a central strategic question:

How can MINI A TURE own a relevant outdoor position without becoming another outdoor brand?

To answer it, we needed to connect what was already true about MINI A TURE with where the brand wanted to go next.

Case: MINI A TURE Brand Strategy Kids' Outdoor Brand

The Process: From Internal Alignment to Winning Game Strategy

The project was developed closely with MINI A TURE's leadership and organisation. Rather than disappearing for six weeks and returning with a finished strategy, the process moved between internal input, strategic development, workshops, and alignment.

The work followed five steps:

• 01 Questionnaire / Internal Audit Input from stakeholders across the organisation and key markets to understand current strengths, challenges and future needs.

  
  

• 02 Leadership Interviews In-depth conversations with key C-suite stakeholders to clarify priorities, ambitions and the strategic scope of the project.

  
  

• 03 Workshop / Foundation A working session to align around brand DNA, positioning, direction and the guardrails needed to move forward.

  
  

• 04 Six-Week Strategy Sprint Strategy development combined with team workshops, feedback and sign-offs, allowing the work to evolve while creating internal alignment.

  
  

• 05 Final Delivery / Implementation A complete Winning Game Strategy, direction for product integration and an activation playbook for marketing and e-commerce.

The most important part with the process is that the strategy gets built together with the people who will eventually have to implement it, act on it and live with it.

The Foundation: Finding the One Idea Everything Else Could Build On

Before developing a playbook, campaign system, or messaging structure, we needed to clarify the foundation underneath it.

The work started by reshaping MINI A TURE's brand foundation, including its vision, mission, promise, and DNA. But the more interesting strategic question was how those existing strengths could translate into a position capable of taking the brand forward.

One consumer and cultural observation became particularly important.

Modern families don't necessarily want outdoor life as an escape from everyday life. They want it woven into it.

Freedom isn't only found by leaving daily life behind for a weekend adventure. It can exist in the ability to move easily between nature and city, play and function, and spontaneity and routine. That insight became the starting point for the new positioning:

Playful Belonging, Family Freedom, From Nature to City Life.

The idea gives MINI A TURE a different way into the outdoors. Rather than competing around extreme performance or adventure, the brand can make outdoor life feel more welcoming, joyful, and naturally integrated into modern family life.

The Territory: Turning a Position Into Choices

A positioning only becomes useful when it helps a brand make decisions.

The next stage was therefore to translate Family Freedom into a strategic territory MINI A TURE could actually navigate. We mapped four connected outdoor worlds across the dimensions of urban to nature and style to function, creating a framework that could guide how the brand thinks about communication, imagery, products, and future opportunities.

The objective was not to make MINI A TURE choose between city and nature or between design and functionality. It was to establish how those different dimensions could belong to the same brand.

This created a much clearer framework for asking:

• Where can MINI A TURE credibly play?

• Where should the brand push further?

• What should remain recognisably MINI A TURE?

• And which parts of traditional outdoor culture should be left to others?

That last question matters. A strong brand strategy isn't only a definition of what you should do. It should also make it easier to say no.

The Brand Marketing System: Giving Communication Different Jobs

One of the recurring challenges I see in brand marketing is that too many things are expected to do the same job. A seasonal campaign, a product story, an activation, and an Instagram post are all communication, but they shouldn't all have the same objective.

For MINI A TURE, we built the marketing approach around two connected layers: seasonal campaigns and always-on storytelling. Seasonal campaigns create attention, visibility, and commercial momentum, while always-on communication keeps the brand relevant and recognisable in everyday family life.

Within that system, communication was given three different strategic roles:

• Brand-shaping initiatives that expand or change the perception of MINI A TURE.

• Brand-building campaigns that strengthen the positioning and preference.

• Brand-carrying activations to make the brand position authentic and relevant.

This creates a clear relationship between long-term brand building and commercial communication. Instead of asking every initiative to achieve everything, the organisation can decide what role it needs to play and how it contributes to the bigger story.

The Playbook: Turning One Strategic Story Into Many

Strategy becomes valuable when the organisation can use it without having the strategist permanently sitting in the room. The final part of the work was a storytelling and activation playbook designed to translate Family Freedom into a repeatable communication system.

At its centre are five storytelling pillars, balancing the different jobs MINI A TURE's communication needs to perform. The pillars are not five separate campaigns. They are different expressions of one strategic story, giving MINI A TURE enough structure to build recognition while leaving enough freedom for communication to stay creative and relevant. Behind them sits the more detailed part of the playbook: formats, channels, objectives, messaging architecture, campaign building blocks and the connection between brand and commerce.

That is where strategy starts becoming a way of working.

From Campaign Momentum to Everyday Relevance

Another important part of the playbook was creating continuity across the season.

A campaign shouldn't be one isolated push that appears, peaks and disappears.

Instead, the model connects communication through three stages:

CREATE ATTENTION → BUILD DESIRE → SUSTAIN RELEVANCE

Brand-shaping ideas can create attention and open new spaces for MINI A TURE. Seasonal campaigns and hero stories then build recognition and desire, while products, guides, activations, ambassadors and everyday storytelling carry the position forward.

One campaign idea can therefore create multiple touchpoints across the season without every piece of communication needing a completely new concept.

This matters commercially as much as creatively. A clearer system allows the brand to get more from its ideas and production while making the overall story more consistent.

The Result: One Connected Brand System

The final Winning Game Strategy connects the strategic foundation with the everyday work of building the brand.

The delivery included:

• A reshaped brand foundation covering vision, mission, promise and DNA.

• A distinct brand position built around Playful Belonging and Family Freedom

• An outdoor territory model designed to guide brand, product, sales and marketing.

• A five-pillar storytelling playbook connecting the position with communication.

• A campaign building-block model linking seasonal news with always-on content.

• A product model connecting position with product, distribution and sales thinking.

More importantly, the strategy is not sitting in a deck, waiting to be implemented. The direction is already being integrated into brand marketing, product development and seasonal planning. For me, that is the real measure of strategy. Not how many pages it fills, but whether it gives an organisation a clearer way to make decisions.

As a brand grows across products, markets and channels, there will naturally be more voices and more opportunities around the brand. The Winning Game Strategy creates the common direction that connects them.

Because the everyday work of building a great brand has no real start or finish. It happens through the accumulation of decisions made by everyone who represents it.

The strategy sets the direction. The playbook helps people act on it.

The Winning Game Strategy

The Winning Game Strategy is my consumer-led approach to connecting:

insight → brand direction → conceptual planning → brand storytelling/activation.

It is designed for brands that don't necessarily need more marketing but need clarity around what they should build, why it matters to people and how that direction can be activated consistently across the organisation.

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