01
Strategy
Decide where to go.
Understand your audience, sharpen your positioning, and identify where your brand or business has room to grow.
- Brand positioning
- Audience and category insights
- Marketing and communications strategy
- Strategic planning
Independent brand, marketing & growth strategy
It’s about connection.
Dottie connects brand strategy, storytelling, and commercial opportunity to help businesses move forward. Founded by Lauren Shuster, the practice helps brands and teams sharpen their positioning, shape their stories, and plan launches and partnerships.
01What we do
Find the opportunity. Shape what comes next.
02
Story
Make the idea clear and compelling.
Turn strategic thinking into messaging, narratives, and creative direction that give people a reason to pay attention.
- Brand messaging and storytelling
- Content and editorial strategy
- Campaign concepts
- Creative direction
03
Growth
Build the case for the next opportunity.
Explore how a launch, partnership, or new initiative can create value—and develop the strategy to move it forward.
- Partnership strategy
- Go-to-market planning
- Business development strategy
- Commercial narratives and pitches
04
Operations
Make the work move.
Connect strategy to execution by improving the workflows, processes, and ways of working that turn plans into progress.
- Workflow audits and process improvement
- Project management systems and setup
- Content and campaign operations
- Tool evaluation and AI-assisted automation
A project might start with one question and draw on several.
02Ways to work together
The support your challenge calls for.
A focused project
A defined engagement around a positioning question, messaging challenge, campaign, partnership, or launch.
An ongoing strategic partner
Regular strategic input as priorities evolve, decisions arise, and new opportunities take shape.
An extension of your team
Embedded or fractional strategic leadership when you need additional senior expertise and someone to help move the work forward.
Hands-on implementation
Support to put new ways of working into practice—workflows, tools, templates, and documentation set up alongside your team.
Every engagement starts with the challenge, then takes the shape it needs.
03How Dottie thinks
Ask better questions. Make the next move clearer.
Look beyond the brief.
Understand what is driving the challenge before deciding what to solve.
Connect creative and commercial thinking.
Bring audience insight, storytelling, and business opportunity into the same conversation.
Make complexity clear.
Turn competing inputs into a clear direction your team can explain and act on.
04About the founder
A curious mind. A strategic one, too.
Dottie is the independent strategy practice of Lauren Shuster.
Across fifteen years in startups, large media organizations, in-house creative studios, and consulting, Lauren has led multidisciplinary teams and partnered with major enterprise advertisers on work spanning brand strategy, storytelling, creative development, and commercial growth.
That experience shapes how she works: asking questions across disciplines, finding the opportunity within a complex brief, and building a clear plan around it.
05Contact
What are you working through?
A positioning question, a launch, a partnership, a workflow that needs untangling, or an idea that needs a clearer direction? Tell me a little about it, and we can discuss where Dottie could help.