A strategic thinking talk with the director of Fog Dog Colombia

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Taking advantage of the fact that Fog Dog recently started operations in the Colombian territory, we spoke with Adriana Pineda, its director in Colombia

Why do you think there are managers in soccer, in basketball, even in video games like League of Legends? Why do we need a consultant when we start working on our degree work? Why do celebrities require a communications consultant to express themselves in public? It's simple: because history has proven over and over again that we alone can not handle important things. More than anything in this era, in which information is increasingly fast and ephemeral, we need advisors for extremely important decisions. That is why the Fog Dog group, a specialist in strategic thinking, came to Colombia.

Leer en español: Una charla de pensamiento estratégico con la directora de Fog Dog Colombia

Fog Dog is a strategic thinking space whose objective is to improve the brands, companies and other clients that hire it, and is part of the Untold group, specialized in communications. A short time ago, Fog Dog arrived in Colombia. For this reason, we spoke on the phone with Adriana Pineda, leader of the Colombian headquarters of Fog Dog to tell us a little about the group she belongs to, what services she offers and why they are relevant for any company, brand or group, both local as regional and international.

Adriana is a publicist communicator who began her career in several multinational communication agencies. Her longest experience was in J Walter Thompson, where she achieved the position of brand vice president. In 2012, they proposed her to create and lead the strategic planning department. Due to her great performance and clear leadership, she was a spokesperson for gender issues, which allowed her to have visibility and important recognition in issues of inclusion and equity of women in the industry. For a few years, she has directed the line of strategic thinking at the university Sergio Arboleda in Bogota, where she is also a professor.

This is what she told us.

LatinAmerican Post: What exactly is a strategic thinking space?

Adriana: A strategic thinking agency works to discover or strengthen the relevance of brands in front of their audiences and, therefore, their results in the business. The most important point for a brand to be successful is the relevance within its audience, which depends on many things: how innovative it is, how effective is its communication with its audience and so on. Relevance among your audience is the key to success.

This refers to how important, how different a brand is in the market in people's lives. It seems easy, but it is a complex and deep issue. Developing a strategy to be potentialized in the market is our job. Many times for the eagerness to communicate, for the eagerness of the results, for the eagerness of the tactics, that strategy and that depth is lost. What we do is work through strategic planning methodologies to find and maximize that relevance and be able to respond to speed and depth. Thus we can give tangible results in the market.

LP: How does Fogdog connect with the other Untold groups?

A: We work for clients as a single company composed of different specialties and, therefore, we can create as needed a specialized team that the client needs in any of the countries that we operate.

Fog Dog provides strategy services to all group companies to offer a better result to customers. Today we do not have a geographical limitation, because we can connect with any country at any time and work as if we were a single team working in the same office.

LP: Which cities does Fog Dog plan to reach in the future?

A: At the moment we are in Colombia and Argentina. Soon we hope to reach the other territories where Untold has presence as Mexico, Miami and Brazil.

LP: What is your differential factor?

A: Clients in these markets have strategic needs and, in general, move between gigantic and multinational consultancy firms. I would think that the difference of Fog Dog and Untold is the level of experience that they handle. We are a group that has bet on senior talent, talent that has excelled in different organizations. Our companies are not in charge of people who do not have sufficient experience or sufficient recognition.

In this industry, talent is practically everything. The second differential factor is that we do not consider that a single formula will help everyone to solve their strategies, unlike several agencies that offer a "magic formula" that solves all problems. We create solutions tailored to each of the strategic problems of customers through different methodologies, proposals, research methods. With all this in mind, we manufacture customized solutions because we consider that the problems of each client are specific problems that require specific solutions. There is no such thing as a magic formula.

LP: Was there a specific badly executed case that inspired the creation of Fog Dog?

A: No, simply the group saw the opportunity and it was created. The opportunity I am talking about is to create a space of thought, analysis and deep decision making in a world that is becoming faster, in a world where the amount of messages, segmentation, eagerness, noise and of data generates a lot of confusion. In this world where we need to question the actions that are executed at the rate of that speed, we enter the scene.

There is the difference between contributing to the brand or simply making annoying noise. Well, of course, with the launch of Fog Dog and with all the support of Untold to launch this strategic thinking space, we are not only going to offer these strategic solutions tailored to customers, but a whole package of solutions and specialties in communication that respond to that strategy. The offer is powerful and is strengthened, because with the entire Untold group, clients will have at their disposal a team of experts who will provide satisfactory results.

Read also: What the merger of Renault with Fiat Chrysler would mean?

What is the rarest company that has required your services?

A: I would prefer to talk about category. The most particular category in terms of strategy development is politics. Politics responds to the original and traditional principles of the strategy. In the daily dynamics, it is a category that requires quick and innovative responses that are extremely cautious. That speed and that care is not necessarily seen in the other categories, because they have a slower rhythm and the implications are of another nature.

LP: Recently, you started operations in Colombia. How has it been?

A: Fortunately, the welcome has been phenomenal. We are working with mass market brands, we are working with financial companies, with political advisors and other confidential groups that I can not speak of at this moment, but we are already working 100% in Colombia. We also have two Untold group companies, which are The Juju, our content creation and advertising company that was also created this year, and Ágora, which is a public affairs company.

LP: Tell me about Untold …

A: It is an independent group of companies specialized in communication. I emphasize the independent, because that entails a lot of advantages. This group was born in 2014 in Buenos Aires and is led by an important figure within the Latin American publicity that is Darío Straschnoy. This group has been growing little by little throughout Latin America and we manage more than 50 clients through the daughter companies of Untold.

LatinAmerican Post | Pedro Vergara

Translated from "Una charla de pensamiento estratégico con la directora de Fog Dog Colombia"