Enabling Brands for What's Next
Enabling Brands for What's Next
brand strategy
is stuck, this book
gets it moving
It’s lost connection to business reality. Inhabit Brand shows how to move beyond purpose statements with a systems thinking approach that makes brands valuable again — giving
them the adaptive capacity to navigate complexity and enable possibility for people and business. At its centre is the Brand Operating Idea (BOI), a practical way to connect brand meaning with function.
For strategists, business leaders, and brand builders, it’s a guide to brand strategy that’s made to work with today’s complex environments.
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"I had the good fortune to work with Esmé and experience her brilliance firsthand. In her book, she doesn’t just challenge the conventions of brand strategy—she rewires them. It’s a deeply thoughtful, rigorously constructed manifesto for those who believe brand should be the engine room of the business, not its afterthought."
Tony Chapman, Chatter that Matters, Marketing Hall of Legends
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"Part-manifesto and part-clinical field guide, Esme has pushed out a fresh argument to the world on what brand should mean in 2025 - not vague and symbolic, or brashy and militant, but the espirit du corps for how business actually runs. If you want to be at the vanguard of post-modern brands, follow Esme's hard-won wisdom in Inhabit Brand"
Sean Moffitt, CEO, Cygnus Launchpad Ventures. and author, Wikibrands - Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplaces
esmé
rottschafer
Esmé (Es) Rottschafer is an award-winning strategist, futures thinker, and founder of Inhabit Brand — a systems-thinking approach to brand, innovation, and business design. She has spent 25 years inside agencies, corporations, and consulting, working in the mess of brand and business and helping organizations navigate complexity while connecting meaning with function.
Late-diagnosed and embracing her neurodivergence, she wrote Inhabit Brand: Enabling Brands for What’s Next to offer a meaningful way forward for brand strategy — one that moves beyond purpose statements to something companies and people can truly inhabit.
When she isn’t working, Esmé can be found creatively collaborating with her husband and slow living in Belleville — often in the company of her two cats, Hansel and Gretel.