We are Driver8. And we’re here to help launch and build mission-driven and disruptive businesses with brand strategy, customer intelligence and creativity that engages and inspires.
Founded by Chris Klaehn, a former grassroots organizer and lobbyist with over 20 years of brand strategy experience, she has a deep understanding of people’s beliefs and values and how to motivate them to act. At Driver8, we put people front and center of all we do. We treat them like fellow humans, not data. We deliver strategically sound, creatively compelling work that moves hearts and minds. Without compromise.
What you do is important. Why you do it matters even more. It defines who you are and how you behave. Driver8 is at its best when working with organizations driven by a mission to do well by doing good and those that disrupt the status quo and break the mold. While our clients reimagine a better world and create new rules of engagement, we help bring clarity to their purpose. And find ways in which their audiences can connect with them on real, human terms.
Here are a few of the mission-driven and disruptive clients we’ve worked with.
Expression without thought is like nutrition without taste. It doesn’t make anybody come back for more. At Driver8, we treat strategy and creative as separate, but equally critical, parts of the process. When they’re in synch, the whole becomes bigger than the sum of its parts. Creativity fuels both, while critical thinking keeps them on track and on target.
Here’s how we do it: first we go deep, getting at what’s really important, externally and internally. Then we go wide. We think of your brand as an elastic, evolving, living being that need focus and clarity as well as the flexibility to evolve naturally. We understand your brand is a set of experiences both big and small, and we think of these experiences as ways to touch the senses. Your brand, like the people it seeks to attract, is fully dimensional and we approach it with that in mind.
Brand Identity & Human and Digital Systems Design
Digital Experiences: Website, Social Media, Apps
Videos
Advertising Campaigns
Research: Primary and Secondary
Brand Strategy
Brand Architecture and Messaging
Social Strategy
Soul. Aretha’s got it in spades. Companies and organizations, on the other hand, have to nurture it. Together, the head and the heart of your brand expresses the soul of your organization. We help answer the essential questions, “why us?”, “why now?” for clients that are as business savvy as they are purpose-driven. And as with our clients, we are likewise driven—to do great work and be great to work with. We value practical know-how as much as invention; agility as much as tenacity; and a collaborative, human sense of being—creating authentic experiences for, and around your most valuable asset—your audience.
Our experience has helped us figure out a few things along the way:
We always have one. We’ve got big ears and do a lot of listening upfront. What we deliver is thoughtful and honest without arrogance.
Trends, industries and, most importantly, customers are ever changing. We believe great brands need to proactively and reactively respond to insights from their audience and evolve with them.
We work closely with our clients to uncover their brand’s distinctive DNA. We investigate what’s unique and ownable for each brand and harness it into a brand movement.
We focus on how customers engage with brands. We identify the journey, then the channel. Not the other way around.
We’re in it with our clients. We’re the part of their team that pushes to get to the right place.
Driver8 employs only the best of the best. Only the smart, open and curious. The ones who know, understand and care for their craft. The ones who know how to laugh. Nothing less.
We make sure our work works. How? We measure it. We build rigor into how and why the work succeeds. And if it doesn’t, we change it, and optimize it, so it’s at the level our clients need and want it to be.
We’re incredibly proud to work with great clients who do a whole lot of good. Here are a just few of them: