“Authentic Identity helped us shift our thinking about brand and marketing within our business. Their work helped pave the way for the evolution of the ZS Associates brand strategy by stressing the importance of framing brand less as a foundation for communications and more as strategic roadmap that must be owned and lived by our people. In terms of marketing strategy, they helped draw the connections between brand, issue ownership, thought leadership and marketing. They helped us develop a vision to guide marketing, and they made sure to transfer skills and knowledge to our team”

“Authentic Identity helped us cut through a long-standing internal impasse about how we describe ourselves to our market. They helped us crystallize a powerful idea that makes sense of the range of services we offer and that gives us a compelling story to tell our clients and recruits. In the process, they helped us align our leadership team and key staff around that message. And they stuck with us while we translated that story into compelling marketing messages.”

“Tony was great to work with: he listened well, was not afraid to challenge, and helped develop a pragmatic action plan in line with our needs”

“We’ve worked with many consultants and coaches over the years. But Tony Tiernan of Authentic Identity is in a class by himself. He is one of the most trustworthy, insightful and caring professionals in the business. Authentic Identity has advised our firm on issues ranging from strategic direction to customer satisfaction. In every case, Tony has delivered value far beyond expectations. He’s an exceptional professional with the rare ability to help organizations and leaders stay true to themselves.”

“We engaged Authentic Identity to help us uncover what really sets us apart, and then help us harness our marketing, professional development and service offerings to that core identity. You helped uncover the value and meaning we deliver to clients by helping us step back from focusing on process (features and benefits) and instead understand the impact we were having on people.You got us talking to the market instead of mostly to ourselves. You gave us the encouragement and the courage to name and shape the unique differentiators we offered but had been hiding under a bushel .You effortlessly moved (or it seemed effortless to us!) from understanding to action and crafted communication strategies and tools that we still use today. Lastly, your overall Identity Alignment Plan is still a touchstone for us today when we consider new service offerings or consider new talent joining our organization.”

“Kurt Salmon engaged Authentic Identity to help transform its marketing function. For years our firm had focused its marketing investment on events, podiums, public relations and a myriad of written pieces done individually by our professional staff. While all appropriate marketing vehicles, it was not a coordinated approach across all our investment and the result was that we were losing our voice with our client base. Our brand message was getting lost in the marketplace. Tony and his team came on board and worked with us to truly transform how we go to market. First Authentic Identity helped us to better understand our brand position with our clients and then refine our brand position. Then we went about a full scale review of our Marketing strategy, processes and organization. The result of this work was to completely change our approach to marketing, shifting to one of detailed research in a few areas of thought leadership, followed by a carefully organized approach to communicating the results of that thought leadership development through white papers, articles, podiums, public relations, webinars, email/mail campaigns and finally carefully coordinated client presentations. All of this was developed to increase the impact of our client messaging and to increase our client contacts on issues of importance. We also completely turned over the Marketing organization to develop a new staff with the skills and understanding to bring this new process to life. In my direct work/interactions with Tony, I found him to be completely committed to my firm’s success, a creative thinker as we addressed our business changes and a person of integrity. I value my working partnership with Tony because his direct involvement was a big part of our transformation. His work was game-changing and had a significant impact on our business success.”