Our secret is simple. It's truth.
That's our gold standard. We don't concoct narratives to be on-trend. Instead, we ask the right questions to find your truth, conducting deep strategic interrogation into organisational and consumer realities to get to nuanced, uncontestable insights. Sometimes they feel raw and even a little uncomfortable - but that grit is where the magic lies. We take those insights and craft a positioning that feels uniquely compelling - something only you can stand for. Something so real that everyone inside and outside rallies around it instinctively. Creatively expressed with an elegance that belies the rigour and the sophistication of the data underpinning it. We're often told it feels like it was hidden in plain sight all along. Because the best answers, in hindsight, always feel a little bit inevitable.
We sieve the grains to get to your singular, ownable, exciting truth.
Our Team
Ricebowl is a collective team of expert senior strategists with a combined 60+ years of client and agency side leadership experience. Based across New York, London, Mumbai and Singapore, we bring a uniquely global perspective to your business with a deeply inclusive mindset.
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Started by Nazia Du Bois, founder and CEO, who honed her skills as Planning Partner at Ogilvy & Mather, where she co-developed the agency’s global proprietary brand positioning methodology The Big IdeaL™, training it worldwide. She co-founded WPP’s award-winning creative agency DAVID in 2011 as its first Global Chief Strategy Officer, working with Coca-Cola, Unilever, Burger King and CHANEL. In 2015, she founded Ricebowl with Spotify and Coca-Cola as founding clients. The Ricebowl team have since gone on to develop award-winning global brand positioning platforms for Netflix, Spotify, Harry’s, Smashburger, Stella & Chewys, Flamingo, Function of Beauty, Heyday, Seaworld and dozens more, while Nazia has also worked client-side as a marketing leader at eBay, and at Google Brand Studio.
We believe that good brand positioning
... is less what you say,
more who you are.
Sure, it’s part creative exercise, but in large part it’s really organisational therapy. It can get uncomfortable, looking in the mirror so hard and for so long. But it’s only when you get to deeply know the truth of who you are, that you can confidently articulate that to the world, in a way that makes people want to take part in your story.
... is about taking a position.
When you have no stake in the ground on anything at all you become easily replaceable. We seek out what you would fight for - whether it’s a problem you won’t rest until you solve, a unique process you follow, or a commitment to a benefit you know is improving peoples’ lives. Whatever your truth is, you can be assured we’ll find it.
... isn’t a deck.
Or a slide, or a line (though we will write you some great lines). It’s a belief system affecting every single aspect of the organisation. Embodied by every employee, lived through every action, word, goal and incentive. It might be the Marketing team who help to define it, but ultimately, it’s everyone in the company who makes it real.
"May your ricebowl always be full"
Inspired by traditional Chinese ceramics and the collectivist nature of rice-based societies, Ricebowl was named in the spirit of the shared knowledge and craft - honouring that in brands as in life, we reap what we sow and ultimately, get the most from things that we carefully nurture.
Chinese proverb
