Marlene Franco
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Marlene Franco Studio is a strategy-led branding studio working with visionary, passionate brands that aren’t afraid to stand out boldly. She helps Conscious Entrepreneurs create fully-expressed brands to achieve a greater impact in the world.
Services Provided — Brand Strategy, Communication Framework
Working on her brand strategy gave Marlene a strong foundation to develop ideas for her business and a clear plan for where to focus her energy and resources first. It opened up untapped opportunities for Marlene as we establish her studio as one that serves clients locally and globally. With the right tools and aligned action steps, she now feels empowered to move forward in her brand with confidence. Let’s take a look at our journey together!
Marlene’s Goals
1.
Redefine her positioning to attract more established dream clients
2.
Craft a communication framework to speak about her brand with clarity and confidence
3.
Relaunch the brand and launch a new offer suite
1:1 Zoom call with Yari & Marlene
What’s at stake
The brand relaunch
Marlene was ready to take her studio to the next level by working with larger end-to-end engagements and minimizing retainer work. She was in the middle of a visual rebrand and realized she needed an outside perspective to get clearer on her positioning and refine her messaging.
She wanted to attract bigger, more established clients and have the language to speak to them about what she brings to the table and validate her new price point and offers.
The Strategy
Unraveling the misconceptions of a high-end brand
A big part of our discussion was a pattern of brands in the industry using similar color palettes—beige, black, and gold—to communicate high-end quality.
Marlene believes that you don’t have to do what everyone else is doing, that you can take what is attractive to you and translate that into a beautiful, high-end brand. (We believe that too!)
Colors, passion, emotion, and quality can co-exist within one cohesive brand experience that is rooted in strategy and curiosity. This is the core of Marlene Franco Studio.
Purpose
For passion-driven, Conscious Entrepreneurs who are ready to boldly stand out
The workshops gave us clarity on who Marlene is attracting now, who she wants to attract in the near future, and what her long-term vision is.
We reviewed the shared qualities of her audience to find out where Marlene would make the most impact and crafted her ideal client persona: passionate entrepreneurs who are purposeful, bold, and mostly out-of-the-box.
Position
The bridge between hispanohablantes and the US market
Instead of exclusively working with Latin brands, we’re now opening up to a more global audience. Having lived in both Panamá and the US, Marlene infuses Latin energy into the brands she works with.
With this new focus, we started to bring English language content into her marketing to widen our reach. But we’re not getting rid of Spanish altogether! We’ll still infuse Spanish words/phrases into her messaging for a bilingual vibe and create some content fully in Spanish for her hispanohablante community.
Personality
Conscious branding with un toque tropical
Marlene celebrates color and bold emotion. This isn’t just about creating colorful designs—which she does—it’s also about showing a brand’s personality in a way that shouts passion and confidence. Marlene brings your fully-expressed self to life through story, visuals, and highlighting your diverse perspectives.
Priorities
Mapped out website launch and social media transition
The big challenge for Marlene was narrowing down all the big ideas she was playing with that were pulling her in all sorts of directions.
We used her brand strategy as our North Star, giving her a brand filter question to guide her in staying focused when making decisions moving forward.
We also outlined a 3-month brand plan for her website relaunch and content strategy to bridge the transition from Spanish to English (and Spanglish cuando hace falta).
The impact
Challenging “safe” ideas led to untapped opportunities
Our work together helped Marlene challenge outdated ideas on who she was supposed to serve and how she needed to show up in the market. The strategy showed her that she could bring her unique personality into her brand, attract bigger clients, and grow her business into a global brand.
Seeing her light up and feeling confident after our final call, she brought that transformation of energy—from a place of doubt to a place of clarity and passion once again. With the new tools she has in hand, Marlene can now speak to her dream clients and help them grow their brands with more impact.
📌 UPDATE
Since our work together, Marlene has launched her website—which is a huge win because it had been on her back burner for over 5 years! Our work together was able to help shape the visuals, services & content to create an impactful online casita🏡.
Not only that, Marlene has brought me on to work on brand strategy for some of her own clients. It’s been so enjoyable to collaborate in bringing a full end-to-end experience for her clients that combines my strategy work and her beautifully captivating design 🥰
A few words about Marlene's experience:
“I feel like Yari is the right person that will take you from ‘confusion land’ to ‘clarity land’.
I have all the tools, everything I need, everything I was longing for... that will help me achieve my new goals in a way that I totally resonate with, and that I have complete alignment.”