If you could sum up Fred Hammerquist’s contributions to the biggest brands in the outdoors over a lifetime of brand positioning work, it would sound a lot like his mantra: “Give creatives the freedom of a tightly defined strategy.”
Sounds like a contradiction in terms. It’s not. Without the guardrails that a well-thought out brand strategy affords, the creatives tasked with executing on voice and vision are left stumbling in darkness. Before a company can deliver a coherent campaign—storytelling based or otherwise—it has to know exactly why it exists, where it resides in the market, who its customers are, and the broad stroke storylines to keep those customers engaged.
Fred is a creative director, a mountain athlete, and an agency lead too, but more than anything, he is a brand strategist capable of identifying the type of positioning and messaging that, at one point in their history, all successful brands have.
That might sound like voodoo knowledge grounded in intuition. But it’s actually a learned skill. Fred’s career is proof. Like most of the creatives featured in Hence Journal, he was pulled into the industry by passion. He loved skiing, so he took a ski shop job. That led to a gig with Hexcel Skis and eventually contract work the repositioning of Olin Skis. Those roles involved graphic design as well as ad campaigns. Design became a passion. Creating advertising followed. Along the way an ad agency hired him as creative director. Each career step he took to progressively bigger agencies with bigger clients brought with it a deepening immersion in brand strategy.
While with the global creative agency DDB, he was invited to international retreats to learn from the best strategists in the business. But he also threw himself into the fire: “At DDB as an Executive Creative Director,” says Fred, “I worked with clients like Holland America, but also issues and advocacy work for generating awareness for gay rights in the workplace and the National Abortion Rights Action League. Those were interesting strategic challenges for our creatives. We were trying to solve complex cultural and business problems. We did that by putting a lot of thought into the positioning and messaging. Good creative comes from good creative strategy.”
Naturally, as soon as Fred’s career allowed him to work for himself in a series of small agencies he started with partners, he brought the brand strategy skills he had honed with big corporations and philanthropic organizations to the outdoors. Over the years, that list of clients included K2, The North Face, Scarpa, Canadian Mountain Holidays, Taos Ski Valley, Ridley Bikes, Specialized, Heavenly Valley, and Sage Fly Fishing, to name just a few.
He credits his success to his ability to articulate strategy before execution. In 2019, Fred and his wife Sydney sold their last agency, Hammerquist Studios.
