Based in Melbourne, Australia, brand strategy consultant Eugene Healey founded Studio EH in August 2024 to help businesses find meaning beyond superficial trends as media becomes increasingly fragmented and consumer behavior shifts. 

“Brands are boring, but desire is interesting,” Eugene states. “I find it interesting that when brands find that desire—that’s the moment when I start to find those brands interesting. They found a way to make something that’s temporary feel like it’s going to fill that hole.”

This philosophy guides Eugene’s work as an independent brand strategy consultant, educator, and content creator in Melbourne’s creator economy. He started out at the University of Melbourne, where he worked as a tutor while completing his Master of Commerce. “Brand strategy was the very first job that I had out of university,” he explains. He then assumed positions of increasing responsibility at agencies like PUSH Collective and The Contenders, where he worked with major Australian brands across financial services, energy, healthcare, and higher education.

Throughout his career progression, Eugene maintained his connection to education, eventually becoming a sessional lecturer at the Melbourne Business School. This dual focus shaped his approach to brand strategy, which is fundamentally educational, translating complex concepts into accessible insights.

Introducing Studio EH

Studio EH offers independent brand strategy and cultural insights consulting to global brands, including Google, Spotify, Red Bull, and Chick-fil-A. This consultancy specializes in uncovering the underlying motivations that drive consumer behavior and brand loyalty.

“I work with founders, exec teams, and people in businesses that have the resources and motivation to do something important with their brands. Because a strategy is only ever as good as the capacity to execute on it,” Eugene explains.

When working with founder-led brands, Eugene starts by exploring the founder’s own motivations. “If you’ve founded a company, you have to be a little bit mad to leave the safety of a cushy corporate career,” he observes. “So to be a founder, you have to have some unmet desire within you that you need to pull out.” This desire becomes the foundation for a brand strategy.

For Eugene, effective brand strategy requires executive commitment. “I never accept strategy projects anymore that don’t have an executive-level sponsor. And generally, I prefer to work with the founders themselves,” he says. 

This approach stems from his view that “strategy is a political process” requiring alignment and resource commitment from leadership, not just the marketing department.

Translating Complexity into Accessibility

What makes Eugene unique in the creator economy is how he has leveraged his expertise into content that resonates across multiple platforms. His content creation began as a way to demonstrate his thinking when confidentiality prevented sharing client work. 

“What I wanted to do effectively was build a portfolio of thinking when you’re not allowed to show the work. And that’s how the channel was born,” he explains.

Eugene describes himself as “a contextualizer” rather than an originator of big ideas. “I don’t think I’m the person who comes up with the big idea, but I’m quite good at synthesizing the things that are out there into something that is more accessible,” he says, crediting this talent for translation for his success as both a consultant and creator.

His content spans Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Substack, and occasionally The Guardian, where he contributes articles that expand on ideas introduced in his videos. 

“When you see a brand on multiple touch points, the memory structures are exponentially improved,” Eugene explains, applying marketing principles to his own brand building. This way of operating has directly led to business opportunities: “I’ll see people who will email me and say, ‘I followed you on Instagram. But then I saw your article in The Guardian and I thought, ‘Okay, this is the person that we want to be working with.'”

When Eugene’s videos go viral, he sees it as validation of his mission to democratize complex ideas. “That’s when I know it’s succeeded because I’ve made the concept accessible enough for anyone to engage with it,” he explains.

A Balanced Business Model

Eugene has deliberately structured his business to maintain creative and professional independence. “My focus is on never doing anything that I don’t want to do, which means being consciously diversified,” he explains. 

His revenue comes from three primary sources: brand strategy consulting, keynote speaking, and paid content creation. This allows him to be highly selective about the projects he accepts. 

“I would knock back 70% of paid content opportunities that come to me. I only pick brand strategy projects where there’s an interesting problem and I can see that the client is on board for something good,” he says. For keynotes, he chooses opportunities that allow him to present provocative ideas to receptive audiences.

His content creation principles reflect this selectivity. “With my paid content, the premise is always to provide the audience value, even if they weren’t interested in the product,” Eugene explains. “If I can’t find the piece at the beginning that connects into the piece at the end, then I won’t make a piece of content about that.”

Among his career highlights, Eugene cites delivering the highest-rated keynote at Snapchat’s annual EMEA conference at Soho Farmhouse in the UK. “I was delivering a concept that I was really proud of, but I thought was going to be quite controversial, was going to make people a little bit uncomfortable,” he recalls. The positive reception confirmed he had found his voice.

Cultural Shifts and Media Fragmentation

Eugene’s expertise becomes particularly valuable as brands face heavy shifts in media consumption and cultural polarization. “Media is getting so much more fragmented,” he observes. “More people watch YouTube now than broadcast television.” This fragmentation makes traditional mass-market positioning more difficult.

The brands seeking Eugene’s guidance face common challenges: “The mid-market position is getting harder and harder to occupy as society becomes more stratified,” he notes. Even mainstream brands face new challenges in positioning. “Being seen to be for everyone is now a political statement,” Eugene says, referencing the Bud Light controversy as an example of this shift.

When brands want to participate in cultural trends, Eugene helps them distinguish between fleeting “trend moments” and more important “trend signals” that reflect deeper cultural tensions. He emphasizes that without strategic integration of brand elements, trend participation primarily benefits the platform rather than the brand: “Unless you have some way of reappropriating that attention back for yourself, all of the value of the attention you create is appropriated by the platform.”

Closed Networks and B2B Creator Growth

Analyzing the creator economy, Eugene identifies two critical trends. First is what he calls “the social media recession, the engagement recession,” where users are “engaging less and less in the public Internet and starting to move more into closed networks.” This shift dictates how brands build awareness and engagement.

“The way that we brand build in closed networks is very different from the way that we brand built in open ones,” Eugene explains. “The brand can’t deliver a spectacle on the same level. They can’t make themselves impossible to ignore because the user doesn’t grant brands an implicit right to be there.”

The second trend is the continued growth, particularly in B2B contexts. “I still believe the creator economy has much to grow and, in particular, I believe the B2B creator economy has much to grow,” Eugene says. He sees significant opportunity in this space because “the customer lifetime value if you can secure a single customer with these B2B companies is very much more significant than the B2C space.”

Eugene practices what he preaches, working as a brand ambassador for B2B companies himself. He collaborates with clients to identify “what can I say that you can’t, what can you say with your brand voice but I can deliver through mine that will allow people to see your brand in a different light.”

Reconnecting Marketing With Reality

A recurring theme in Eugene’s work is questioning marketing orthodoxy. “Marketing, it seems, is increasingly detached from reality because it can’t deal with reality, it’s uncomfortable with reality,” he observes. The result is what he calls “marketing fetishes” — concepts like community and generational cohorts that become substitutes for engaging with actual consumer experiences.

His keynote speeches aim to offer insights that reconnect marketing with reality. “What I really like is to go up on stage and deliver a provocation that is, ‘Here’s what’s really happening, here’s what the world really looks like, here’s what marketing needs to do to better connect into the world,’” Eugene explains.

After just one year of content creation, Eugene is preparing to scale his business. “I found success relatively much faster than I thought I would. But now it’s starting to move into the next phase, and that’s going to involve scaling and bringing in other people as well to scale the message,” he says.

His ultimate question for marketers and brands returns to his core philosophy: “Are you dealing with the reality that your consumers are experiencing, or are you dealing with the reality that you’re comfortable talking about?”