Brand Strategy · Financial Services & Regulated Categories · New York
The real opportunity rarely sits on the surface.
I'm Alicia Wiedemann, co-founder of Summer Friday and head of client strategy. I lead brand strategy for financial services, healthcare, and energy companies, categories where trust is difficult to earn and essential to grow. I help organizations find the human truth inside a business problem, then turn it into work people actually care about.
The problem
Marketing has gotten very good at finding people.
But finding people doesn't mean they care.
Marketing that fills a media space and marketing that delivers something the audience needs, wants and remembers aren't the same job.
Attention isn't the strategy.
It's the outcome.
Look closer
The brief tells you what the business wants.
The audience tells you what matters.
The strongest strategy starts in the gap between the two. Look past the initial ask, understand the behavior underneath it, and the opportunity often changes.
The assignment is rarely the whole story.
02 / Proof
Energy + Utilities · National Grid
More media wasn't the answer.
The usual move would have been simple: buy more impressions.
Instead, we created a grant program that invited local organizations to tell their stories and gave neighborhoods a voice in deciding where the funding went.
Financial Services
The audience needed more.
The assignment focused on adults caught between two generations, supporting their children while increasingly responsible for aging parents.
Research exposed something bigger than a product need: difficult financial conversations people weren't prepared to have.
The platform became a place to start them.
Private Equity + Due Diligence
We showed them what it could become.
As part of due diligence, we evaluated the company from the outside in: category dynamics, competitive position, brand strength, audience opportunity, marketing effectiveness and customer experience.
It was already the leader in a niche real estate finance category, with strong partnerships and efficient acquisition. But it had limited brand equity of its own, and a much broader real estate audience it had never reached. The bigger opportunity wasn't more share of the category. It was relevance beyond it.
Healthcare
The audience wasn't one audience.
Health plans, consultants and employers were all in the specialty conversation, but they weren't starting from the same place. Health plans were tracking the drug pipeline and outside expertise closely. One thought leadership strategy would tell them what they already knew while asking everyone else to move too fast.
So we mapped each group: what they knew, what triggered their search, what stood in the way of a decision and what they needed next. That research became a customer journey and content funnel that moves from education to clinical, strategic and cost conversations, at whatever level a reader enters.
Change the frame.
Change what you see.
Summer Friday Lunch & Learn
↗ ChiefChief
↗ ResearchSummer Friday
↗ CultureGen Z: Redefining the American Dream
↗ AudienceBehind the Curtain: The Sandwich Generation
↗Curiosity doesn't switch off when the workday ends.
There's always another angle. Photography is how I look for it. Art, architecture, travel, people, culture. Different subjects, same curiosity.
Where the thinking gets made
I co-founded Summer Friday in 2020 and lead our strategy practice, partnering with organizations in categories where trust is difficult to earn and essential to grow.
E*TRADE · Cigna · National Grid · J.P. Morgan
The path so far.
Strategy for organizations including E*TRADE, Cigna, National Grid and J.P. Morgan.
Grew a full-service agency from boutique to a 170-person firm, leading client services for BNY Mellon and Bank of America.
Ran day-to-day operations of the boutique content shop through its sale.
Account leadership
Ideas get more useful when you put them into the world.
04 / In public
Founding Member
Writer + Speaker
Immediate Past President + Executive Board
Talks & conversations
A few ideas out in the world.
A little more about the work.
A brand strategist finds the truth about an audience that a business hasn't seen yet, then turns it into a clear direction the whole organization can act on: positioning, messaging, campaign platforms, and the brief that creative teams build from. I lead that work for Summer Friday's clients.
The product is abstract, the audience is skeptical, and every claim passes through compliance. My view is that constraint is not the problem; the problem is work that never looked past the initial ask. The brief tells you what the business wants. The audience tells you what matters. Strategy lives in the gap.
I work with marketing leaders at banks, wealth and asset managers, trading platforms, insurers, and fintechs, along with healthcare and energy companies facing the same trust problem. Clients have included E*TRADE, J.P. Morgan, Cigna and National Grid.
My talks focus on cultural shifts and what they mean for marketing strategy. Recent sessions include Reading the Moment, When Marketing Fights Back, Marketing Under Pressure and Signals That Stick.
Have a problem that needs a different perspective?
Let's talk.
Summer Friday partnerships
Speaking
Advisory
Industry conversations