There is a recognizable moment in every brand workshop when the optimism goes out of the room. The executives have covered the wall with virtues: experienced, innovative, trusted, responsive. Then someone asks the rude question. Which of these could a competitor also claim? One by one, the pleasant words receive a red line. This was the Thoma Thoma method in miniature - generosity first, subtraction second.
Martin and Melissa Thoma founded their Little Rock firm in 1988. Martin came from journalism and writing; Melissa brought strategy and market research. The agency grew into a compact, full-service operation serving banks, hospitals, nonprofits, colleges, public agencies and technology companies. It could name a company, build a website, plan media, make an ad, run public relations and measure a digital campaign. Yet its most distinctive work happened before any of those deliverables existed.
The agency called its field “brand leadership.” The phrase sounds grand until you see what it meant in practice: interview customers, compare the company with its rivals, isolate a defensible advantage, put that idea into language, then make the organization behave as if the language were true. The first audience was often the payroll.
The first thing to fail was consensus
Consider Southern Bancorp. The development bank had grown from a $10 million investment into a $1 billion institution, with more than 360 employees and over 40 branches. Its mission was serious, but its identity had fragmented across three business entities. The trouble was not a lack of good intentions. It was that good intentions had multiplied faster than a common language.
Thoma Thoma researched employees, customers and communities, then created what it called Brand Leadership Frames. Management took those ideas on a road show. The three entities received one rallying cry: “One Southern. One Mission.” An employee brand council kept refining the culture; a recognition program turned five values into named, observable behavior. In the first year, employees made more than 1,000 nominations for core-values recognition. Engagement and alignment rose by 25 percentage points.
That sequence explains the difference between Thoma Thoma and a conventional production shop. A production shop is useful when the brief is already right. Thoma Thoma was hired when the brief itself was the problem. Its competition included Little Rock agencies such as CJRW, Stone Ward and Sells Agency, national brand consultancies, specialist digital firms and the client’s own marketing department. The Thoma wedge was to connect research and culture to the eventual campaign, all under one roof.
The first audience was often the payroll.Thoma Thoma’s inside-out premise
Useful beats visible
In 2023, Together Arkansas needed employers to respond more intelligently to opioid addiction in the workforce. Thoma Thoma ran a six-month paid social campaign aimed at business owners and executives. But the campaign did not terminate at awareness. It led to a toolkit: fact sheets, posters, rack cards and a slide deck that could appear in an orientation or an actual break room.
The numbers were respectable: 996,234 impressions across Facebook and LinkedIn, 9,093 clicks, 4,200 toolkit page views and 711 downloads. The more transferable idea is the last one. A public-awareness campaign becomes more valuable when the audience can carry away an object that changes the next conversation.
ARORA, Arkansas’s organ procurement organization, presented a harder behavioral problem. Hospital partners supported donation in principle but did not always make timely referrals. Research showed that the gap was operational as much as promotional. Thoma Thoma helped design staff training, scripts, behavioral principles and a customer experience, then backed the work with “Save 8. Donate.” advertising and earned media. Paired with process changes inside ARORA, donation totals reached a record in 2021 and surpassed it in 2022. The ad mattered because the system behind it had changed.
A four-move recipe worth stealing
The Thoma process can be compressed without turning it into a slogan. It is particularly useful to a mid-sized organization with history, several stakeholder groups and enough complexity to have accumulated contradictory descriptions of itself.
- List the claimsWrite every supposed strength without editing for taste.
- Apply the red penRemove anything a credible competitor can also claim.
- Ask the marketTest the survivors with customers, employees and evidence.
- Build behaviorTurn the winning idea into decisions, training and measures before promotion.
What did it cost? Thoma Thoma sold bespoke professional services, not a public menu. The economic ingredients were consultancy time, research, creative production, media and implementation. That matters because the method asks more from a client than approval of a logo. Leaders must surrender favorite but generic claims. Managers must keep reinforcing the idea after the launch. Without access to customers, honest executive debate or internal follow-through, the workshop produces attractive language and little else.
There is also a limit to inside-out branding. A startup still searching for product-market fit may not possess a stable advantage to codify. A commodity seller unable to change its service may discover that research is diagnosis, not medicine. And an organization in immediate crisis may need to repair the product before it narrates the culture. Thoma Thoma’s method works best when something true already exists but has not yet been agreed upon, expressed or repeated.
The agency finally revises itself
In January 2019, Thoma Thoma merged with EXIT Marketing, a Little Rock creative and digital firm founded by Shawn Solloway. The logic was explicit. Thoma added creative and digital depth; EXIT gained strategy, planning, media and administrative capacity. Solloway joined Martin and Melissa as a principal. It was not a dramatic repudiation of the old model. It was the old model admitting which muscles it needed.
Thoma Thoma became Day 2 Marketing. The successor agency, led by CEO Kari Amore, lists offices in Little Rock and Fort Mill and emphasizes data, measurable performance and transparent client relationships.
Then the firm put its own name through the filter. The Thoma Thoma website announced a January 2025 launch for Day 2 Marketing. The successor company, led by Kari Amore, talks less about “brand leadership” and more about data, measurement, transparency and business solutions. Its name points past the excitement of a launch to the morning after, when the work has to perform.
The change is more evolution than erasure. Day 2 still says strategy should begin with evidence and business goals rather than a bundle of preselected tactics. It still joins creative, digital, web and communications work. What changed was the center of gravity: from a founder-named consultancy in Little Rock to a performance-minded agency with offices in Little Rock and Fort Mill.
For 37 years, Thoma Thoma kept returning to an unfashionable observation. A company cannot advertise its way out of internal disagreement forever. Eventually the customer meets the branch manager, the hospital referral desk, the website form or the sales representative. The brand meeting comes first because the market always attends the second one.