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Liberty Blume: Transform to outperform
How Liberty Blume used insight-led research to reposition back-office transformation as a driver of growth and business performance
Nobody ever became famous for having an amazing back office. But as economic pressures intensify, operational efficiencies are being put under the microscope.
High-performing back-office functions can result in significant productivity gains, help relieve financial strain by effectively cutting costs, and support businesses stay the course on big strategic initiatives.
The problem? Many back offices are simply not set up for success.
The challenge: Bringing the back office into the spotlight
For Liberty Blume and its Transform to Outperform campaign, the opportunity was clear: leveraging deep expertise to help organisations transform their back office functions.
The challenge was how to position that expertise credibly in a crowded, hype-heavy conversation. To build a reputation with business leaders, Liberty Blume needed more than visibility. It needed to anchor its perspective in evidence, demonstrate authority in a complex debate, and differentiate itself through insight rather than assertion.
Liberty Blume had strong conviction that transformation was a strategic growth issue, but clarity was needed on how to translate internal expertise into a perspective that would resonate credibly in the market.
The question was not whether transformation mattered. Their own experience and the wider market made that clear. The uncertainty lay in what should sit at the centre of the story.
Liberty Blume needed a way to position its expertise as strategic guidance — not just implementation capability — and to define a point of view that felt disciplined, differentiated and defensible in a crowded debate.
We’re way past the ‘transform and done’ mindset, companies have to ensure the systems they put in place allow ease whenever change inevitably occurs. The industry is moving very fast, and that’s not going to stop anytime soon.
Natalie Douglas CFO, Liberty Blume
The solution: Speaking like a partner
Our role was to help Liberty Blume place back-office transformation in its wider economic and competitive context, surface the tensions shaping decision-making, and define where it could speak with genuine authority.
Our analysis of newsflows and competitors revealed that AI dominated media coverage, while themes such as change management and the human side of transformation were comparatively underdeveloped.
While many competitors were taking similar stories to market in a formal, advisory tone, we worked with Liberty Blume to shape a more distinctive and accessible voice. By refining their positioning, we helped them move away from speaking from above and instead show up as a credible partner — combining deep expertise with an empathetic understanding of the real challenges their audience faces.
With this approach, we helped Liberty Blume to move from positioning ambition to a strong voice in the market, backed by clear evidence.
Business leaders surveyed
C-suite respondents
The research surfaced a critical tension in the market. Transformation was widely endorsed in theory, but uneven in execution, leading to many back-office functions struggling to prove their value and facing practical barriers, like siloed teams and lack of expertise.
Influence and impact
This insight gave Liberty Blume something powerful: a defensible point of view rooted in the lived experiences of those it wanted to influence. And the markets response speaks for itself:
increase in website traffic during the campaign period
landing page visits
report downloads
Rather than leading with technology alone, Liberty Blume anchored its narrative in a more disciplined framework — one that made clear that transformation success depends on data, technology, people and change management advancing together. Crucially, it also reframed the back office not as a cost centre to be optimised, but as a growth engine capable of unlocking measurable business performance.
With that foundation, Liberty Blume was able to articulate a clear internal position and develop thought leadership that felt credible rather than promotional. The conversation shifted from “implementing new tools” to enabling financial outperformance, stronger growth and measurable gains across core business metrics.
The insight also enabled Liberty Blume to reach a wider audience through the FT’s The Next Five podcast, allowing the business to dive even deeper into the conversation on how organisations are transforming their business operations to the current and future needs of a tech savvy workforce.
podcast episode listens
social media engagements
As a marketing team, we were able to show the business the benefits of using media partnerships to reach the right audience, whilst using their experience and heritage to build reputation, trust and credibility.
Amy Alfieri Senior Brand Marketing & Communications Manager, Liberty Blume
Conversations about AI and transformation are clearly here to stay, so it’s crucial that brands have a clear, repeatable, and evolving position they can use to help differentiate themselves in the market with confidence.
The clarity produced by the work that went into the Transform to Outperform campaign strengthened Liberty Blume’s internal alignment. Senior leaders were actively involved in shaping and championing the perspective, reinforcing the company’s identity not just as a service provider, but as a strategic partner.
The insights and voice Liberty Blume gained from working with FT Longitude have already been used to support additional activations, including a roundtable where the businesses senior leaders and prospects discussed the report in detail, and will continue to be used for further networking events in 2026 and beyond.
What emerged from the Transform to Outperform work was more than a campaign. It was a defined market stance: expert and evidence-led, growth-focused and differentiated from the AI-led hype cycle dominating the sector.
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