Project
Sage: Boss It
Client
Sage
Service
Brand Campaign / Creative Direction
The situation
Sage needed to become the brand of choice for UK small businesses — in a market dominated by Xero and QuickBooks and complicated by a post-pandemic surge in new business registrations. Boss It was the campaign built to cut through: an integrated push across TV, OOH, DOOH, print, radio, and TikTok, rolled out across eight global regions. The Q1 launch delivered 193% YOY growth. By H2, QuickBooks had launched a campaign taking direct aim at ours.
The situation
Sage is one of the UK’s largest technology companies, supporting more than a million small businesses with accounting, payroll, and compliance software. The market it operates in is fiercely contested — Xero and QuickBooks were both investing heavily in brand awareness, and a post-pandemic surge in new business registrations had opened up a significant new audience of first-time entrepreneurs who hadn’t yet committed to a platform. The brief was to own that moment. To make Sage the first name a small business owner thinks of when they decide they need help running their business.
The Friction
The category had a perception problem that no amount of media spend alone could fix. Small business owners didn’t think of accounting software as something for them — they associated it with complexity, compliance, and things they’d need eventually but not yet. Sage had the broadest product offering in the category, but that breadth wasn’t visible in the market. The brand needed to feel human, ambitious, and on the side of people building something — not a tool for managing admin. The creative idea had to do two things at once: make Sage emotionally resonant to people who hadn’t considered it, and credible enough to convert those already in market.
The Approach
Working with my Sage brand team counterparts and Wunderman Thompson, we developed Boss It — a campaign built around a single, energising idea: that running your own business is something to be proud of, and that Sage gives you the confidence to do it well. The campaign ran across TV, OOH, DOOH, print, radio, and social including TikTok — one of the first major B2B-adjacent campaigns to use TikTok as a serious channel. It launched in the UK as the master market and rolled out across seven additional regions: Canada, South Africa, France, Germany, Spain, the US, and Australia. The creative featured real small business archetypes — a fishmonger, a plumber, a florist — shot with warmth and confidence, showing people who were unambiguously in charge of their own story.
The Outcome
The Q1 launch delivered 193% year-over-year growth. By H2, the campaign had generated enough cultural traction that QuickBooks launched a direct-response campaign taking aim at it — with copy riffing explicitly on the “boss” idea. A competitor spending money to undercut your campaign is an uncomfortable kind of validation, but it’s validation nonetheless. The H2 brief was built to respond: sharpen the messaging, increase media investment, and extend the campaign’s momentum before the competition could establish an alternative. Boss It had done what a brand campaign rarely does — it had moved fast enough to threaten someone else’s market position.
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