We don’t just ignite brands. We give them momentum.
Incito Mentis pairs brand conviction with commercial firepower. Two senior operators, one job: turn your brand’s potential into growth you can measure.
In a world crowded with brands, messages, and noise, standing out isn’t a luxury, it’s the whole game. Incito Mentis, Latin for “ignite the intellect,” exists to help a brand find its distinct space and then actually take it. Today that means two senior operators working side by side, the strategist who finds the idea, and the marketer who scales it.
Ignition → Momentum
I started Incito Mentis on a simple observation: too many brands carry a powerful story that never gets told. Rooted in the Latin for “ignite the intellect,” the practice exists to unearth those stories and shape them into strategies that move people – and markets.
Over 20+ years across DDB, Omnicom, McCann, FCB, and Freebirds, I’ve built brand, marketing, and creative strategy for companies at every scale – from PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, Nestlé, and Unilever to founders naming their very first product. The influences I keep returning to – Bernbach and Ogilvy on craft, Gladwell and Godin on human truth, Jobs on conviction – all point to the same thing: strategy isn’t noise, it’s connection.
My work is the spark – the diagnosis, the positioning, the single defining idea a brand can be built on. But an idea is only as good as what happens next. Which is why Incito Mentis is no longer just me.
Karim Syed
Chief Ignition OfficerFor 25 years I have turned brands into revenue engines, from Colgate to Energizer, across EMEA, Asia, ANZ, and LATAM, rising to Senior Director of Marketing for the Global Distributor Markets with full P&L expertise and a seat beside senior leadership. My belief is simple: marketing’s job is to make people love a brand enough to buy more, more often, at a higher price, so every investment makes tomorrow’s sale easier.
That conviction earned two Global CEO Awards for share and margin growth, and drove work like the “Eveready for Life” relaunch, which tripled the dollar share of a fading battery brand in Asia in four years, alongside market re-entries built on disciplined go-to-market models. Across 40+ markets I have seen every retail format and worked through launches, post-acquisition integrations, and M&A prep.
As a fractional CMO with deep roots in CPG and FMCG, I bring the commercial engine to Incito Mentis. In practice that’s go-to-market and market re-entry, spend optimization that separates what’s working from what isn’t, and brand architecture for portfolios that have grown cluttered. Where Karim ignites the idea, I build the momentum that carries it to market. If your brand has the spark but not yet the engine, that’s where I come in.
