Want to confidently market with cultural intelligence?
Begin at Wānaka Place.
In today’s world, being culturally relevant is not only a social imperative; it’s a powerful business, community, and governmental strategy that drives profit, innovation, and public trust.
Wānaka Place is a Māori and Pasifika-owned consultancy that brings robust marketing discipline and cultural safety to organisations engaging all audiences.
We also offer specialist marketing services for organisations aiming to reach Māori and Pasifika communities.
If you want to be sure your marketing efforts resonate, foster trust, and deliver results, we’re here to help.
Centering your audience at the heart
Branding, campaigns, media, social and digital marketing and more
Wānaka Place works collaboratively, kanohi ki te kanohi, at all levels of your organisation to:
- Understand your audience, and how you hope to engage and influence them.
- Understand and embrace the perspectives of cultural ambassadors and experts within your organisation (for example, staff who are part of the community you serve, or frontline employees who work closely with the target audience).
- Outputs include: marketing or communications strategy and/or plan, proactive media, copywriting, cultural advice and more.
Consultancy - Te Whiriwhiri
Wānaka Place brings together a project team of subject matter, cultural and creative experts, including:
- A network of Māori and/or Pasifika cultural experts and designers to communicate with your audience in an authentic, respectful and effective way.
- Its full-service creative agency partner, Lion’s Share, to plan marketing outputs.
- Outputs include: brand development and messaging, websites, campaigns, promo materials, and email, social and digital marketing.
Planning - Te Whakamahere
Wānaka Place provides marketing rigour, effectiveness and accountability to your project:
- Oversight at critical junctures of the project through to completion, ensuring cultural safety of all outputs.
- A project that is delivered on time and within budget, with measurable results.
Execution - Te Whakatinana
Kia Ora, Talofa Lava
I’m Tuvaelagi (Tuvae).
(Ngāruahine, Ngāpuhi, Sapapali’i, Fugalei, Samatau, Faleasiu, Leone).
There’s nothing more exciting as a marketing professional than bringing to life new initiatives and seeing the positive outcomes it has for clients and the communities they serve.
I’ve been doing this for over 18 years across the health, media, housing, research, and government sectors. I’ve worked in both mainstream and kaupapa Māori organisations.
While working for the U.S. State Department, I developed leadership and cultural programmes across the Pacific region, culminating in sharing my work, and one of the leadership networks, with President Barack Obama.
I’m known for my collaborative style of working and my ability to harness the differing views and strengths of people at all levels of an organisation to achieve powerful results. I’d love to work with your organisation to do the same.
Meet our creative partner, Lion’s Share
Wānaka Place has a close and proven partnership with Lion’s Share, a full service creative agency based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Lion’s Share is a well-resourced, established agency that works as the creative expert on Wānaka Place project teams to deliver a full range of marketing services, including brand architecture and visual identity, media planning/buying, design, copywriting, video, and animation.
See it in action
OWN IT
See how we helped turbo-charge enrolments of Māori and Pasifika whānau into a shared home ownership programme for Tāmaki Regeneration Company.
RAKO SCIENCE
Find out how we helped Rako Science to encourage New Zealanders and visitors planning to take advantage of our recently reopened borders, and get them to ‘Test2Fly’ before leaving the country.
AWANUI LABS
Asia Pacific Healthcare Group, has recently completed a rebrand to bring the parent company and eight of its subsidiary brands under a new name – Awanui. See how we helped get the word out to customers that there’s a new name to look for when they need a blood test.
My story
Ko wai ahau
Ko Wānaka Place tōku tūrangawaewae
Wānaka Place is the foundation for my place in this world