A Rochester Agency Took Its Founder’s Name and Made It a Mindset

Most agencies that rename themselves run away from the founder. Napier ran toward her. The Rochester shop known for 22 years as Partners + Napier dropped the first half in October and kept the half that was always doing the work.

Courtney Cotrupe, CEO, has been at the agency since 2003 and in the top job since 2019. Rob Kottkamp, chief creative officer, arrived the same year from MullenLowe in Boston with a Truth campaign and two pieces in MoMA’s permanent collection on his CV. Between them they explain the new name without once calling it a rebrand exercise. “Napier is really a mindset,” Cotrupe says. “It’s a spirit. It’s a word.” The Scottish root means no peer. The working definition is “grit, wit, never back down attitude.”

That attitude has a client list to back it: Royal Caribbean, Constellation Brands, Checkers & Rally’s, MDLIVE, Delta Vacations. It has offices in New York and Boston and a mothership on South Clinton Avenue. And it has a founding sentence Cotrupe said to Kottkamp in his first interview that neither of them has stopped repeating: “We’re from Rochester, we have to work a little harder.”

How the name got shorter and meant more

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Sharon Napier founded the agency in 2004 and ran it for 15 years before handing Cotrupe the CEO title and moving to chair. The Partners + Napier look had been on the walls for a decade: the giant P and N, as Kottkamp describes it. Dropping “Partners” while most of the industry is scrubbing founders off the door was a deliberate swim against the current. “A lot of agencies are moving away from founder in their names,” Cotrupe says. Napier went the other way on purpose.

Kottkamp’s read on the internal reaction: positive, and a little surprised. Adding “some humanity” to a name people had stopped seeing changed the mood in the building. “Everyone really appreciated what that spirit meant and saw themselves in it.”

Part of the spirit is geography. “It’s owning where you’re from,” Kottkamp says. “Everyone’s from somewhere, so embrace it.” Not starting in a coastal city, in his telling, stopped mattering a while ago.

What Napier is known for: waking sleeping giants

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Ask Cotrupe what the agency is best known for and the first answer is the sentence that drove the rebrand. “We wake sleeping giants to unleash brand growth.” It’s strategic positioning, but the useful part is the diagnosis underneath it. Brands get comfortable. They fall into routines. They look outward at the category instead of inward at what made them different in the first place.

Kottkamp has a story for how that lands in a room. Two years into his tenure, a CMO sat through a Napier pitch and said something he’s kept: “I’m used to agencies 10 times your size with 10 times the budgets delivering work like this.”

Independence: freedom, with the bill attached

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Cotrupe has watched independence from the account-director seat up, and she refuses the easy half of the answer. “The easy answer is it’s about freedom,” she says. “But it’s also just about accountability.” Nobody above you sets the next phase of growth, which is liberating right up until you realize that means you have to.

“There’s no one there telling you how to grow. There’s no one there telling you what the next thing is. So you have to push yourself, but then you have to be accountable to that on the other side.”Courtney Cotrupe

For clients, Kottkamp translates independence as accessibility. His title got amended to “working CCO” shortly after he arrived, a Cotrupe coinage he has come to accept. It means being in the work rather than above it, and it extends to the whole senior team, Cotrupe and Sharon Napier included. “They can just text us and we’re there.” Not when something is on fire. On a Tuesday.

Why brands should work with Napier

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Cotrupe’s first answer is “we’re the best,” offered with the grin of someone who knows it doesn’t count. The real one is a word. Brands are drowning in data and intelligence and inputs, she says, “and so what happens is we find that what brands are really missing is conviction.” Napier’s job is to help them find it, which is what the sleeping-giants line means in practice.

The Rochester question comes up, as it always does. Kottkamp’s view is that the city is interesting for about one conversation. Everyone knows someone from there; everyone asks if you grew up there; then the work takes over. “The work is the great equalizer.” What stays is the sentence Cotrupe handed him on day one about working a little harder. “It’s not a chip,” he says. “It’s just an acknowledgement.”

Why talent chooses Napier: polymorphs welcome

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Cotrupe borrows the agency’s own brand rule for its people. A brand, she says, should be “always consistent and endlessly surprising,” and so should the staff: high standards on one side, “ideas can come from anywhere, stretch beyond your role, take some risks” on the other. The pitch to a candidate is plain. “If you want to build something and be part of that, then Napier is your place.”

Kottkamp’s word for what happens next is polymorph, “which is fancy for wearing many hats.” People who did one thing at a bigger shop find out they’re more strategic than anyone let them be, or better with clients, or useful in production. He calls it the fastest way to grow, and the part that takes new hires a second to believe is the permission structure. “You don’t really necessarily always have to ask for permission.”

Cotrupe’s leadership formula for the next chapter is two words she says she will keep working on: empathy and conviction. The first for the people, the second so everyone knows where the agency is going. The new name, she argues, gives them a story to stand behind.

A glorious band of misfits

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Weirdos, misfits or underdogs? Kottkamp picks misfits without much deliberation. Misfits come out of nowhere, he says. They’re underrated and unexpected, “and I think that every great agency started with a band of misfits.” The industry, by his account, makes less sense the longer he does it. “Advertising is not rational,” and that is what makes it fun, frustrating and glorious at once.

Cotrupe’s response, in full: “Yeah, I’ll go with that.”

Kottkamp went to Virginia Tech, not a creative school. Every stage since, he says, was a chance to prove himself. Lose that and you lose the extra mile.