Our story

A firm built around one uncomfortable observation.

The best people in most rooms are invisible outside them, and they are usually invisible on purpose. Self-promotion feels beneath them, so they do none of it, and the market prices them accordingly.

Six years telling other people's stories, from adobo Magazine to the Wall Street Journal.

Before Studio JNSQ, Jerico Lugo spent six years in media and public relations telling other people's stories: founders, executives and companies across industries, placed everywhere from the Manila Times and the Inquirer to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and TechCrunch, and in the trade press that actually decides a category.

The same pattern kept appearing. The people with the deepest record were the ones nobody outside their building had heard of. Coverage was easy to win for them once someone made the case. The hard part was that nobody had ever made it, because the person who had earned it would not, and the people around them did not know how.

Then he noticed he was one of them. A strong name inside every company he had worked in, and almost nothing outside. Studio JNSQ started as the fix for that, run first on its founder.

What we build.

Your body of work, in front of the right people.

The second half is the load-bearing one. Putting a body of work in front of everybody is broadcast, and broadcast is what a market ignores. Deciding who specifically needs to see what, and in which order, is the actual craft.

Everything on the services page is an instrument for doing that. The diagnostic decides which instruments and in what sequence, which is why we will not offer activation to someone who has not been scored.

How we work

Six rules we have actually turned down money over.

The score comes first.

No activation without a diagnostic. Not as a policy, as a refusal. Work sold before a score is work sold on a guess, and you would be paying for our guess.

We surface, we do not manufacture.

Every claim we make about a client has to be true before we arrive. If the record is not there we say so in the first meeting rather than the sixth month.

Checkable in ten minutes.

Nothing goes into a case study that a sceptical reader cannot verify quickly. That rule costs us the more impressive version of several stories, and it is worth it.

Same instrument at both ends.

We rescore with the same items and the same scorer. The movement is the only claim we make that does not require you to trust us.

We say which facet is fine.

Where the score is already strong we leave it alone and tell you. It is usually the cheapest advice in the engagement and the reason clients believe the rest.

One set of facts, everywhere.

Founding year, service names, prices, framework marks. If a change is not made on every surface it is not finished, and we hold ourselves to the standard we audit clients against.

The founder

Jerico Lugo

Brand Equity Architect and Strategist · MCIPR

Founder of Studio JNSQ and the firm's own test case. The record below is stated as his rather than the firm's on purpose. Studio JNSQ is a Philippine practice with a bench, not a newsroom with bureaus, and confusing the two is exactly the defect the firm is paid to find in other people.

The record, stated so a stranger can check it.

Fifteen industry awards won for clients, in the categories below. Placements in the outlets a category actually reads, and on the podcasts where its decisions get talked through. The names are a sample; the categories are the whole.

15 industry awards won for clientsReal estateLeadershipInnovationESGDEI
Clients placed inBusiness and finance pressTechnology pressFashion and lifestyle titlesReal estate and marketing trade pressPhilippine national dailiesIndustry podcasts
Wall Street JournalBloombergTechCrunchVogueYahoo FinanceManila TimesInquirerPodcasts by CBRE, NAIOP, GlobeSt. and IREI

The founder, continued

The work is the craft. Yours does not get handed off.

Jec anchors every engagement personally. Every strategy and every external read passes through him before it reaches you. Clients say that is the reason they come back.

Jerico Lugo (Jec) spent six years in public relations watching the same thing happen. A company earns coverage, wins awards, builds a name that opens doors, and none of it shows up anywhere the finance team can point to. Marketing had numbers. Advertising had numbers. Public relations had a folder of clippings.

He loved both sides, the storytelling and the balance sheet, and one question would not leave him: why is public relations never counted in a company’s financials the way marketing and advertising are? Brand equity architecture is his answer. It treats a company’s name as what it actually is, an asset that decides what you can charge, who calls you first, and what the business is worth when somebody puts a price on it. He founded Studio JNSQ to build that asset on purpose, and the work the studio leads with takes a company from profitable to valuable.

Six years of it, from adobo Magazine to the Wall Street Journal, and fifteen industry awards won for clients. The finance half is not something to take on faith either: if the work claims to move valuation, the person doing it should be able to build the model, which is why the FMVA sits beside the MCIPR.

“I care about the craft more than the brand. When Studio JNSQ hands back a strategy or an external read, it is because I have read every line twice. That is what clients are paying for.”

Jec, on the practice

Credentials and memberships

  • MCIPRMember, Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR)
  • BMCAP memberBusiness and Management Consultants Association of the Philippines
  • MBA, in progressUniversity of Western Australia · expected 2027
  • FMVA, in progressFinancial Modeling & Valuation Analyst · Corporate Finance Institute
  • Postgraduate CertificateBusiness and Management Consulting · Asian Institute of Management
  • BSBA, Marketing ManagementDe La Salle-College of Saint Benilde · cum laude
  • PANAF, first placeBrand Communications Students Competition, 2020

Strategy advisory, separately.

Alongside the firm, Jec takes a small number of advisory engagements in his own name, working directly with founders and key management personnel.

Part of that work is surfacing what management, legal and finance are each inferring and reconciling the three. The larger part is showing them what the possibilities actually are: how the company, or the group, can genuinely grow from where it stands.

That work is not brand equity architecture, which belongs to Studio JNSQ alone. It is deliberately a separate thing, and the two are not sold as one.

Who we do this for

Who we do this for.

The leader or firm with high credibility and low visibility. Real record, thin public signal, and a market that is pricing the thin half. Philippines first, serving clients in APAC, EMEA and the United States.