Solving brands business problems
with insightful storytelling
I believe in introducing a visionary mindset combined with an insight-led-data-approach to help brands thrive by guiding and building their brand stories. With 20 years industry experience I can separate the future trends and opportunities from the creative blah-blah to help guide brands towards financial success and cultural resonance. My background as global creative director helps me to write creative briefs that deliver impact, inspire creatives, nurture breakthrough ideas and remain 100% waffle free.
My career has covered nearly every sector in every continent from automotive to alcohol brands and FMCGs to charities with expertise in restrictive sector solutions.
2023/24 pitch win rate of 74%
Pitch strategy + AI Research + Brand building frameworks + Workshops + Cultural insight research + Global audience research + Product development + Product architecture
+ Brand models + Product models + Messaging frameworks + Creative briefing + Script writing
Brand storytelling highlights 2022-25
Davidoff: Brand & consumer strategy
Role: Senior global strategy lead + Research lead + Innovation lead
Brief: Increase brand share and profitability by repositioning the Davidoff brand and its product portfolio
Insight: Legacy brands need to evolve their origin and product stories to remain culturally relevant + The understanding of modern-premiumness is highly nuanced especially amongst young adults in Eastern Europe, KSA & Taiwan
Strategy: Use cultural & consumer insights to evolve the brand origin story and product architecture RTBs to connect with a new modern-premium focused young-adult global audience
Fitbit: Brand archetype + brand & product comms
Role: Strategic + Insights lead
Brief: Create a new brand purpose to reflect and connect with a post-covid society
Insights: When it comes to health & wellbeing everything influences everything else - sleep affects stress, stress affects activity, nutrition affects sleep
Strategy: Fitbit needed a strategy partner who could help them define their new brand archetype, brand purpose and internal brand comms framework
Unilever Lynx: Experiential sampling strategy
Role: Creative strategy + Experiential & Sampling strategy
Brief: Change perception of the Lynx brand & convince 1.3M GenZ males to sample the new Lynx ‘as fine as the finest fragrance’ - showing measurable engagement and conversion
Insight: Research revealed that 70% of GenZ say that they have social anxiety post covid (impacting on the traditional brand ambassador sampling approach) – Yet they crave social-friendly experiences that resonates with their culture & values
Strategy: To overcome preconceived perceptions of the brand (and maximise sampling opportunities) we created unbranded entertainment-portals to entice GenZ into unexpectedly sample the new Lynx Fragrance
Davidoff: Product strategy
Role: Strategic lead + Research lead + Innovation lead
Brief: Davidoff is not connecting to Taiwanese YAS - lacking brand-empathy, cues of modernity & product features that connect with their audiences values and lifestyles
Insight: Taiwanese YAS are looking for a product that delivers less negative-effects for self and others + YAS feel ‘old fashioned’ when compared to their vaping peers
Strategy: Change existing perceptions of Davidoff from old-fashioned to modern-premium - by positioning it as: New, Fresh & Progressive
Twitch: Marketing & sales strategy
Role: Brand strategy & Sector research
Brief: Create a marketing & sales strategy that convinced global brands that Twitch is more than a ‘gaming platform’ - activating new advertising, partnership & sponsorship opportunities
Insight: Language, especially platform-slang, can become an intergenerational barrier without context and explanation - resulting in a misunderstanding of the depth and breadth of the Twitch content being created
Strategy: We turned the top 10 googled twitch language-queries (that we knew brand managers were googling) into s series of ‘Understanding the Twitch community’ short educational films that decoded the platform-slang and revealed mass-marketing brand opportunities
Pokemon: Immersive experience game launch
Role: Strategic lead + Research lead
Brief: Create a successful immersive-experience product launch for the new ‘Pokemon The Hidden treasure of Area Zero: The Teal Mask’ - That drives excitement, positive reviews & early downloads
Insight: With the first 48hrs of any new game launch being critical we needed to speed-up the creation of influencer content - Activating and maximising platform algorithms to create media-momentum
Strategy: A ready-to-go 101 influencer content creation moments - with real-life in-game Matsuri village recreations
Strategy should solve a clearly defined problem, be built from an insight, be culturally aware and make the complicated simple
An insightful strategy turns creative blah-blah into creative wow
My Process
Research >
Depending on the projects time and budget projects begin with either quantitative desk research or workshop qualitative research - To create a series of impactful hypothesis
Strategy & Concept
development >
Guiding, supporting & collaborating with the creative teams to ensure the creative builds upon the research and creative strategy with creative briefing that helps instigate creative wow
Narrative
storytelling >
The best creative still needs to be supported by a persuasive deck - I use my author & journalism side hustle experience to help create decks that win pitches and wow clients
Evaluation
& learnings
Test & Learn! - Strategy shouldn’t be seen as the beginning & end of a project, - instead it should be seen as an evolving & growing of a brands DNA - Writing case studies that help attract new clients & grow existing accounts