About Freemavens
We’re a pioneering insight and strategy consultancy; equipping changemakers by charting new paths to growth in a dynamic and unpredictable world. We scout ahead of the curve by integrating diverse datasets, innovative analytics & data science to reveal insight, empathy and opportunity and set out growth strategies that inspire progress with confidence & agility.
We’re proud to partner with some of the world’s most iconic global brands to drive sustained growth; Unilever, Haleon, Pernod Ricard, LEGO, Coca-Cola, and L’Oréal.
About the role
This brilliant opportunity is made for highly ambitious, pioneering, and forward-thinking individuals who have a knack for building creative, commercial and compelling strategies to support our clients with their most complex challenges and biggest opportunities.
In this role you will work with other Strategy consultants (supported by a mix of Analysts & Data Scientists where needed) to devise pioneering strategies for opportunities covering the full spectrum of Brand, Portfolio/Category, Comms & Experience, Futures and Innovation.
At Freemavens We make decisive strategies for lasting impact. We combine advanced analytics with human intelligence to unlock growth opportunities ahead of the curve. As such, our Strategists must be solution- and channel-agnostic. We treat Brand as an outcome to be influenced by the full mix of possible touchpoints across the consumer journey, and our Strategies need to consider the full stack of contributing factors across language, product, service, function, emotion and technology.
As Associate Director you will take ownership of projects and client relationships, with support from the senior leadership, managing delivery expectations and presenting to business partners & stakeholders.
Requirements
Strategic Skills and Capabilities
- Market Analysis: Conduct comprehensive market analyses to identify trends, competitive landscapes and growth opportunities from a mix of client research/reports, desk research, and Freemavens analysis of unprompted data.
- Strategic Planning: Develop and implement strategic plans aligned with client objectives, ensuring agility in response to market dynamics; bringing in best-practice from past experience and the broader industry.
- Executional fluency: Broad understanding of all marketing levers and how they work together to build brands (across Branding, Experience, Digital, Comms/Creative, Media, Packaging, Product & Service design) with domain expertise and experience of implementation in at least one of these areas.
- Innovative Problem-solving: Apply creative problem-solving techniques to address complex business challenges, fostering a culture of innovation within the consulting team.
- Data-Driven Insight with Empathy & Intuition: Work with Analysts & Data Scientists to derive actionable insights, driving informed decision-making and enhancing strategic and creative recommendations.
- Process optimisation: Ability to contribute high level approach development throughout projects, while looking to innovate and set the standard for new and replicable approaches. Contribution to development of Freemavens’ Strategy proposition through identification of opportunities for service expansion.
Client Relationships & Impact
- Project management: Confident and comfortable leading projects from end to end, including collaborating with and overseeing analysts on projects with both research and strategy components, and ensuring a consistent level of quality in output.
- Narrative building: Distilling simplicity from complexity, using sound logic and data-driven rigour to synthesise human insight into a clear, simple and compelling narrative. Ability to produce outputs using a variety of media, but primarily in slide format.
- Opportunity framing: Solid business and category understanding, through which to identify the most important challenges to solve and align recommendations with key client and business needs.
- Business partnering & Stakeholder management: Ability to build rapport with junior and senior clients, engage in collaborative and constructive dialogue with, as well as present to, business partners and stakeholders.
- Account growth: Ability to form constructive working relationships with clients that identify and convert opportunities for new projects through compelling proposal writing.
- Facilitation & Engagement: Ability to design and deliver compelling workshops across a mix of challenges relating to stakeholder alignment, distilling simplicity from complexity, ideation and prioritisation.
- Communication: Being an excellent communicator and presenter in all forms (in-person, email, over the phone), with a demonstrated ability to translate data into client-friendly terms and tailor communications to individual audiences.
Coaching, Culture & Business Development
- Training: Contribute to advising and training of the Analytics team to help with insight synthesis, storytelling and activational fluency.
- Development: Demonstrate initiative towards growth and self-development, be forthcoming with feedback on projects, and actively seek out areas to improve, while looking to share learnings, best practice and promote cross-fertilisation across teams.
- Commercial awareness: Demonstrate an understanding of the client-agency relationship and best practice, combined with an ability to identify opportunities for Freemavens, keeping the client team up to date on any new developments.
- Industry: Demonstrate an up-to-date interest in market research, insights and marketing, and the potential implications for Freemavens’ ways of working.
- Values: Ability to represent Freemavens and its values, proposing and championing internal initiatives, and actively participating in projects or discussions centred around business growth.
Benefits
Inclusiveness & Wellbeing
- Work with a very diverse team of amazing colleagues from all around the globe.
- 28 days of holidays on top of bank holidays
- Enhanced maternity/paternity/adoption leave after you've been in the company for a year.
- Central London office with a relaxed environment, e.g. comfy break out areas, a fully stocked kitchen with free tea and coffee.
Flexible working
- Hybrid working model with two core anchor days to come together as a whole agency.
- Working from abroad: work from anywhere in the world (outside of UK and Ireland) up to 4 weeks per year.
Training and development
- Plenty of training sessions and resources available to ensure you’re equipped with the knowledge to succeed in your role.
- Weekly “Latte and Learn” sessions where we get to learn from each other.
Social culture
- Every Thursday drinks in the office bar from 5pm (on us!), with a chance to mix with sister agencies (across advertising, PR, media, product design & development, production, brand & packaging design)
- Regular social events as well as Summer and Christmas parties
- Workiversary meal: when you've hit your work anniversary you can take yourself and a colleague out for lunch (on us!)
Diversity
We know that innovation thrives in teams where diverse points of view come together to solve hard problems. As such, we are explicitly seeking an individual who will bring diverse life experience, diverse educational background, diverse culture, and diverse work experience. Please be prepared to share with us how your perspective will bring something unique and valuable to our team.