Senior Strategist at The Formery

Job description
Profile:

We’re a strategic creative agency – here to form profound bounds between businesses and people that drive transformation.

Working with international clients, we tell inspiring brand stories that build affinity, create culturally relevant marketing that converts affinity into action and design innovative services that reward action with prosperous relationships.

The biggest and most effective ideas come from an intelligent understanding of what makes people tick – and how they behave. Intelligent understanding of behaviour to spark bold imagination. With creative intelligence at the core of our approach, strategy plays a critical role in our agency.

We thrive on strategists who are not only passionate about people but about creating ideas that create commercial value to clients.

We are looking for a Senior Strategist with a track record of developing innovative strategies on multi-national brands to lead our strategic practice from Cape Town – while working in close collaboration with team members and clients based in Europe.

The ideal candidate is self-directed, ready to work across hemispheres and possess the drive and ambition to lead strategy across established international brands as well as category-disrupting start-ups.

Responsibilities:

• Play the lead strategic role with global client teams (based in Europe and North America).
• Distilling clients’ high-level business objectives and business strategy into well-crafted transformation roadmaps, agency briefs and creative/innovation briefs – with measurable objectives.
• Win the confidence and trust of clients through proactive thinking, business acumen and highly effective collaboration (both face-to-face and remote).
• Quickly grasp business category dynamics to strategically advise clients on both long-term brand vision and more tactical opportunities.
• Design and run workshops with clients, consumers and agency teams
• Collaborate with Creative and Technology leads to develop effective ideas and solutions
• Coordinate with Account leads to synchronise team efforts, maintain project momentum and ensure decision making.
• Act as a driving force for new business development, working in close partnership with management team. First line support for category research, competitive landscape audits and opportunity analysis.
• Build upon and maintain our Creative Intelligence methodology - blending (quantitative) data-driven analysis, with (qualitative) human-centred behavioural insights to develop powerfully simple solutions to complex business problems.
• Take ultimate responsibility for quality of our strategic methodology and output.
• Manage the working effectiveness of strategic resource on your accounts/projects
• Work as lead strategist (hands-on) across a broad array of branding, marketing and service innovation projects. Includes designing and authoring:
• Comms plans
• Ecosystem / channel plans
• Social strategy
• Content strategy
• Audience personas and segmentation
• Audience co-creation methodology
• Brand strategy
• Be a proactive and engaging thought leader on behalf of the agency – through client leadership and publication/speaking .
• Work remotely and directly as part of agency teams based across Cape Town, Amsterdam and Edinburgh. Travelling between Cape Town and Europe as needed.
• Build a playfully smart agency culture that inspires our strategic makers and attracts clients.
• Collaborate closely with Digital Marketing Director (Cape Town), Client Service Director (Amsterdam) and Executive Creative Director (Amsterdam) to establish best practices across multi-disciplined, cross-office teams.

Reports to the Senior Management Team.

Requirements:

• 6-10 years experience in creative agencies with a strong, progressive planning ethos
• Strong communication skill and ability to collaborate on equal footing with senior client stakeholders and influence outcomes. Compelling, effective delivery (spoken and written English).
• Rigorous, well structured, and highly organised collaborative approach - managing many inputs and breaking down complexity.
• Ability to manage time and work across accounts/projects running in parallel.
• Strong comms and channel planning experience blending digital, data-driven and traditional qualitative approaches.
• Experience developing social and content strategy, content calendars, etc.
• Experience developing brand targets, personas and segmentation.
• Ability to produce digital strategy and execution – across ecosystems (from web to eCRM to social, etc)
• Ability to develop measurement frameworks and optimisation – working knowledge of analytics combined with brand measurement.
• Case studies demonstrating examples of both creatively and commercially led campaigns – on multi-market brands at a regional or global level.
• Has designed research frameworks and market research (quant and qual).
• Good general knowledge of SEO/AdWords. Additional digital qualifications/certifications in
• Google Analytics, AdWords, or Adobe Digital are considered a plus.
• Experience designing and running client workshops and consumer workshops.
• At least two years mentoring/managing junior or mid-level strategists.
• Previous experience tailoring awards applications.

Relationships:

Collaborate within a multi-disciplinary setting consisting of strategists, analysts, designers, developers, project managers and the management team. Confidently liaise with client marketing teams and inter-dependant departments.