Curiously strategic
What’s the key to strategic thinking and how do you generate those stand-out creative ideas?
Phil Stott, our new Head of Campaign Strategy & Planning, has a wealth of experience creating opportunity for B2B brands, but how do you find that point of connection between the brand and the strong creative idea that’s going to resonate with its audience? For him, it all starts with curiosity.
“I’m a curious person by nature, always asking why. I love trying to figure out what makes people tick and what’s driving their perceptions, behaviours and needs. Why is it that they want what they want? I think if you can understand what’s going to motivate them on a psychological as well as a functional level, you get to some really interesting creative territory.”
There’s more to it though. “We want to create memorable, effective experiences finding that point of connection between a brand and what’s going to resonate with the audience with a strong creative idea, defined roles for content and channels, and how these integrate together to achieve the client’s goals.” says Phil. “All these things should work together and feed each other.”
Learning from diversity
Phil began his marketing career almost 30 years ago. For the first 10 years he was part of the team behind First Direct’s meteoric rise as a challenger brand in UK banking. Since then, he’s worked with over 60 brands, and brings all of that experience to his newest assignment: leading campaign strategy for our B2B tech clients.
As part of Fox Agency’s dedicated strategy team, Phil focuses on delivering on our clients’ long-term ambitions, centring on two of our key mottos: creating opportunity, and bringing the excitement.
He also draws a lot of inspiration from playing sports pretty much his whole life, and sees clear parallels. “It’s helped shape the way I work a great deal – the value of teamwork and harnessing the different skills in a team, developing a winning mentality, and the importance of resilience.”
Strategy loves intelligence
Every client brief is unique and we always start with insight, but for Phil it’s always with the end goal in mind.
“It’s essential we understand the purpose behind the campaign and the problems we’re trying to solve for our clients, getting to the heart of why we’re doing it and the outcomes we want to achieve.”
“Our insight comes from data, global trends, research and working collaboratively with our clients to unpack their knowledge through discovery workshops. This helps us understand business objectives, audiences, what’s authentic about the brand and what it does well, what makes it distinctive from its competitors, and so on. It’s about making sense of all this and finding the nuggets of powerful insight to ignite and inspire creative thinking, storytelling, content planning, the right channel mix and journey mapping, making sure we measure effectiveness that’s aligned to the business impact, and is all extremely well thought through.”
Connecting what we do with what our clients need
Thinking big and collaboration are further recurring themes in Phil’s (and Fox Agency’s) strategic outlook.
Says Phil: “In the role I get to work with lots of different clients, all facing unique challenges and work with all the teams at Fox Agency – creative, paid media, organic search, social media, PR, website experience and client services to maximise the opportunities and value for our clients.”
“We have a culture of inclusivity and collaboration. Part of my job is getting everybody involved at the earliest opportunity and ensuring we’re focusing on the right things at the right time. We draw on all our expertise from start to finish, collaborating and taking meaningful actions to ensure we’re always progressing towards helping our clients achieve their ambitions.”
Curiously cyclical
And speaking of start to finish, Phil is a big believer that great strategy doesn’t stop when the campaign’s been rolled out.
“The way we’re approaching things for our clients is cyclical. That way you can learn from what’s happened. It makes a strategy agile and dynamic – analysing its performance to constantly maximise results.”
