Communications Strategy

Jif’s creative agency, Publicis’ PSONE, had an idea rooted in a timely, cultural debate between old vs new hip hop fans that would extend Jif’s That Jifin’ Good positioning, and came to us to validate and inform what would become ‘The Lil Jif Project’. 

We went deep with dedicated rap fans to ensure the message was respectful and authentic, while delivering key guidelines and guardrails to steer the creative, ensuring strong appeal, relevance and brand fit for rap & non-rap fans alike, with iterative creative testing huddles along the way. The result: Jif’s highest category share in 10 years, significant lift in social voice share, and attracting a younger audience. We also won the ARF David Ogilvy Awards Gold & Grand Ogilvy for it in 2022.

One of the world’s leading alcohol businesses was looking to raise the bar in inclusive marketing and came to us for help educating and empowering their internal commercial division. For this, we partnered with our All Humans Crew – a collective of creative thinkers from underrepresented communities who shed light on specific challenges and illuminate their personal lived experiences, as well as societal and cultural factors shaping them. 

We delivered a strategic toolkit with empathy at its core, including a brand communications evaluation framework for clarity. A workshop immersed the teams into the key insights and provocations, with exercises used as stimuli throughout to help start building solutions to better serve and represent People with Disabilities.

A leading musical instrument brand came to us to help them define the content opportunity and provide inspiration for their socials. We scanned music industry reports, conducted trend analysis on approximately 200 music and audio-based products, and synthesised content from key competitors to uncover interesting territories with energy in culture, set to permeate the music world in the next few years.  

We explored the most relevant in-depth, bringing them to life visually with brand examples and guidelines on creating inspiring, engaging content for each. We rounded our portion of the research up with a provocation – to reframe what they think of as ‘content’, in turn allowing them to stretch beyond their comfort zone into a whole new world of consumer engagement.

Helping Axe/Lynx re-articulate who they are in the world, we went on an extensive journey with them, using a plethora of innovative approaches to uncover the ‘magic’ that used make the brand great, and apply that to modern culture. 

From early-stage research with ‘old Axe’ men (now in their 40s), through to Gen Z influencers and experts in modern masculinity, we helped uncover what a new vision for the brand might look like. Iterative, agile advertising development finished the process – helping them select an agency in a pitch situation, developing and fine tuning the new campaign idea in partnership with them. 

‘The new Axe effect’ campaign resulted in a lot of positive publicity and exposure for the brand, also winning an Effie in 2021.

Having done strategic work in the UK for sports nutrition brand, Science in Sport, they came back to us for help when developing their US launch strategy. Looking not only at a variety of athletic mindsets, goals, attitudes and beliefs across states, we delivered a broad market & competitor understanding, identifying ownable narrative & positioning opportunities in the gaps that played to the brand’s strengths. 

We also explored drivers and barriers to products, levels of knowledge about them and consumption habits in-the-moment, delivering a rich and colourful digital catalogue of the target and their behaviour as well as a short, engaging film that really brought them to life for all stakeholders.

Our oral care client wanted to identify the most appealing packaging design and language for a new toothpaste brand they were developing.​ Using a monadic test to better reflect the real world, we questioned people using client-specific Action Standards and our proprietary AURA metrics. We also used timed response and a highlighter tool to gather spontaneous and more considered feedback.​

We identified a design that appealed and stood out most alongside as well as valuable insight ifor optimising individual elements to better serve the overall positioning of the brand.  We were also able to provide insight on how well understood the language was across the various designs and which comms should be used as part of the winning design.

A leading, premium fashion brand asked us to assess how their marketing is affecting their brand and how they could improve and optimise it over time. To do this, we put together a tracking programme that ebbed and flowed with the market and marketing communications needs, rooted in our Brand AURA principles. 

Covering 15 global markets, we incorporated a long-term core quantitative tracking hub and in-depth deep dives to ensure their activity was captured for key markets, whilst providing vital performance diagnostics. We delivered & interpreted monthly reporting dashboards which fed into business planning, campaign evaluation, and an annual debrief which helped bring current learnings to life, highlighting strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.​