Stuart Wood, Executive Creative Director in the London Studio discusses the meaning of Bold Thinking and the importance of agency collaboration.
As the new government starts to instigate their new austerity measures it would appear that our clients have different ideas. It’s been a good year so far for FITCH London and in many ways a chance to take a deep breath and look to the future.
With a new creative leadership team in place, it seems as good a time as any to start to take stock and reassert our approach to brand design. We’ve always believed that informed intuition can lead to compelling solutions but now we have developed a strong positioning around the notion of Bold Thinking that is going to be a real FITCH rallying cry over the next few years. Bold doesn’t mean reckless or trite but should be built on a profound understanding of the consumer, the brand and the market place they operate in.
We like to think that with these strong foundations we can take our clients on a journey and help to challenge the way they see themselves, challenge the accepted norm and create distinctive experiences for their consumers. Our breadth of skills at FITCH leaves us in a unique position to capitalize on the ‘experience economy’; where consumers no longer want to passively view brands from a distance, but want to touch, taste and feel them (or as Steve Jobs once said, “Lick them”). We have developed a number of tools over the years to bring brands alive beyond the visual and never before have these human moments of interaction been as important for consumers.
We have found over the last year that increasingly clients are looking for a joined up solution to their problems. As their marketing belts get tightened it makes sense to collaborate with experts in their respective fields. We’ve found that those relationships have seen some of the most interesting and successful solutions. From our work on HSBC with Team HSBC to a total offer for Vodafone as part of WPP’s Team Vodafone, or the successful inter-agency pitch for Bombay Sapphire led by RKY&R – collaboration has never been such a hot topic for clients.
So it would seem that two, three or even four brains are better than one. If you fancy picking our collective FITCH brain sometime, you know where we are.