How It Works The Streams
Brand Management
Alastair Morgan
ACCOUNT MANAGER, Targetbase Claydon Heeley
What attracted you to Accelerate?
There is nothing else out there that offers so much experience, so quickly, with such support and training along the way. And you get this within the most exciting, dynamic and creative industry in the world.
What stream were you on and what companies did you work with?
Brand Stream. I worked at Interbrand, Flamingo, Siegel+Gale, Targetbase Claydon Heeley and Agency Republic.
What’s the most important thing you’ve learnt through being on the programme?
Listen and learn from everyone around you, but always have the confidence to have your own point of view.
What is the hardest thing about being on the programme?
Moving agency every three or four months is a real challenge, and should not be underestimated. It’s hard to shake the ‘back to square one again’ mentality, particularly in the final few placements.
What is the best bit about being on the programme?
With Accelerate you get the kind of breadth of experience and exposure to numerous accounts, marketing disciplines and agency talent in 16 months that can take many years to develop.
Where are you now and how did you get there?
I’m at Targetbase Claydon Heeley. This morning, I got here by tube and bus.
What piece of advice would you give to someone applying to Accelerate?
You do need to have the right kind of personality and attititude; ambitious, adaptable, fast learner. More than this, I’d say you need a genuine passion for the marketing industry.
Please give an example of something you’ve done that you would never have had the opportunity to do if you hadn’t been on the programme.
Well, apart from a paid trip to New York to speak one-to-one with leading agency executives, I also worked on a research project that saw me travelling the UK searching for insights around the world of casinos (with a nice pocket full of the client’s cash to get the first hand experience that was obviously needed!).
What brands have you worked on?
McDonald’s, Lego, Tiger Beer, Marks & Spencer, Bacardi, American Express, Three Mobile, Playstation…to name but a few.
Describe yourself in 3 words
Cheerful. Ambitious. Calm.
Describe in 3 words what we look for in an Accelerate graduate
Adaptable; driven, smart.
We all think we know something about brands- we come into contact with literally hundreds of them every day but engage fully with only a few. What makes some brands so successful and others really not? It’s not merely a case of creating a logo, a name and or a new product, and whoosh off it goes- but building something that people want to engage with and believe in. The Brand stream is a whistle stop tour of the core aspects of creating, building and managing great brands; from creating the strategy behind the brand, to the creation of brand identity and the management of a brand’s reputation in the market.
Interbrand is recognised for being at the forefront of the dialogue on brands as business assets. They’ve worked with clients such as GE, Thomson Reuters, Hays, Pearson and Samsung to define and clarify their brand in a way that drives business growth. Whoever their client, they are concerned with only one thing: creating a measurable and positive effect on their business by building a powerful brand.
As the largest qualitative research agency in Europe, Flamingo believes that brands exist because people do. For them, brands are not fixed and static ‘entities’, any more than people themselves are. People and brands are part of this complex, beautiful, often mystifying web of connections called culture.
For over 18 years, Flamingo has been making sense of brands and culture in partnership with many of the world’s most successful businesses, delivering inspiring consumer insights and commercially-incisive brand thinking across cultures, all the time.
Siegel+Gale is committed to building world-class brands.
Through the lens of simplicity we help organisations identify and express the simple truths of who they are – creating elegantly simple, surprisingly fresh strategies, stories and experiences across all channels that stimulate the senses, engage the emotions and help organisations realise their full potential.
Campaign Magazine’s “Direct Agency of the Year 2004” and “Best DM Creative” in 2005, Targetbase Claydon Heeley approaches client issues without a specific medium in mind, and so is able to plan and execute the appropriate solution via direct marketing, relationship marketing, advertising and consumer and trade promotions.
Agency Republic is a digital advertising agency with a unique combination of marketing experts and digital specialists. As 5 times winner of Marketing’s ‘Digital Agency of the Year’, Agency Republic have an industry leading track record of using digital channels to deliver commercial success.