What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Garry Dods, Founder and MD at WeAreFearless.
Give us a brief overview of WeAreFearless as a company in general and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically?
WeAreFearless was founded with a challenger mindset and a commitment to bring real change. Four years in, we’re proud of our award-winning work and joined up thinking with the likes of Bridgestone Europe, UEFA and Sky. We’re on a mission to break new ground in sports and entertainment marketing by breaking through the fear that holds marketers back from doing things differently. I believe that fear and fear of failure is our industry’s biggest threat. It creates apathy, stagnation and a sea of sameness which limit the creative bravery and informed risk taking marketing leaders need to take.
So our ethos is Boldness with backup – a distinctive insight and evidence-led approach for clients that foster the courage to do things differently. Our insight – built from academia in neuroscience and values-based psychology – helps us understand what makes people tick and WHY at a much deeper subconscious level. It’s not just inspiration, it’s robust, scientific evidence that gives us and our clients the confidence to do things differently.
We combine this evidence-led human approach with a deeper understanding of sports and entertainment and its culture and lifestyle. Our integrated multi-channel approach is led by experts in partnership strategy and activation, storytelling, earned social, digital and PR, talent and influencer marketing.
What are the current trends within your business area, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver on strategy?
Our industry is under huge pressure to create more exciting, interesting and relevant partnership campaigns that connect brands to fans in meaningful and authentic ways. We cannot keep doing things the same way and expect different results. After all, humans don’t act if they don’t care so we need to find new ways to cut through and connect.
Traditional research methods tell us what people SAY and DO, but this only gives us a very basic understanding of people. Through our work in psychology, we discovered that VALUES tell us WHY people behave as they do and how we RELATE to each other (based on shared values). Put simply, people’s values inform behaviour, and their instinctive decision making and therefore why we choose Brand X over Brand Y instinctively.
Marketers who understand the different values perspectives have the best chance of removing their own bias from the process so they can bravely focus on what matters most to the people they are trying to engage with. This is boldness with backup in action.
What approach makes WeAreFearless strategy/model unique? What is your USP/differentiator?
When you work for an agency called WeAreFearless – you give yourself one hell of a task.
We have an agency-wide philosophy of being Fearless and having the courage to do things differently whether that’s our unique creative process to our fearless collective of cultural experts who help inform our work. To address the issue of relevance, we have delved into the academic work of renowned social psychologists Maslow (1943) and Schwartz (1994) and leveraged over 40 years of values data to more accurately understand the fundamental driving forces of people in the UK and internationally.
Over the past two years, we’ve developed our own proprietary insight tool called Fearless Human Values™ – the first data-driven approach to values insight that drives deeper salience and meaningfulness between brands and their target audiences.
What are some recent clients you’ve worked on campaigns for, and how do these campaigns speak to wider new and emerging trends in your business area?
Deeper audience understanding and trends in the category and pop culture drives the heartbeat of our client work, where insight is translated into actionable strategy, bolder creative ideas and earned communication plans. To this end we have teams of channel experts and key discipline experts, creating integrated campaigns within a matrix structure.
Our unique values-based insight and bolder strategic approach has helped inspire a range oi innovative work we’re proud of:
- Audience values insight was critical to the development of our big campaign ideas that have a universal human truth at their heart, including, the multi award-winning Chase Your Dream, No Matter What campaign (Bridgestone/Olympics) and our recent client win Behind Every Goal (Hays Recruitment/City Group)
- Values insight led us to create a brave content series that packs a punch to cut through the noise for UEFA Europa League, now into its second season
- We’ve used values insight to inform a revised brand strategy and identity for an iconic global entertainment brand
No matter what the challenge a brand or property faces, understanding the audience’s hearts as well as their minds will always lead to more meaningful, impactful and exciting ways of communicating. Our ultimate fear is indifference to the work, so we’ll keep building on this knowledge base to keep our clients at the forefront of what matters most to their audience, and to demonstrate the effectiveness that fearlessness can bring to our industry. We surely need it more than ever!