Job description
Why is this role crucial for C Space?
We're looking for an experienced and passionate insight, branding or senior innovation consultant who can work both independently and in collaboration with junior and senior colleagues to help our clients get closer to their customers. Our priority is to help our clients develop better products and services - this could be through identifying unmet needs and wants, and/or through developing concepts and solutions that might meet those needs. You're likely to have a proven track record in a hands-on insight (qual and/or quant), branding, innovation or planning experience. You will have experience of running both online and face to face research projects. You have now outgrown your current role, are frustrated by the limitations of 'research' or are simply looking for a more commercial, entrepreneurial place where your contributions define your progress, not 'doing your time'. You're also someone who has a teaching mind-set – helping those around you learn more about your craft, through your previous experience and your wider curiosity and reading around the topics that will enrich your insight - human behaviour, research, insight and innovation.
You will be a key team member on 2 or 3 strategic accounts, helping build relationships with the client, getting to know their business and their needs and providing excellent project delivery throughout. You will be an effective project manager, using previous experience to plan and resource pre-emptively and with clarity. Project ownership and the ability to work autonomously and make judgement calls about how projects should run are a must. Flexibility and adaptability so you can pivot and adapt priorities as projects run their course are also key role skills. You will also demonstrate growth mindset and passion for new ways of working – always being on the lookout for how we can add most value to our clients
As a Senior Consultant at C Space you will be working closely with experts across the business to meet the needs on different projects and clients, as well as other parts of the organisation (Creative Services, Operations, EMEA leadership) to achieve our promise of 'Customer-Inspired Growth'. The good work you do, will lead to the client extending their relationship with us - hence you'll also need to be able to talk credibly and authoritatively to senior clients about how we created the work and why our approach has been successful 9and our learnings for future work).
Your role will also focus on client and team management: we need you to build strong relationships with new and existing clients and become their 'go to' person when it comes to anything 'customer' or 'insight'. Similarly, we need you to coach and develop junior members of the team and ensure the highest quality and level of insight across all deliverables for your accounts. Depending on the account structure you will hold responsibility for managing 1-3 Associate Consultants on a day-to-day basis.
Role & Responsibilities:
- Owning client briefs autonomously
- 'Responsible for the design and delivery of 500k's worth of insight and innovation work across the year'- that is ensuring all work meets client's objectives and is delivered to a high standard.
- Being the lead client-facing role; that is, managing clients and tricky stakeholders on a day-to-day, building your network within accounts as well as having the skills to be able to present debriefs confidently to large senior audiences
- Line management responsibilities as well as coaching / mentoring on the job; being able to share your knowledge to develop more junior colleagues is key.'
- Understand and query the real underlying business objectives from our clients
- Design a 1st class research approach, that is creative, progressive and pushes our/the clients' boundaries
- Compile a tight and articulate recommendation based on the analysis presented
- Continuously build on your understanding of the clients' world and their consumers
- Always looking for opportunities to deliver more value to your clients
- Deliver impactful presentations and facilitate engaging workshops with your clients to ensure they act on the recommendations gathered from their consumers.
- Do the above on time and within the budget!
- Being the guardian of (and being ultimately responsible for) insight and quality – working with Consultants and Associate Consultants to ensure that we're really unpicking consumers' needs and delivering that back to clients in a compelling way
- Having overall oversight of projects and making sure that everything happens when it should – managing both more junior team members' time and ensuring that you're pulling in directors at the right time
- Proactively communicating with clients throughout the life cycle of a project to ensure that they are properly informed and involved.
- Training and mentoring and sharing your knowledge to elevate the quality of the work for more junior colleagues.
- Build strong relationships with new and existing clients and always be looking for opportunities to deliver more value to your clients.
- Oversee project management across the accounts and projects under your remit, ensuring they run to time and within budget.
Desired Experience & Ethos
- You will have strong qualitative experience and have had exposure to mixed methodologies, with an openness to learn and do things differently
- Ideally relevant experience in design-led research, but also open to other skills - UX researcher, Service/experience designer, behavioural specialist, cultural anthropologist / semiotician
- Strong relationship builder. You get your energy from working with others and really listening to their needs.
- Successful problem solving. You have a creative outlook, 'Yes, and' attitude and the ability to bring new thinking to problems with energy and enthusiasm.
- Demonstrate gravitas and EQ in all your stakeholder management interactions: you can manage relationships with both senior and junior team members, and bring people of all levels into exploring solutions to given problems and communicating those solutions in a way that ensures buy-in.
- Able to balance commercial needs with people needs. You can operate, and deliver, within a fast-paced environment whilst appreciating the individual differences of people and their resourcing constraints.
- Super organised. You've developed ways of working to successfully juggle multiple needs at the same time.
- Great communicator. You have excellent creative writing and oral communication skills.
- Ownership and able to work autonomously and make judgement calls about how projects should run.
- Flexibility and adaptability so you can pivot and adapt priorities as projects run their course.
- Growth mindset and passion for new ways of working – always being on the lookout for how we can add most value to our clients.
- Strong Excel and CRM knowledge (desired)
- You are not 'the finished article' and demonstrate energy and enthusiasm whilst proactively owning and taking action on your development needs.
About C Space
C Space is a pioneering consumer collaboration consultancy with offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, London and Tokyo. Our promise to our clients is to deliver 'Customer Inspired Growth' - over the years we have helped clients like Twitter, Samsung, McDonald's, British Airways, Orange and Heinz grow by developing new products, services and communication together with their customers. Most of our clients have worked with us for a number of years and about 80% keep coming back for more every year: building long-lasting relationships with our clients is the key ingredient to our success. Over the last year we have won six insight and innovation awards.
Insight at C Space isn't like insight at other agencies; it's faster, more entrepreneurial and more integrated. And it doesn't just focus on finding the 'truth' but more importantly on leveraging that truth with those who matter in our clients' organisation: we truly care about and organise ourselves around having impact on our clients' business – by either making them or saving them some money.
To help us make good on our promise to clients, we've developed four differentiating capabilities:
- 21st Century Research: a proprietary tool-kit that allows our clients to listen to and co-create with their customers in an ongoing, iterative way using private, moderated online communities
- Employee Crowdsourcing: best-in-class expertise that allows us to consult on and manage high-profile (employee) crowdsourcing assignments
- Business Solutions: a team of outstanding insight, innovation and brand consultants who specialise in high-impact, live project-work
- Creative Services: a team of designers who develop the creative behind new campaigns, branding and our storytelling offer - in conjunction with the other teams or stand-alone
We pride ourselves on our friendly but high-performing culture. We love people who are self-starters, see the glass as half-full and thrive in a fast paced, entrepreneurial environment: six directors of the EMEA business have started their career at C Space as entry level consultants. We tend to attract people who are curious about the world and who have been able to match this curiosity with the ability to problem-solve challenges for clients in marketing and insight departments. Ultimately, there are five traits that all our people have in common:
Ambition Collaboration Appetite to learn Resourcefulness Humour
We are passionate about our people and proud of our culture. We have six 'behaviours' to ensure that we are delivering fantastic work, continuing to learn and develop and building a high-performance culture which creates opportunities for those who work here:
- I've got this: taking responsibility, doing what we say we will.
- Only accept awesome: delivering high quality work that we are proud of and has impact.
- Show the love: celebrating successes & ensuring everyone has a voice.
- Do what scares you: challenging ourselves, taking risks and learning more.
- Tell it like it is: being honest and freeing ourselves from "office politics" and "hidden agendas"
- Open up and listen: Listening first and fully before we respond or react
You can find out more about our culture on our culture page - https://cspace.com/culture/ and through this video - https://vimeo.com/cspacelondon/review/304868770/b2ddca64f1
Some examples of our work:
- British Airways: bringing flatbeds to business – a smarter way to fly
- Santander: launching the world's biggest bank in the world's biggest market
- Kraft Heinz: customer inspired product innovation
- Jaguar Land Rover: helping convert consumer truth into business strategy
- McDonalds: co-creating the restaurant of the future
- Etihad: redefining luxury at 30,000 feet
- Samsung: inspiring laundry solutions for developing markets
To learn more, visit www.cspace.com or follow us on LinkedIn or on Twitter @CSpaceGlobal. C Space is a part of DDB, a division of Omnicom Group Inc.
Interested? We are very keen to receive applications from people from all walks of life – talented, creative people with their own voice, own ideas and perspectives. We look forward to hearing from you.
Salary/Package
Alongside a competitive starting salary and bonus structure we offer a comprehensive suite of benefits – from a contributory pension, private medical insurance, cycle to work, paid sabbatical, individual wellbeing funding, free breakfasts, weekly drinks and regular company socials including our Summer Sports day and renowned Christmas parties too.