Latest news and views from LockSmith

Navigating Change Through Connection: ​A Wellbeing Retreat for Edrington UK’s Marketing Team

The Edrington marketing team was facing a significant moment of change. With organisational shifts on the horizon, there was an opportunity to step back from the day-to-day and focus on the bigger picture. The team needed space to reflect on the personal and professional impacts of a transformative year, celebrate their successes and recharge for the future.​

This wasn’t a standard business retreat. Edrington’s vision was something far more personal — a chance to recognise the journey the team had been on, thank them for their hard work and create an environment where they felt supported, valued, and empowered for their next chapter – whatever that might be.

Developing a team of strategic, commercially astute marketers for Clorox

The leadership team at Clorox recognised that to keep their brands profitable long-term in a commoditised categories like cleaning and personal care, they needed a strategic, commercially astute marketing team.​

The problem? Most of the team hadn’t been formally trained in marketing. Without foundational theory and critical marketing skills, they were delivering hit-and-miss marketing plans that fell short of the consistency Clorox needed to drive business performance. There was also a gap in customer understanding and sell-in skills, meaning that even their strongest marketing plans lacked the commercial follow-through needed to make a real impact.​

That’s where we came in. To raise the floor for Clorox, we designed a fully tailored, end-to-end learning journey to equip their team to deliver brilliantly thought-through marketing plans and effectively commercialise them, making the marketing function at Clorox a key driver of long-term profitable growth for the business.

Unlocking Compelling Customer Propositions​ with C&C

C&C had an exceptional marketing team delivering standout brand marketing campaigns. The problem was the impact was falling short. Why? They weren’t successfully bringing their sales team or retailers along on the journey to support their brilliant marketing activity.​

After a closer look, we uncovered the root of the issue: the team hadn’t been trained to craft commercially astute propositions.​

They weren’t winning over key decision-makers: retailers and customers. So, while the marketing hit the mark, it was getting blocked from reaching consumers because they weren’t swaying the gatekeepers.​

The mission? To raise the floor on commercial capabilities by training the marketing team at C&C how to create sell-ins that buyers simply can’t say no to.

Helping award-winning strategists develop ​prize-worthy client relationships​ for The Forge 

Founded by supersmart duo Steven Melford and Simon Garnett, The Forge is an insight-driven innovation consultancy, highly regarded by top marketing businesses like Diageo, Innocent and PepsiCo for their ability to translate what people will care about in the future into commercial returns.​

Although their reputation and business performance was strong, The Forge team had identified a need to shift from transactional relationships to meaningful, personal connections that would set the business up for long-term success.​

Their challenge was that they hadn’t been intentional about giving their client relationships the time & effort needed to unlock that next-level quality that would their business performance. They had a few long-term partnerships, these took years to develop and were the exception, not the norm.​

Unlocking a new generation of Future Leaders​ for Wavemaker UK

Wavemaker is an integral player in WPP’s global media network, and has been one of the UK’s leading media agencies since 2017. From superstar strategists to formidable media buyers, it’s no surprise that Wavemaker has never struggled to recruit top-tier agency folk. ​

Wavemaker’s challenge was developing their top layer of high potential senior talent from being experts in their fields into being effective leaders. ​

The Billion-Dollar Benefit of Strong Stakeholder Management Skills: Lessons from the Most Successful Brands

Building a business case for creativity involves showing how brand-building principles can lead to tangible commercial impact. That’s why we created The Key to Unlocking Brand Building—a comprehensive, two-part guide packed with the latest case studies of commercially successful brands and the role creativity played in driving those results, as well as practical tips to help you implement these learnings in your business.

When Creativity Drives Commercial Impact: 3 Strategies To Bring To Your CFO

Building a business case for creativity involves showing how brand-building principles can lead to tangible commercial impact. That’s why we created The Key to Unlocking Brand Building—a comprehensive, two-part guide packed with the latest case studies of commercially successful brands and the role creativity played in driving those results, as well as practical tips to help you implement these learnings in your business.

From Bland to Brand: The Skills Your Team Needs to Grow in Commoditised Categories 

For many brands, the risk is no longer one of being overlooked – it’s one of complete irrelevance. The internet has pushed the marketplace to a depressing sea of sameness: the trend for ‘averaging’, an outcome of our algorithm-first culture which aesthetically optimises everything from hipster cafes to brand logos, is inadvertently making brands look and feel the same, catapulting us to a dangerous middle ground of global ubiquity where all differentiation is lost. Indeed, Marketing Effectiveness experts Adam Morgan and Peter Field have famously warned us that this extraordinary cost of dull is costing businesses big money: 18.9 billion dollars, or the equivalent of the GDP of Greece to be precise.  

Getting the barn in order​ with Yeo Valley

Founded in 1994 on a family farm in Somerset, Yeo Valley is one of Britain’s leading organic brands and a well-established player in the British dairy category. ​

The business kicked off 2022 with a bang: a superstar new Brand Director, ex Diageo and ex Fever-Tree Niall McKee, and big, bold growth plans.​

The challenge for Niall was to build belief at senior levels in the role marketing should play in driving that business growth – and then come good on that promise!​

To deliver on that growth, Yeo Valley needed to invest in the people behind the brand. That’s where LockSmith came in.​