Sophie Collins is Marketing Manager at BIG little LDN. After six bottomless-brunch-filled years in London, Sophie headed back to her Motherland of Wales where she lives on the beautiful coast of Mumbles with her husband, son and French Bulldog Stanley. When she isn’t coming up with the next campaign strategy or uncovering audience insights, Sophie can be spotted with a coffee in hand looking for the next biggest trends. A style icon of the BIG little LDN office, we sat down with Sophie to find out what she loves most about her job and what is her biggest industry pet peeve.

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Tell us a bit about your background  ‍

I’ve been in marketing for almost ten years, and have tried out several different roles in that time. Starting off in an admin role sitting opposite the Group Planner, I soon discovered a passion for Planning. Learning from some great Planners along the way, I honed my own style and have been lucky enough to work with some of the world’s biggest brands. I worked closely with the B2B marketing team to share the trends and insights we were uncovering and this organically became a hybrid role between Planning and Marketing. It worked really well, combining strategy with lead generation, and we had a lot of fun coming up with attention-grabbing marketing campaigns and even won a few awards along the way. ‍

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What do you love about your job?

A challenge! Getting a tricky client brief gives me a real buzz. Needing to do lots of research to arrive at a real behavioural insight that underpins the strategy and becomes a springboard for big thinking. The creative side of my role is definitely my favourite part. I love coming up with ideas and believe that in a brainstorm no idea is a bad idea. The weirder and wackier the ideas the better, as these often lead to something great. I would much rather a client have to reign the ideas back in than be underwhelmed, I think as an agency pushing the boundaries is our job.  

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What annoys you?

Stats, stats, stats for the sake of stats. There is nothing worse (or more boring) than being shown lots of wishy-washy statistics that don’t make a strong point. Every fact presented needs to be punchy, memorable and support the end strategy. Just like a puzzle, all the pieces fit together and at the end you can see the full picture.  

What makes a good strategist?

A Creative Director I used to work with always said that a good Planner is curious and has a natural interest in people, I am inherently nosey so perhaps that’s why it suits me so well. Being interested in people, how they behave and what makes them tick is a must. A good Planner should ask lots of questions, and never be quite satisfied with the answer.  

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What can business owners expect from brand strategy at BIG little LDN?

No marketing jargon or loads of graphs and pie charts and definitely not death by PowerPoint – we will get to the point of what your brand needs to do and why. Also, expect to have a lot of fun, we are all passionate about what we do and it will definitely rub off on you.

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What is the one thing you want business owners or brand managers to know?

We're all just people. Whether you're targeting B2B or B2C, we all still log off or clock off at the end of the day, go home, have dinner and go to bed. If you want a campaign to be successful it needs to be personable and tap into a true insight. This is why all good campaigns start with a deep dive into the target audience to find that core truth that speaks only to them with a campaign message that can only be owned by your brand. We're embarking on a deep dive into Gen Z at the moment, so this is worth a read if that's who you're targeting.

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If you weren’t in marketing what would have been your plan B?

I would really love to be a children’s author. I’m so inspired by the imaginations of people like David Walliams, Roald Dahl and Julia Donaldson. I am often making up bedtime stories for my son about what we’ve done or seen that day, so who knows maybe one day you will see my name on a shelf in Waterstones!  

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If you want to talk to Sophie about brand strategy, French Bulldogs or anything Wales related, drop her an email, talk@biglittlelondon.com.

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