Research Director

Are you a brand and communications enthusiast? Do you want to benefit from the career opportunities of a large and growing global agency? Are you interested in innovation and integrating and enhancing brand and communications surveys with other data sources?

We're looking for an experienced brand tracking specialist at Director level who will play a pivotal role in strengthening and growing our business. A key part of this role will be to act as trusted adviser to our clients, helping them to manage the equity of their brands and the effectiveness of their communications across media, with an increasing focus on the use of digital and social media.

Beyond delivering inspirational work, you'll be part of developing the strategic direction of our business, helping to drive team and business growth via innovation orientated R&D; ensuring our offer is consistently in tune with market developments as well as having stand out against our competitors.

You'll need to demonstrate credible experience in brand and communications research, with experience of leading medium to large tracking programmes in particular, most likely from the agency side. You will be comfortable taking full ownership of delivering insights that drive client action, as well as leading pitches and being able to build strong client relationships at any level. You will also need to display good people management and leadership skills.

What you'll be doing:

You'll be a resilient and inspirational leader able to work strategically with a variety of clients delivering high impact work illustrating a deep understanding of their business. You'll have overall responsibility for client accounts and their commercial development. As you'll be leading on pitches and proposals you'll need to be able to build a strong relationship with clients, engaging them early about their business issues, looking for where we can help.

In this role, you'll bring strong commercial acumen, needed for driving new business opportunities and working collaboratively with your account team. Partnering with our clients you'll offer strategic insight and technical guidance in developing solutions to business challenges. Uncovering and creating opportunities for new business, you'll ensure that the client's unmet needs are addressed while ensuring that core, on-going research continues to evolve and delight them, delivering high levels of client satisfaction.

With your proven brand tracking experience, you'll be recognised as a senior point of contact and expert to both internal teams and external clients. By partnering with the client you'll be advising on how to identify early opportunity areas through insights to ideas, conducting insightful analysis to create clear stories, making actionable recommendations that are delivered with impact.

This opportunity will report into a Team Head and allow you to work closely with the senior leadership team to help shape and create a supportive environment to manage, provide regular feedback and coach other members of the team.

You'll have the freedom to create Thought Leadership and marketing collateral to publicise the expertise we have in brand equity and touchpoint activation. You'll continuously push yourself and be active in the adoption of new techniques and methodologies including behavioural science, neuroscience, social intelligence and mobile approaches. We have experts across the business you can learn from and industry leading development opportunities from our L&D offering.

About you:

• Have strong brand and communications research experience, most likely from a market research agency and across multiple markets
• Have proven skills in building strong relationships with clients
• Be able to tell insightful stories from data, creating actionable recommendations
• Have excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to tailor to different audiences
• Inspire others and personally commit to delivering excellent quality
• Have excellent people management skills, including the ability to coach and motivate others, and be able to work with a variety of people in a team setting

As a Director, you'll be someone who can positively display our core values -

• Client First - being relentlessly client orientated and immersing yourself in their business to become a trusted advisor.
• Entrepreneurial Spirit - have a 'feed' yourself mentality, driving profitable long-term opportunities
• Curiosity - being an expert and 'go to' person in the team
• Collaboration - displaying courage as a leader who sometimes has to make tough decisions
• Integrity - taking personal accountability for delivering robust research; knowing when to step back and direct whilst also judging when to muck in.

If you believe you can create the impact we are looking for then we would love to hear from you!

About Us:

At Ipsos we help to power brands on the road to growth by defining how they can execute and best measure their strategy. We do this by monitoring brand performance, identifying threats, measuring the effectiveness of responsive actions, and optimising touchpoints and creative and media investments, so that brands can adapt and thrive in the face of category disruption and competitor actions.

We pride ourselves on doing research that has an impact and want to inspire our clients to make better decisions. We harness our size and scale to enable our employees to 'be the best me'. We celebrate everyone's uniqueness, encouraging people to succeed, take the initiative and perform at their best.

Our culture is unique - we have the entrepreneurial spirit and quirkiness of a small boutique, but we also have the resources, scale and diversity of a large global agency. We have more bright, friendly, hard-working and enthusiastic people, from more backgrounds, with more interests, skills and experiences to learn from. Our values are based on our diverse cultural backgrounds, helping us to be responsive, client-focused and flexible.

We are committed to equality, treating people fairly, promoting a positive and inclusive working environment and ensuring we have diversity of people and views. We recognise that this is important for our business success - a more diverse workforce will enable us to better reflect and understand the world we research and ultimately deliver better research and insight to our clients. We understand the importance of commitments you may have outside of work and we consider all flexible working applications - please highlight what you are looking for when you make your application.