James Odene [User-Friendly]

Creative Director @ User-Friendly
398 karmaJoined Jun 2022Working (6-15 years)

Bio

I am a senior marketer and strategic consultant with extensive marketing experience in both B2B and charity industries and an MSC in International Marketing.

I have worked for and with a number of international animal advocacy organisations and vegan food brands alongside my work within the commercial sector, building up a firm understanding of how behavioural science and marketing can work together to optimise brand performance.

Having studied Behavioural Science for the past five years I ensure that all of my work and consultancy is both commercially sound and science-backed.

​James has spoken at conferences across the globe on marketing, positioning and behavioural science with his most recent CARE conference talk being voted as one of the top three talks of the entire event.

How I can help others

Marketing, strategy, campaign strategy, communications, behavioural science

Comments
13

Thanks for your comment Melissa.

In terms of EA as a movement or individual orgs, I would vote for the latter. They typically will have clearer CTAs and modes of supporting their target audiences. Whereas we've seen many challenges to having one unified movement that must represent us all, and us all it. The fundementals of the approach can guide and inform the organisations, but I'm not sure 'the movement' needs to be a something we present to the gen-pop vs organisations, though of course I wouldn't see this as an either/or decision. Both need to improve the marketing work, but perhaps for different reasons.

Thanks for your message Jeffrey, always great to hear from fellow creatives.

Love seeing marketing in here! New organisations often haven't budgeted for their marketing needs. It would be great to see systemic change in funders making clear what's expected and that includes a marketing spend (in most cases).

Thanks for commenting.

Sure, I'd be happy to.

This first example of a research org is needing short-term action, so long-term branding for them would have ideally predated this need and built a bigger audience that knows their brand and would be likely to support. For this current need, they are using short-term activation marketing, but would get much greater success if they'd already committed to building their audience over a longer time. So the current ads for this purpose wouldn't be long-term, but would be support by past long-term marketing.

The startup charity aiming to acquire talent has 5 years to imbed their brand into the minds of likely future candidates. This long-term marketing could be relevant sponsorships, attending conferences, ads that are focused on making their brand memorable.

The "shopfront" EA org should be generating ads that are purely designed to capture peoples attention, impart the brand and some credibility. These could be 6 sec YouTube ads, social ads, sponsorships...

Broadly speaking, all long-term marketing has one major focus, and that is to be interesting enough to be remembered. It should therefore hone into emotions, humour, surprise - something that will leave an impression on the audience so that they are effectively warmer to the brand for when they (in the future) might come to want to engage.

If you consider this Rightmove ad, it's entire remit is to make you feel something, which you then associate with the brand. And it has no call to action. It's about logging the brand into your mind for whenever you might come to need to look for a place to live.

Hey Yonatan, thanks for reaching out! I think we're both at EAG DC over the next few days, let's meet up and chat about this? :)

Thanks for commenting Linch, this is a great point. I agree on this viewpoint. There are likely many benefits to meta services like the one you describe being covered by more than one org, not least the diversification of skills, focus, specialisation and resource.

Hey Christian,

That's great to hear - thanks for sharing. I'll aim to be writing posts of this style fairly regularly, but do shout if there's a topic you'd particularly like me to cover.

Thanks Peter - I do agree that marketing and communications could do with being more highly prioritised, broadly speaking.  I hope to at least provide some of the basic knowledge that might help others stay away from some of the easy traps to fall into.

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