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Following over 20 years advising some of the world’s most valuable brands, supporting their leaders through complex challenges, Defiant was set up by award-winning effectiveness strategist Will Poskett in 2022. It leads with a strategy-first approach that uses ‘fame’ for its clients as its north star, providing exponential growth and quantifiable value.
Here, the Defiant founder speaks to DCA about what fame means to brands now and how Defiant’s “small and nimble” approach achieves it.
Fame through fearless thinking
Fame is something Poskett says he “probably spends too much time thinking about”, as he shares his favourite example of what fame looks like now for brands, giving the example of juggernaut canned water company Liquid Death:
“They do fame through strategic thinking, so they displace and disrupt the market through offering a fundamentally different product,” he says. “Their packaging design delivers fame, even the way they do distribution is a form of fame. They can't compete with big bottle brands that have mass distribution in big supermarkets, so they're growing distribution through small independent family shops that give them more shelf space and arguably more fame at point of sale.”
Defiant’s motto is “Fame through fearless thinking,” says Poskett, explaining the reasoning that “Fame is the biggest driver of brand growth, and everything we do is in service of that.” And with a founder with a solid strategic background, everything they do must be in service of the client’s ultimate business goals – and be measurable.
“Where strategy originally was born out of a way to serve the creative department,” he says, “I actually think strategy is the most important thing to add value to a business right now for brands. So everything we do, even if we were given a brief where the client had written their own strategy, we would still add some strategic rigor and creative strategic thinking to that brief to elevate it and make it even more effective – and get to fame even faster.”
And this approach is yielding real results. Defiant goes up against big agencies in pitches and continues to win work from them. They beat off two big agencies to score Bella Italia and Kallo Foods from larger competitor agencies, with new work launching soon. They’re also working with Beavertown Brewery on a new positioning and creative platform, something which will make them stand out, and provide longevity in the category.
Guiding strategic principles
“We don't take what's been given for granted; we really interrogate the brief that clients give us and we are very open,” says Poskett, who has previously worked on strategy at the likes of Droga 5 and Wieden+Kennedy, where he says “there is a spirit of collaboration but also challenge.”
Poskett also taps into what he describes as strategic provocations, which keep the work on a path of effectiveness, aimed squarely at business success. “I think one of the biggest dangers in our creative industry is that too often creative work is based on subjective judgment and not the objectivity of what will work commercially,” he says. “So we have strategic principles or rigor to do that, and also as a measurement and effectiveness.”
“We want to make sure that everything we do is hitting the bottom line and driving commercial growth. And especially in the climate that we're in now economically, that is more important than ever.”
Measuring client success
Like a true strategist, Poskett says that the most important thing to do before any creative work begins is to establish the metrics for success. For bigger clients, they can isolate the effects of marketing through econometrics, but for smaller clients, they take a more nuanced approach. An example of this is the project Defiant did for co-working space Work Life, isolating metrics around new spaces. They're now the fastest growing brand in the category in the UK and they're growing spontaneous awareness over 200% in about 12 to 18 months, according to Poskett.
Clients that best suit Defiant’s offering are “scale-ups, challengers or legacy brands that have fallen out of favour,” according to Poskett. Bella Italia – a client of Defiant – is a good example. Defiant’s work with the restaurant chain saw bookings grow four times greater than projected in the first month of their campaign.
Poskett doesn’t like terms like ‘series A’ or ‘series B’ instead opting to base compatibility on revenue, with £50m being the sweet spot. And as for categories, though they do service B2B, Defiant’s heart and team experience is in B2C, finding their feet with a food and drink niche. They’d also love to bring some of their experience to entertainment and gaming. “I think it's a category ripe for disruption,” says Poskett. “It's quite formulaic in its approach. Without being too rude, I think there's a lot of specialist entertainment agencies that are a bit rubbish and I'd love to take some work from them!”
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