About
Run Jump Fly was founded in 2013 by Jo Lilford, who’d spent her career working inside organisations as ‘the client’. She cut her teeth on the original Getty Images team as the Seattle-based global Communications and Corporate Marketing Director. After a decade she returned to the UK, to a number of senior marcomms positions in high street financial services, national parks, B2B trade credit and public transport.
This extensive in-house experience means:
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She fully gets the challenges leadership teams face within their organisations, because she’s spent her career working within those teams;
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It’s obvious when agencies are deploying smoke and mirrors to hide that they don’t really understand strategy – it’s surprisingly frequent (and we routinely get pulled in to fix more of these scenarios than you’d imagine).
She was determined to offer a robust and inspiring alternative that would help organisations find strong strategic foundations for their ambitions, brand and internal culture. She knew what worked because she’d done it herself, within other organisations, dozens of times.
Today, Run Jump Fly helps organisations all over the world who challenge themselves to do better. We work with them to determine their distinctive competitive advantage and apply it, through strategies that play at the intersection of commercial ambition, creative thinking and company culture.
Jo is still at the helm, pulling together teams to work on a variety of challenges. Projects range in scale from major strategy programmes for world governments that potentially impact every continent….right through to positioning for a three-person start-up on a trading estate. Her approach is the same no matter what: to open minds, to ask the awkward questions, to challenge the status quo and to make sure everyone has fun doing it all.
Our Services
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Commercial, brand, communications. Experienced national and international strategy for organisations who want to push themselves harder. Clients see us as a critical friend, interrogator and source of ideas to help them get where they want to go.
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EVP development, recruitment platforms, internal behaviours and cultural development programmes. Your external face to the world is a reflection of your internal one. If that’s not right, you will never succeed in the way you want to.
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From board strategy sessions to creative workshops – if you need to harvest ideas, explore ways to do things differently or co-create with your team, we facilitate workshops and meetings at any level.
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Strategic messaging that supports a proposition to market. We can tailor it to any audience broad or restricted.
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Qualitative and quantitative. From focus groups to focused interviews, surveys to global benchmarking. We have research partners ready to plug into any project, whether you want to evaluate your global audiences or your product idea or anything else at all.
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We develop ownable voices for brands who want their language to be a recognisable point of distinction. We can work in English, Welsh, French and Italian and often work globally.
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Everyone has different career experiences – we should never take knowledge and understanding for granted. So, we offer training for teams who’ll benefit from everyone being up to speed, including Brand 101 for Non-Marketers (popular with senior leadership teams), Applying Brand Language and Strategic Content Development, and other bespoke courses to fill in gaps.
Our Process
Run
There is something unique about your organisation – but it’s hard to see it from the inside, when you’re close to everything. Our job is to spot the things that you don’t. During this phase, we’ll get close to you, ruminate, interrogate and get right under your skin. The best results come when we become like an extension of your own team – and understand what truly makes your organisation tick.
Step: Run
Our Process
Jump
We take all findings and work them into a central idea that forms the launch pad for your strategy. This is where we organise thoughts and feelings and ideas into a strategic framework that will deliver against your commercial ambition, shape your internal culture and give you a clear and distinctive proposition that sets you apart.
Step two: Jump
Our Process
Fly
Strategy only works when it’s well implemented. So, we help our clients to plan a dedicated bespoke approach that will truly work for their organisation to take it somewhere new. Sometimes this can mean a rolling all-company engagement programme that runs from recruitment to retirement – for others it might need a lighter touch. But we’ll stick with you till it works.
Step three: Fly