To celebrate 15 fabulous years of Flourish Marketing, we sat down with the mastermind behind it all, Ellie Murphy, to get a peak into her journey over the last decade and a half.
Let’s dive in!
What inspired you to start Flourish Marketing 15 years ago?
I’m not sure that I actually aimed to open a marketing agency at first. When I had my kids I had to try and rebalance what I was doing. My old boss was actually the one who initially approached me and asked me to develop a marketing strategy for Scotland’s airports, which were devolving commercially from BAA in Heathrow. I kind of fell into the idea of being a freelance consultant, almost by accident.
Mind you, I quickly began to see the beauty in this way of working. I’m super curious and generally pretty nosy, so having the opportunity to dive into a range of completely different businesses on a regular basis was ideal for me.
How has the marketing landscape changed since Flourish first launched in 2009?
Like many professions, it has changed massively and yet fundamentally stayed the same. The basic premise of marketing hasn’t changed at all, but the ways in which you can reach customers have become incredibly more sophisticated and so we need to stay on top of all of the trends, whether that’s change in consumer opinion, behaviours, ways of buying, ethics etc.
There’s also so much more ‘noise’ now to contend with – as humans we have so much information coming at us via multiple channels all the time, so it makes it far more difficult for companies to get that cut through and make that connection with their target consumers. For that reason, it’s much more important now to include personalisation within campaigns. I think this has also affected the way in which we consume information too, so things like short form and video content are more important than ever as our attention span has become an awful lot shorter.
There’s a hell of a lot more data available now too, which is great as we have much better insight, plus I’m a research geek so this is music to my ears, albeit sometimes people can get lost in that and lose the thread of what’s important in terms of what will make a difference to consumers. I think that people’s perceptions have also changed significantly, so expectations are massively different: for example, brand loyalty is much more fostered by ethics and brand reputation, not just ‘is this the right product at the right price?’
Flourish has achieved and grown so much over the last 15 years. What are some of the things you are most proud of?
Without a doubt, most important has been watching the team grow from just me working at my kitchen table to a crazily wonderful team of 16. A great source of pride for me over the years has been our incredible client base, from local start-ups to more established household names. And our flexibility to adopt different working styles: working on a project basis or, like a huge proportion of our work now, on more of a long-term basis as an outsourced marketing department, or seconding our team into businesses to work within their core team.
Through the frameworks we sit on, with both Glasgow City Council and Business Gateway, we also get the chance to work with such a varied range of smaller, local businesses to equip them with marketing support that they might not otherwise be able to access – whether it’s in the form of a strategy, training or helping them piece together a campaign.
I think I could go on for ages here, but the main thing I’m getting at is that I take immense pride in seeing the positive difference our work makes for businesses.
What have been some of the biggest challenges to growing Flourish over the last 15 years? And how have you overcome these?
I guess some of the challenges mirror the same challenges of running a business in any sector. There’s the challenge of bringing work in and balancing that with the capacity available to make sure you’ve got enough work for the team to do and remain profitable, but also anticipating what skills and volume of staff you need for your workload.
We’ve certainly transformed from purely focusing on strategy, which is still at our heart, to having a more full-service delivery model. That calls for a lot more specialist marketing skills than I possess, that’s for sure! One of the ways in which I had to challenge myself to grow was by bringing in people who are experts in each area so that I could feel really confident in everything they are doing. It has always been just as important to me though that they can also balance that specialist delivery with still being really great client-facing account managers because of the size and flexibility of the way in which we run the business.
Through the first five or six years we were also probably overly reliant on two or three key clients, which if we lost their work it would have made us quite vulnerable. So, we took a deliberate decision to work across more sectors and more clients and we’ve seen a huge change in the business from that in terms of the volume of sectors that we are in.
Imagine you have a time machine going into the next 15 years. What trends or technologies do you think will be must-haves for marketers in the future?
AI will be absolutely commonplace by then, won’t it? It’s already getting there now if the volume of marketing vlogs and training sessions are anything to go by.
The metaverse also comes to mind here, blurring the lines between reality and virtual worlds as brands do more than experiment with new ways to engage customers in the spaces where they hang out. I think in time, that will become a lot more prominent, particularly amongst younger generations.
On the flip side, I think a sense of community and people needing a connection will continue to grow again. It feels like we are going through a period where things have become quite impersonal and people are starting to seek that deeper connection with brands and each other.
Obviously, I think sustainability, diversity and inclusion will continue to be major themes. All brands need to properly understand how to communicate to a far more diverse range of audiences and to be able to understand them better than they perhaps do. Companies who are already integrating these themes through their entire business model will have the best chance of continued growth.
Looking back at the past 15 years, what’s the single biggest marketing lesson you’ve learned?
I think one of the biggest things I guess I’ve learned is to always keep asking questions and never take things at face value. I think also accepting that you’re going to make mistakes – that’s the whole reason why we optimise, why we test and learn. You can do all the testing you want in the world to get close to what you think will be the right blend of messages, channels, creative, timing, budget and all that good stuff, but it’s very very rare that you get something perfect first time.
I think also always not being frightened to ask for help and being able to put your hand up and say I don’t know the answer because nobody knows everything.
Finally, I’d also say, I’ve learned to back yourself. Imposter syndrome and confidence issues are so prevalent, particularly amongst women in the industry. I guess I’m pretty confident now but that comes from being quite long in the tooth and having seen most of the marketing challenges that companies come up against. Realise that we all have something valuable to say that will add value to your clients and help give them clarity to cut through some of the noise.
