Bio

Meet Abe.

Abe comes armed with decades of experience working within agencies, with clients’ marketing teams and directly as a brand strategy and business development consultant. His core skills are:

Strategic: Nineteen years as a Strategy Planner working in New Zealand, Australia, Tokyo and London. He has experience with big brands in global network agencies and in disruptive independent agencies. Specialist skills areas are brand insight definition, brand architecture, digital integration, behavior change and creative strategy.

Facilitator: Strong workshop facilitation and presentation skills with depth and breadth of hands-on experience running brand development, strategic marketing, digital persona definition and process innovation workshops.

Effective: Proven success winning multiple New Zealand and international advertising effectiveness awards for strategic excellence, marketing awards and media strategy. Business acumen with Henley Business School MBA.

Collaborative: The best results arise from a flexible approach to insight discovery and creative inspiration. He's self-motivated and also enjoy working within multi-skilled teams where knowledge sharing delivers results.

Innovative: Experienced in running product, brand and service innovation pipelines, helping teams find fresh perspectives to disrupt stale processes and discovering pitch winning consumer and business strategy insights.

Insightful: A skilled qualitative B2C and B2C researcher and marketing and advertising feature article writer. Skilled in consumer insight generation, business problem definition, and creative concept presentation.

In 2004 Abe moved to Planning's birthplace London. As a Senior Digital Planner at Tribal DDB London, he gained a deep understanding of digital and won the first two UK IPA Effectiveness Awards for a digital agency in 2006. He completed a Henley Business School MBA in 2010 with a dissertation ‘What clients want’, and have written for New Zealand Marketing Magazine and his brand strategy article ‘Turning Japanese’ was published in ADMAP in 2013.

Qualifications

Henley Business School, UK

Master in Business Administration 2010

Axis Creative Advertising School

Copywriter 1999

University of Auckland

Master of Arts Hons, English Language & Literature 1994