We’ll fight your corner! A strategic creative agency for challenger brands that want to punch above their weight. Fiercely Integrated.

Our mindset is to “think with clients” in order to solve business and marketing problems. We aren’t an agency to take a brief, go and sit in a dark room for a month then present our ideas with a fanfare of flamingos to start the meeting. To genuinely build brands over the long term, it is imperative to work with clients so we can riff, test, iterate and work together on finding the right solutions.

We are owned by Hakuhodo Inc, one of the top global marketing service networks, but we act, and our spirit, is very independent. We never wish to grow beyond 100 people. The benefit of this is we all understand each other very well, we challenge each other, we know how to utilise people’s strengths when designing project or client teams and clients get senior personnel working directly on their business. This all drives high performance both for our clients as well as the agency.

The ‘Southpaw’ analogy from sport is the left-handed competitor – we’re unorthodox in our strategic approach to create an unfair advantage for our clients. This mantra motivates us to beat the competition - which we do on behalf of our clients every day. We do this through our neuro and behavioural sciences as well as our creative thinking.

Southpaw is known for its very strong culture, which has been developed by all of the talented people within the agency. We embrace diversity and inclusion, our culture supports flexibility, different backgrounds, ideas and ways of working. However, we recognise there is so much more to do. As such we are implementing a programme, to educate all our employees on D&I and have involved every single employee to help develop an initial 2-year strategy.

Our values (Do Unorthodox, Run With The Pack, Be Furiously Curious, Give A Shit, Have Fun & Difficult Is Worth Doing) give you a sense of what it would be like to work with us, how we challenge clients to deliver the best strategic creative work possible, how we are furiously curious about audiences, brand, consumers and creativity, and most importantly how we do it together.

We have an ambition for all of our clients to punch above their weight, and so we look to create an unfair advantage in their sector. And we do this through our neuro-behavioural science approach.

We have developed our own proprietary science of emotion methodology to analyse, predict and influence behaviour to ensure we create successful creative executions.

Analyse
Based on research from the Centre of Applied Neuroscience, we divide the brain into four distinct behavioural types. We then overlay audience data to create a bespoke neuro-map of your target consumer.

Predict
We can then gain a deeper understanding of your audience’s emotional triggers by focusing on what they love, hate and are motivated by.

Influence
Finally, we apply the most appropriate behavioural science models to your audience’s emotional traits. These biases, nudges and heuristics can have a massive influence on how customers think and act towards your brand.

And this is because we have a very clear belief that shapes all that we do at Southpaw.

And that belief is ‘in order to make people do something, you have to make them feel something’.

We are paid by clients to create business impact and so we are looking for present and new customers to DO something – whether that’s to buy a product, book a trip, download a podcast, sign up to a newsletter, enquire about a test drive, donate to a charity, turn up to an event……and the way we’ll do that is by first making them FEEL something (inspired, aroused, happy, guilty, scared, proud).

Because as marketers, emotions are the super-powers we have to understand and influence our consumer’s actions.

1. Emotions control our decisions – 95% of all our decisions are made by the emotional ‘system 1’ brain
2. Emotions drive our actions
3. Emotions help us remember - people remember how you made them feel. And using distinctive assets that trigger the system 1 brain best influence the memory.

So they are a powerful tool in influencing consumers and getting the brand results you need.