Karen Fream, the former European Marketing Activation Manager at The Coca Cola Company, has joined entrepreneurial and creative branding agency 1HQ as Client Director of Shopping Engagement.

Karen has spent the last 11 years working in activating design for commercial value, initially focusing on brand design and management for Coca-Cola GB and more recently developing and managing the shopper marketing activation for Coca-Cola’s European campaigns.

Photo: Karen Fream, Client Director of Shopping Engagement at 1HQ

Karen says, “We live in a world full of choice, however, 50 percent of shoppers choose the same items each time – so how we affect that choice is key. Consumers can choose to love you, but that doesn’t always lead to your brand being bought in store. Retailers can choose to stock you, or compete directly against you with their own brand. So making sure your brands seal the deal at the shelf requires the delivery of great insight based shopper engagement that will be compelling for all, and importantly convert that pre-defined shopping list of items to chosen brands in the basket.”

Karen continues, “This requires two essential elements—mining the insights that matter, and delivering the solution through excellence in execution, engaging with the shopper to create the memorable experiences that are key in successfully converting them to choose and buy your brands. In my experience finding an agency that delivers both of these elements equally is very rare so I am extremely excited to be joining the 1HQ team in Windsor.”