Oliver Group, the agency which recruited Proximity London chief Sharon Whale as its new group UK CEO last month, has overhauled its planning team to tap into the experience of the Dare team who joined when it bought the agency last year.
Mark Bell moves up from planning partner at Dare to chief experience officer for Oliver Group. While at Dare he led a team ranging from psychologists to toy designers to help brands join up and create ever more effective customer experiences. Bell, who was head of UX at LBi before joining Dare in 2005, will report into David Russell, director at the agency.
Meanwhile John Gibbard and Roz Thomas will step into his shoes at Dare and have been promoted to co-heads of experience planning. Together they have more than 13 years’ experience at Dare.
With backgrounds in industrial design, financial services, digital user experience and psychology, this new leadership team will be tasked with developing the experience planning proposition to include in-store and physical environments as they benefit from the increased remit Dare now has as part of the Oliver Group.
David Russell said: “The experience planning approach pioneered by Dare offers brands a new way to define, design and create even more effective and memorable customer experiences. The senior team behind it are as unique, creative and perceptive as the process they’ve developed.
“Mark will now bring his expertise to the entire Oliver Group, while Roz and John will be the guardians of experience planning at the agency where it was born. Brands still have a lot to do to improve the customer experience across all their various touch points, and a focus on experience planning across the group as a whole will help our clients build new, robust and fun ways to delight and enthral their customers.”
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