Principal Consultant - S3 in London

As a Principal Consultant within Strategy3 UK, you will be a senior leader responsible for shaping, selling, and delivering some of our most impactful work with private sector clients. You will play a critical role in evolving our go-to-market proposition, with a particular focus on embedding demand spaces, category strategy, and commercial transformation into client organisations. You will act as a trusted advisor to senior client stakeholders, influencing decisions that sit at the intersection of strategy, brand, trade, and growth. Your leadership will help strengthen cross‑functional alignment across client teams (marketing, sales, commercial, product, and strategy), ensuring our thinking translates into sustainable commercial outcomes. Internally, you will be a key contributor to the growth of Strategy3 UK—supporting account expansion, winning new work, shaping intellectual property, and mentoring the next generation of consultants. This is a hybrid role with 3 days in our London office and the rest from home.

Day to day, these are the types of things you can expect to be doing during your day to day, although as Ipsos is a dynamic organisation, this may vary as different opportunities arise:

• Lead the design, development, and activation of category and demand‑led growth strategies for private sector clients.
• Translate complex market, consumer, and commercial insights into clear strategic choices and practical activation plans.
• Embed demand spaces and category thinking into client organisations, ensuring relevance across brand, portfolio, pricing, trade, and channel strategies.
• Oversee end‑to‑end project delivery, ensuring work is high quality, commercially impactful, and delivered on time and budget.
• Act as senior client counsel, supporting executives through ambiguous or high‑stakes strategic decisions.

Stakeholder & Relationship Management:

• Build and maintain strong relationships with senior client stakeholders.
• Navigate and align multiple client functions, overcoming silos and driving collective ownership of outcomes.
• Represent Strategy3 UK as a thought partner, not just a supplier.

Commercial Growth & New Business:

• Own and grow major client accounts, identifying opportunities to expand scope and deepen relationships.
• Lead or significantly contribute to new business pursuits, including opportunity shaping, proposal development, and pitching.
• Use insight‑led thinking and strong storytelling to articulate the value of Strategy3’s demand space and category expertise.
• Support the evolution of Strategy3 UK’s sector focus and go‑to‑market strategy.

Team Leadership & Capability Building:

• Provide line management, coaching, and mentoring to Consultants and Managers.
• Set high standards for analytical rigour, strategic thinking, and client engagement.
• Contribute to talent development, capability building, and the creation of new tools, methodologies, and IP.

Research & Insight:

• Direct and quality‑assure qualitative and quantitative research programmes.
• Ensure insights are not just robust but actionable, commercially grounded, and clearly communicated.

About You:

• Extensive experience in consulting or a closely related strategy environment, with strong exposure to brand, commercial, and trade strategy.
• Demonstrated success in developing and embedding category strategies for private sector clients.
• Proven ability to lead complex, multi‑disciplinary project teams.
• Strong understanding of demand spaces, growth platforms, and how they translate into organisational change.
• Excellent client‑handling skills, with experience engaging senior stakeholders.
• Commercial acumen with a clear track record of contributing to account growth or business development.
• Experience at a top‑tier consulting firm or specialist strategy consultancy.
• Established network within relevant private sector industries.
• Experience shaping thought leadership or proprietary methodologies.

Behaviours:

• Strategic and future‑oriented: Anticipates market shifts and client needs before they become obvious.
• Collaborative leader: Brings people together across disciplines and perspectives.
• Entrepreneurial and proactive: Spots opportunities, takes ownership, and drives momentum.
• Client‑obsessed: Focuses relentlessly on delivering real, measurable impact.
• Resilient and adaptable: Thrives in ambiguity and fast‑moving environments.

We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support you as an individual. Our standard benefits include 25 days annual leave, pension contribution, income protection and life assurance. In addition, there are a range of health & wellbeing, financial benefits and professional development opportunities. We realise you may have commitments outside of work and will consider flexible working applications – please highlight what you are looking for when you make your application. We have a hybrid approach to work and ask people to be in the office or with clients for 3 days per week. We are committed to equality, treating people fairly, promoting a positive and inclusive working environment and ensuring we have diversity of people and views. We recognise that this is important for our business success – a more diverse workforce will enable us to better reflect and understand the world we research and ultimately deliver better research and insight to our clients. We are proud to be a member of the Disability Confident scheme, certified as a Level 2 Disability Confident Employer. We provide an inclusive and accessible recruitment process. Your application will be reviewed by someone from our Talent Team who will be in touch either way to let you know the outcome. Ready to have an impact? Apply now!

About the Team:

Strategy3 is a leading brand, strategy and marketing consultancy, founded and run on the premise that marketing and business are intertwined, and critically, rooted in customer centricity. S3’s multi‑disciplinary team of brand strategists, researchers, management consultants, ad executives, and even a few attorneys and accountants, work together to answer complex business questions.

About Us:

Ipsos is one of the world’s largest research companies and currently the only one primarily managed by researchers, ranking as a #1 full‑service research organisation for four consecutive years. With over 75 different data‑driven solutions, and presence in 90 markets, Ipsos brings together research, implementation, methodological, and subject‑matter experts from around the world, combining thematic and technical experts to deliver top‑quality research and insights. Simply speaking, we help the biggest companies solve some of their biggest problems, serving more than 5000 clients across the globe by providing research, data, and insights on their target markets. And we are proud of our continuous efforts in making Ipsos the best place to work!