Completing our leadership team: Alex Stephenson joins Memetic

There are some people you would build a business with in a heartbeat.

For me, Alex Stephenson is one of those people.

I’m delighted to share that Alex has joined Memetic as Managing Partner, completing our senior leadership line-up alongside David Lewis, Richard Moss and me.

Alex brings over 15 years of experience helping complex organisations across science and deep tech to build trust with the people they most need to reach.

She joins us following a period of strong client demand, and at a point when Memetic is growing exactly as we intended: around brilliant senior people we trust, and with a focus on the frontier research and technologies reshaping the world.

The person you want in the room

I worked with Alex for 13 years before Memetic. During that time, she became one of the very few people I would trust implicitly to manage the most challenging, complex or sensitive situations.

As someone who naturally likes to stay close to the detail, that’s not something I say lightly.

Alex has an exceptional ability to bring calm, logic and strategic thinking into situations where there are multiple stakeholders, competing priorities and a lot at stake. She understands people quickly, and puts clients and colleagues at ease. She knows when to challenge, when to listen and when to move things forward.

She is warm, magnetic, thoughtful and commercially sharp. In complex sectors, clients need consultants who can become an extension of their team: close enough to understand the internal context, objective enough to bring a fresh perspective, and experienced enough to reduce friction rather than create it.

Alex has spent her career doing exactly that. She has supported long-term programmes for organisations including Ordnance Survey, the National Physical Laboratory and the Royal Academy of Engineering, and ambitious start-ups and scale-ups including OneWeb and bit.bio.

In many ways, Alex and I have grown up professionally together. She has often been the person I’ve trusted most to challenge my thinking, balance my perspective and make the work better. The yin to my yang!

The right moment

Alex joins Memetic after taking a year of maternity leave from her previous role at Marketbridge. For someone of her experience and ability, returning to work was always going to be about choosing the right next step.

That Alex has chosen Memetic means a huge amount to me, and says a lot about what we’re building.

Her appointment strengthens our new agency model: a senior-only team for organisations operating in areas where the science is complex, the audiences are sceptical, and the communications need to do more than generate awareness.

High-quality, evidence-led content remains central to Memetic. It is part of our heritage and will always be one of our strongest differentiators. But as we grow, we’re also deepening the integrated communications experience around it: strategy, campaigns, stakeholder engagement, media, social, partnerships, events, measurement, and the client experience that holds it all together.

Alex will play a major role in this next phase. She will help us scale senior delivery without diluting quality, broaden our integrated communications capability, and continue building the kind of agency we believe ambitious science and innovation organisations deserve.

I could not be happier to have her with us.

Welcome to Memetic, Alex.