Why the John Lewis Christmas ad formula will never, EVER, get tired

Tis the season for ad agencies to cast cynical glances towards the latest festive offering from John Lewis. And one can understand why. In a purely creative sense, there really does seem to be a case of diminishing returns here. A full, what, six years on from the first ad that really hit the right […]

United enjoyed a record quarter after dragging that guy off their plane

Yup, this surprised me too. Following “the PR disaster to end all PR disasters” that occurred when footage was released of United Airlines forcibly removing David Dao from one of their flights due to overbooking, one might have thought that the carrier would receive some sort of retribution for their sins. I mean, all sorts […]

How should we organise our marketing departments?

Sometimes the old ways are indeed the best. You might be familiar with the concept of the four, or latterly seven “ps” that comprise marketing – product, price, promotion, place, process, people, physical environment. Whilst this list has been around for a long time (the original variation cropping up around 1960), it actually represents a […]

Purpose is broken – here’s how to fix it

This piece originally appeared in Campaign. Every brand has been created for a reason. That reason can generally be found in the value they provide that people are prepared to pay money for. Your local coffee shop, for instance, is there so that people in a very particular vicinity can get coffee. They are providing […]

A business should be a creative brief

  A creative brief – for those lucky enough to have never worked in marketing – is a document that advertising agencies give to their creative teams to prompt them to create exciting, on-message ideas. As you can imagine, it’s something that’s pretty important to get right. Get it wrong and not only is it […]

How To Write A Tagline That Transforms A Business

The formula for creating a business that will succeed in today’s post-advertising marketing is pretty simple. Firstly establish a coherent purpose for your business (and contrary to popular wisdom this doesn’t have to be anything particularly worthy, it just needs to be reasonably exciting and unique). Secondly, take that purpose and use it to develop […]

Do marketing departments stand in the way of great marketing?

  This piece first appeared in Management Today. Type Coca-Cola into Google and you get 160 million results. Being extremely charitable, Coke probably didn’t create more than 1% of that information, meaning that the genuine life of the brand exists entire out of its hands. As Jeff Bezos said, your brand is what other people […]