A bottle appears on screen for seconds. No close-up. No #ad. Just a glass of Sancerre in a Taylor Swift documentary. And then it sells out. The product didn’t win because it was promoted. It won because it was chosen—and witnessed. That’s social proof in its purest form.
I’d never heard of the Savannah Bananas. But twenty minutes into listening to Jesse Cole speak, I realised I was hearing one of the clearest modern examples of brand-first leadership I’ve ever come across. Not marketing. Not storytelling. Not gimmicks. Brand decisions — taken to their logical extreme.
Most brands fight for attention. The smartest ones fight for a place in the daily routine. Mental availability gets you considered. Behavioural integration makes you irreplaceable.
AI shopping is here — and it changes everything about how people discover and buy. With ChatGPT now handling the full journey inside the chat window, digital retail finally gets the flow and immediacy physical stores have always owned. For brands, this isn’t another channel. It’s a new battleground for relevance, clarity and recommendation.
After decades of monopoly, Adobe’s Creative Cloud empire is under threat. Canva and Figma aren’t just building better tools—they’re building better relationships. This is the story of how customer contempt creates opportunity, and why every category leader should remember: the real moat isn’t market share, it’s trust.
Every few months, another beloved brand “modernises”—and forgets that heritage isn’t a problem to solve. It’s an unfair advantage waiting to be re-energised. When done with care. Learn why protecting values beats preserving versions, and how to turn heritage into a flexible system that grows with culture.
Crocs were mocked as the world’s ugliest shoe and ranked alongside asbestos as one of TIME’s worst inventions. Instead of redesigning, they doubled down on what made them different. The result? $4 billion in revenue by turning polarisation into power and giving fans permission to make the product their own.
Brands with less than 2% market share captured 39% of all incremental category growth in 2024. Up from 17% in 2023 and just 6% in 2022, according to Bain’s research into 120 insurgent brands.
The question isn’t what these brands are doing differently. It’s how they’re making decisions.
David Tran built an empire on authenticity and product obsession. But when sriracha shortages hit, shoppers like my wife grabbed any red bottle with a green cap. That’s the danger of category creation without brand ownership: competitors get the spoils. Here’s what every founder and CMO should learn from the rooster bottle’s fall.
ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer brand by accident. Now OpenAI must make intentional brand decisions to protect love and trust.
Everyone got Jaguar’s rebrand wrong. The controversial campaign wasn’t brand suicide—it was strategic brilliance. Here’s why it’s working.
In times of pressure, it’s easy to default to what’s measurable—efficiency, cost, ROI. But great brands aren’t built that way. This piece explores why choosing brand-first thinking leads to deeper connections, longer-term value, and competitive edge.
In Part 1: Researched to Average, I outlined how our obsession with research is averaging everything to death. But the solution isn’t to abandon data, it’s to use it strategically.
The research itself is damning: half of ads trigger no emotion at all. Zero. Nothing. That isn’t just boring, it’s ruinously expensive. According to a System1 report, to lift the performance of those dull ads to the level of good work would cost an extra $189 billion in media spend!
Researched To Average. How Our Data Obsession is Optimising Everything to Nothing, and the cost is huge. When every brand looks the same, every brand becomes interchangeable.
Nike didn’t just lose market share—they gave it away. A sharp look at how retreating from visibility undermined brand power, and what it means for every modern marketer.
Every great company faces a fork in the road: Optimise the business you’ve built—or stay true to the brand that built it. The business lens says: squeeze more revenue, ship faster, control the ecosystem. The brand lens says: create better experiences, earn more trust, lead through vision.
Sobriety offers benefits, but are we discarding aspects of human connection & creativity? Explore the ‘Sobriety Paradox’ & a nuanced future for alcohol.
