I think strategy might be one of the most overused, and misunderstood, words in business.

Ask ten people what their strategy is and you’ll probably get ten different answers. A three-year plan. A roadmap. A set of objectives. A list of priorities. Or, more often than not, a 60-page PowerPoint deck that gets presented once and then quietly disappears into a Google Drive folder.

None of those things are strategy.

An objective isn’t a strategy. “We want to become the most famous brand in our category” might be a perfectly good objective. But it doesn’t tell you how you’re going to get there. Likewise, a plan isn’t a strategy. A plan tells you what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it.

And strategy definitely isn’t about predicting the future. Despite what a few LinkedIn gurus might have you believe.

After 30 combined years working in strategy, I have landed on a definition that’s much simpler:

Strategy is the best possible path forward.

There are two parts of that sentence that really matter. Best possible. And path forward.

Let me explain why, and how they clearly define what strategy really is.

So let’s first dig into the idea of ‘Best Possible’…

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You can spend a career building a brand and never once control the thing people actually came for.

That’s the sentence that stuck with me after an hour talking to Charlotte Ullathorne, Head of Marketing at ODEON. Not the stat about UK cinema admissions clawing back to pre-pandemic levels. Not the bit about £5 tickets on a Monday. This one. Because most of us in this industry operate under a quiet assumption: if the product’s bad, that’s not our problem, that’s Product’s problem. ODEON doesn’t get that luxury. The thing people are actually there for, the film, is made by someone else, marketed by someone else first, and can bomb on opening night no matter how good the popcorn is.

I’ve spent twenty years doing brand strategy and I couldn’t think of many parallels. A shopping centre gets closest, except even a shopping centre controls its signage and its shop mix. ODEON doesn’t get to choose whether Tuesday’s release is any good. It just has to sell you a seat for it anyway.

That’s a strange job. And talking to Charlotte, three things came out of it that really stuck with me.

1. You can build a brand around a product you don’t own

Every previous marketing role Charlotte has had at the like of Powerleague &, Center Parcs, retail she had influence over the product. ODEON is the first time she hasn’t.

“In every single previous marketing role I’ve had, we controlled the product. Whereas film, you could do the best marketing campaign in the world and target everyone with a great product, but if the film gets bad reviews… it’s not actually our product.” Charlotte Ullathorne, Head of Marketing, ODEON Cinemas.

Sit with that for a second. You can nail the creative, buy the right media, get the timing perfect, and the outcome is still, in large part, out of your hands. Most brand strategy assumes you’re the one steering the ship. ODEON’s job is closer to being an extremely good captain of a ferry, you don’t choose the passengers, you don’t choose the weather, but you’d better get everyone across in one piece.

What that means in practice is that ODEON’s actual product, the thing it can control, isn’t the film at all. It’s the seat, the screen, the sound, the thirty seconds before the trailers when your phone’s still in your pocket. Which is probably why the brand line that’s outlasted every campaign in Charlotte’s time there is deliberately not about the films:

“The one that’s consistent and has always been consistent is ‘we make movies better.’ That’s been our longstanding strap line… that’s the one I think it sticks with us and will be with us.” Charlotte Ullathorne, Head of Marketing, ODEON Cinemas.

Of course, they do talk about making films great, and they do a fantastic job of building excitement around them. But ultimately, how well a film is reviewed or received is outside their control. That’s why “We Make Movies Better” is so important as a strapline. It sits above the success or failure of any individual film and focuses on something ODEON can always control: making the experience of watching a movie better.

Not “watch great films.” We make movies better. It’s a brand built to sit underneath whatever the studios throw at it, good or bad, and still mean something on its own.

2. The best positioning against a threat is never naming it

I asked Charlotte, fairly directly, whether ODEON thinks of itself as the antidote to scrolling, to Netflix, to being permanently switched on. What I got instead was a brand that’s clearly thought hard about this and has decided not to say any of it out loud.

“We don’t really do the whole Netflix versus cinema, because you could argue there’s a place for both. It’s not really our strategy... we’re don’t need to put other brands down, to make us look good” Charlotte Ullathorne, Head of Marketing, ODEON Cinemas.

No comparison ads. No “remember what you’re missing.” Instead, a campaign built entirely around loneliness at Christmas, the idea that going to the cinema alone still isn’t going alone, because you’re in a room full of people having the same experience as you.

“We did a big campaign at Christmas around loneliness, reminding people that one of the amazing things about the cinema is you’re never alone. Even if you go alone, you are not alone, because you’re in a shared experience.” Charlotte Ullathorne, Head of Marketing, ODEON Cinemas.

That’s the whole positioning, and it never mentions a phone, an app, or a rival once. It just makes the case for the room you’re already in. I think there’s something in that for anyone building a brand against a cultural villain, the temptation is always to name it, and the more disciplined move is usually to just be the better thing and let people draw the line themselves.

It also explains something that surprised me: Gen Z, a generation that grew up with everything on demand in their pocket, is one of the strongest audiences coming back through ODEON’s doors right now. Not despite the phones. Alongside them.

“That generation are very mindful of health and well-being, more so than we were. Going to the cinema, looking after yourself, that’s solo dating and they’re filming their experience, aren’t they, so it’s that social media movement that’s shifted it.” Charlotte Ullathorne, Head of Marketing, ODEON Cinemas.

Which is a strange loop when you think about it. The same platform that trained a generation to want everything instantly is also the platform now selling them on going somewhere slow, dark, and phone-free, because it’s content. Cinema didn’t fight the scroll. It became something worth scrolling about.

3. One brand, no single message

The bit that surprised me most, because I hadn’t thought about it before this conversation, is that ODEON can’t always run one national message. Not because of budget or bureaucracy. Because the estate itself isn’t one thing.

“...not one size fits all, because our cinemas are so different. We have brand new ODEON Luxes that are gorgeous and can compete with the most luxurious cinemas in the market. Then we have equally brilliant ones that have been there eighty-plus years, in the hearts of communities...”Charlotte Ullathorne, Head of Marketing, ODEON Cinemas

So the brand splits itself by site, on purpose. Recliner seats in one postcode, free parking as the entire pitch in another.

“It might be that our cinema in a certain area has the best recliner seats, so we’ll lean into that. It might be in other areas where we’ve got free parking, and it could be something as simple and functional as that. If it’s raining, you can park right outside and run in.” Charlotte Ullathorne, Head of Marketing, ODEON Cinemas

That local layer sits underneath a national one, not instead of it. The big, film-led brand campaigns do the awareness work; the recliners-here, parking-there messaging is where the actual conversion happens, town by town.

“We still have to combine our marketing with tactical campaigns, those conversion campaigns I’ve just spoken about, but also reinforcing the brand. It’s always going to be surrounded in the traditional ODEON brand that is really recognisable.” Charlotte Ullathorne, Head of Marketing, ODEON Cinemas

So it’s not really inconsistency, it’s a brand running two jobs at once: a single recognisable identity at the top, and a hundred slightly different local arguments underneath it. What holds the whole thing together isn’t the messaging, though. It’s something you can’t manufacture with a campaign at all:

“I think it’s driven a lot by heritage and legacy. Everybody knows ODEON. If you think about the last hundred years, everyone will have been to an ODEON at some point in their life.” Charlotte Ullathorne, Head of Marketing, ODEON Cinemas

Nearly a hundred years of being the place someone had their first date, or took their kids, or hid from the heat, does something a strapline can’t. You can’t put that in a campaign brief. It’s just true, repeated enough times across enough lives that the brand doesn’t need to argue for itself anymore.

Summary

ODEON’s story proves brand strength and product control aren’t the same thing. Charlotte Ullathorne doesn’t own the film customers walk in for, so she built the brand around what she does own: the seat, the room, the shared dark. “We make movies better” survives every flop because it was never a bet on the films.

That same discipline shows in how ODEON handles Netflix, never named, never compared against. Instead, a campaign about loneliness makes the case for the room itself and lets the contrast draw itself. It’s why a generation raised on-demand now chooses to sit still, phones away, and films it for the story after.

And underneath the national brand sit a hundred local arguments, recliners here, parking there, held together not by a tagline but by a century of first dates and rainy Tuesdays.

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Sina Neubrandt spent years creating bold work that came out of Absolut and Adidas, and she’s just left all that behind for something almost nobody would call a brand yet: Air Up, the scent-based water bottle company. A near-blank canvas after two decades on brands with decades of cultural equity already built in.

She told me why she jumped. And its a very personal story. Her daughter got a kidney stone. The doctor said drink more water. Sina did what every parent does (nagged, pleaded, got nowhere) until she noticed her daughter necking an Air Up bottle unprompted, drinking more water than she ever had before. That’s the kind of product truth that sticks with the best markters.

But as Sina is at the beginning of her journey at AirUp i want to delve into something else. I wanted to know what she’d learned building some of the bravest campaigns in marketing; Its in Our Spirit, Kiss With Pride & the Adidas Ridiculous Run campaign and the Womens World cup 2022 . All work that actually says something, when so much of what gets called “brave” in this industry is just a brief with a bigger media budget attached. Three things came out of that call that I haven’t stopped thinking about.

Bravery is a culture, not a campaign

Ask most agencies why they’re not braver and you’ll get some version of “the client won’t let us.“ Sina’s answer was different. She traced Absolut’s boldness back to the founder, decades ago, who refused to play the category’s game of talking heritage and provenance and where the grain was grown

He ran the Absolut Perfection campaign instead: pure, simple, nothing like what any other spirits brand was doing. It worked. And a company that gets big off one brave idea tends to keep hiring people who want the next one. That’s the actual mechanism. Not a braver brief.

“If you come into Absolut, they want you to come up with ideas that give you goosebumps.” Sina Neubrandt

So infectious was this culture that, nine years in, she found herself painting her summer house in the brand’s colours. For me, that’s the clearest evidence of a truly powerful brand culture. Because a culture of bravery isn’t something you install with a workshop or write into a set of values. If it’s real, it becomes something you absorb… until, eventually, it starts shaping the way you see the world.

But the real test of a brave culture is whether it survives contact with the people who didn’t write the brief. I asked Sina how she’d managed to get global work like In Our Spirit, shot remotely, during lockdown, with almost no product in it, through local markets, each convinced they know their market better than anyone.

“There isn’t really a tip. It comes down to relationships, you need to learn influencing as a skill…if you don’t involve people early, it’s organ rejection. Not created here.” Sina Neubrandt

To summarise simply culture gets you the brave idea, but you need brave people to get it out the door.

The best provocation is an unsaid truth

Adidas’s ‘Breast Gallery’ gave me the cleanest expression of the idea that the best provocation is an unsaid truth. The campaign was born from a simple but powerful insight: 90% of women were wearing the wrong sports bra.

And while that campaign happened before Sina joined, she watched the same pattern play out in her own work. ‘The Ridiculous Run’ was built around another startling truth: 92% of women don’t feel safe running.

The campaign sparked many conversations and also created awareness. Some men were writing they had no idea and from now on would be more thoughtful when seeing a women run. A small behavioural shift sparked by a campaign whose entire creative team was, by design, women.

“A lot of men were writing in saying thank you, I had no idea.”

That’s an unsaid truth reaching the people who needed to hear it. And what struck me was how obvious the insight sounds once someone finally says it. That gap, between what most quietly know and what anyone has actually said out loud in public, is where the real bravery here lived.

You have to earn the right to be bold

Today everything is more polarising than before and boldness that used to read as confident now can be read as a target. Her filter for whether to run with something isn’t whether it’ll cause a stir. It’s whether it’s true to the brand and if it has a right and credibility to speak to it.

That’s the difference between Kiss With Pride and the campaigns that make you wince. Absolut had been showing up for LGBTQ rights for decades before that work existed. Compare that to some brand discovering an opinion overnight and getting torched for it

Same category of provocation, completely different foundations. One is decades of earned credibility being cashed in. The other is a company saying something for the first time and hoping nobody checks the receipts. Consumers can tell the difference instantly, even when they can’t articulate why.

And the checking happens fast now. A brand with no track record on an issue used to get a news cycle before anyone noticed the gap between the campaign and the company. Now it gets about a day. Which means the old trick, borrow interest from a cause, run the ad, move on before anyone asks hard questions, simply doesn’t work anymore. The DNA has to already be there, because there’s no longer enough runway to fake it.

Sina’s now doing this from a standing start at Air Up, no accumulated brand equity, no forty years of “this is who we are” to lean on, just a genuinely useful product and the instincts she built at two companies that already had all of that. With her pedigree and experience, im truly excited to see what this brand does next.

I ended up reading a genuinely sharp essay on the film this week, and the detail that stuck with me was the theme of the trickster. In the film Odysseus is played by Matt Damon. A man who by all accounts wakes early and rarely finishes a second glass of wine, is no “man of many wiles.” He’s not a trickster. And that, the essay argues, was Nolan’s first trick: he didn’t cast Odysseus as a trickster at all. He cast him as a man surveying the wreckage tricksters leave behind.

I then went onto read Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World. Hyde’s trickster (Loki, Coyote, Raven, Hermes, Eshu) exists to disrupt the things a culture depends on: he “dances across customs and taboos, says what cannot be said, does what should not have been done.” This is necessary, because a culture that can’t meet disruption with creativity doesn’t survive change. It is also dangerous, because a culture that can’t protect its core values gets eaten by a trickster’s corruption instead. In Native American traditions, Coyote is a vital trickster figure who steals fire from greedy beings or spirits to save freezing human. In Norse mythology Loki does not bring Armageddon (or Ragnarok) by himself, but he plays a major part in starting it. Same archetype, opposite ending, depending on which way it tips.

Now let’s look to modern day tricksters likeTrump, Musk, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate. What do they do? And what do really care about? Well none of them are really interested in solving a crisis. All of there real interest lies in perpetuating chaotic conditions of confusion & profiting from it .Whether in terms of monetarily or attention or both.

And whats most interesting is i really don’t think this is a political moment. I think we’re in a mythological one, and i believe its now coming for brands.

Trust broke & chaos moved in

Tricksters only show up once the conditions already exist and right now the conditions are almost perfect.

Trust in institutions is somewhere near rock bottom. Pew has US trust in federal government sitting around 17%, one of the lowest readings in seven decades, and The Guardian has spent years describing British politics as simply broken. Add a financial crisis nobody quite recovered from, a decade of stagnant wages and a pandemic that exposed how fragile the whole arrangement was, and you get an audience that’s stopped expecting competence and started rewarding confidence instead.

That’s the opening a trickster needs.

Layer the attention economy on top and it gets even worse. Platforms reward reaction and outrage. Infact MIT found that false political stories travel six times faster on Twitter than true ones, mostly because real people share them, not bots. And tricksters love these conditions, because they don’t need to win the argument. They just need to be the loudest thing in the feed before the fact-check loads.

Put those two things together, broken trust, an algorithm that rewards noise, and you’ve built the perfect stage for Tricksters.

Alastair Campbell put it better than I can: we’re not just in a post-truth world, he said, but a post-shame world, where broken promises no longer carry a cost. That’s the real shift. It’s not that the tricksters lie more than politicians always have. It’s that getting caught stopped mattering.

So what are the implications of all this for brands, let’s dive in…

The weapon is simplicity, fired on repeat

Not all tricksters look alike, but they’re running the same play.

Tricksters win with clarity, not depth. Trump’s language analysis reads almost childlike: short words, constant repetition, “I” and his own name doing most of the heavy lifting. Farage’s rallies aren’t policy briefings, they’re call and response. Underneath it is basic psychology, not laziness. Repeated claims start to feel true whether or not they are, the illusory truth effect, and a message that’s easy to process beats one that’s merely accurate, especially in a feed nobody’s reading closely.

Byron Sharp would recognise the mechanism even if he’d hate the application. Distinctive, repeated, simple cues are exactly how brands build mental availability. Whether you like it or not “Just Do It” and “Take Back Control” are closer cousins than anyone would like to admit, in terms of how they operate.

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I keep coming back to one number from the games industry this year: $188.8 billion. That’s global revenue in 2025, across roughly 3.6 billion players, and Newzoo reckons it keeps climbing from here.

Now sit that next to this one. In GDC’s 2026 developer survey, 28% of respondents said they’d been laid off in the last two years. Half said their current or most recent employer had cut jobs in the past 12 months. Two-thirds of the people working inside AAA studios said their company had done layoffs.

Read those two paragraphs again. An industry generating record revenue, with more players than ever, is simultaneously making thousands of the people who build the thing redundant. Yet strangely demand is fine. People want to play games & arguably more than they ever have.

So what’s actually going on?

The industry lost the plot

For a while I thought this was just a hangover story. Too much lockdown spending, too much cheap money, the usual post-boom correction. And sure that’s part of it. Companies looked at 2020 and 2021, decided the growth rate was permanent, and hired, financed and acquired against it. Then the world reopened, interest rates went up, and the growth rate turned out to be exactly what it looked like: temporary. Reuters reported games revenue grew just 0.6% in 2023, after actually falling in 2022.

But the more I sat with it, the more I realised the hangover explains the timing. It doesn’t explain the decisions. Underneath the macro story, four very avoidable strategic choices turned a normal correction into a bloodbath and one company managed to mostly sidestep all four. Not by being smaller, or slower, or more nostalgic. But by having a clearer idea of what it was actually for.

Before we dive into that, lets first look at the mistakes they avoided that most other companies made…

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I keep coming back to a strange fact: 450 million people open Snapchat every single day, and yet nobody thinks of it as a winner. Not the press, not advertisers, not even the teenagers who built their whole social lives on it a decade ago. It loses money. It loses relevance. And it did both while inventing nearly every format that now defines social media.

Disappearing messages. Stories. AR filters. Snapchat built all of it first. Then, one by one, it watched Meta, Apple and Google pick up each invention, bolt it onto a bigger audience, and turn it into a weapon against the company that dreamed it up. That’s not bad luck. That’s a brand strategy failure playing out in slow motion, and it’s worth sitting with, because the mistakes are the kind that show up in far smaller businesses too.

The company that refused to be a company

Snapchat’s origin story is already a tell. Three Stanford students, one stolen idea, and a founder in Evan Spiegel who paid the guy whose concept it originally was $157 million after a lawsuit rather than any credit up front. Before Snapchat had a single user, it had already established the pattern that would define it: take what works, don’t ask who it belongs to, and assume growth forgives everything.

That instinct served Spiegel well early on. When Mark Zuckerberg offered $3 billion to buy the company in 2013, Spiegel said no and bought six copies of The Art of War for his team. Ballsy, and in isolation, a defensible bet on his own vision. But it also revealed something about how he’d run the company for the next decade: alone, and unwilling to hear otherwise.

The camera company that couldn’t cash the cheque

Here’s the detail that matters most to me, because it’s a positioning decision, and positioning decisions are the ones that quietly determine everything downstream. When Snapchat filed to go public in 2017, it didn’t describe itself as a social network. It called itself a camera company.

That wasn’t modesty. It was counterpositioning, and for a while it worked brilliantly. Facebook was the incumbent that tracked you, catalogued you, and sold you to advertisers. Snapchat’s entire pitch was the opposite: nothing sticks, nothing gets remembered, nothing becomes a permanent record of your teenage years. For a generation of users who’d grown up watching their parents get in trouble for what they posted, that was a genuine category entry point. Real need, real moment, real reason to open the app.

But counterpositioning against a business model means you’ve also locked yourself out of that business model. Meta makes north of $200 per user per year in the US because it knows everything about you. Snapchat built its entire identity on knowing nothing about you, on purpose, as a feature. You cannot have it both ways. The thing that made Snapchat feel safe and different is the exact thing that capped how much money it could ever make from each user. That’s not an accident of execution. That’s what happens when your positioning is defined entirely in opposition to someone else, rather than around a need you can monetise on your own terms.

Assets versus moments

The second thing Snapchat never seemed to grasp is the difference between an audience and a moment. Every Snap disappeared. Every post was a fresh start. Which sounds poetic until you realise it means there was nothing to compound, nothing to build on, and nobody with a reason to keep showing up for you specifically rather than for the app in general.

Compare that to what Instagram did the second it cloned the Stories format in 2016. Instagram already understood that a following is an appreciating asset. Creators come back because the relationship compounds: post today, and people who liked yesterday’s post are there to see it. That reciprocity is the entire economic engine behind the creator economy, and it’s why people who make content for a living live on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, not Snapchat.

Kylie Jenner’s tweet in February 2018 (does anybody else not use Snapchat anymore or is it just me?) wasn’t a random celebrity complaint. It was a rational response to a platform that had built nothing for her to invest in. On Snapchat, she got nothing back for the audience she’d built there. On Instagram, every follower was a compounding asset she could keep nurturing. The stock lost $1.3 billion in a day. That’s what it costs when a platform never gives its most valuable users a reason to stay other than habit.

Being first isn’t a moat

The most expensive lesson in this whole story is that invention without a network is just R&D for your competitors. Snapchat built disappearing messages before Apple made them a standard iMessage feature in 2017. It built AR filters before Instagram and everyone else made them table stakes. It built Stories before Instagram took the format and, within two months, had grown it to 100 million users, more than Snapchat itself had at the time.

None of that was theft in the legal sense. It’s just what happens when your invention is a feature rather than a system. Instagram wasn’t cloning a product, it was attaching a proven feature to something Snapchat never built: a durable social graph. That’s the pattern repeating again right now with AR glasses. Snapchat’s new Spectacles are, by all technical accounts, genuinely excellent, competitive with Apple’s Vision Pro. But Meta’s glasses come with the Facebook social graph already wired in, Google’s will come with Android and search, and Apple’s will come with an ecosystem people are already locked into. Snapchat has spectacular hardware and nobody to send a message to. First doesn’t mean forever if you never convert the invention into a relationship people can’t get anywhere else.

The dictator problem

Underneath all of it sits the same structural flaw: a founder who never had to listen to anyone. When Snapchat’s 2018 redesign tanked usage, lost three million users in a single quarter and triggered a 1.2 million-signature petition to reverse it, reports later confirmed that Spiegel had overruled his own team’s warnings. Nobody could stop him, because nobody was structurally able to.

That’s the through-line from the Reggie Brown lawsuit to the Zuckerberg standoff to the redesign disaster to the TikTok scramble that burned through $130 million in creator payments with nothing to show for it once the money stopped. Total control can produce fast, confident decisions. It can also produce catastrophically wrong ones with no mechanism to catch them before they ship. Every founder I respect is the opposite of this: hungry for the pushback, not immune to it.

Four things worth carrying forward

If I pull the thread on all of this, four ideas keep surfacing that apply well beyond Snapchat.

First, counterpositioning against a competitor’s business model is powerful for growth and dangerous for monetisation. It wins you an audience by being everything the incumbent isn’t, but it can permanently box you out of the revenue mechanics you’ll eventually need. Know which trade-off you’re making before you make it.

Second, an audience is an asset, a moment is not. If your product gives users no reason to compound a relationship, whether that’s followers, loyalty, or repeat use, you’re renting attention, not building a business. The people who matter most to your growth need a reason to stay that outlasts novelty.

Third, invention is not a moat. Being first to a feature only matters if you can convert it into a system, network, or relationship your competitors can’t copy. Otherwise you’re doing unpaid product research for whoever has the bigger distribution.

Fourth, a founder who can’t be challenged is a single point of failure for the entire business. Fast decisions made in isolation work right up until they’re catastrophically wrong, and there’s no one there to catch it before it costs you three million users in a quarter.

Snapchat isn’t a failure by any normal measure. Evan Spiegel is a billionaire and 450 million people still open the app daily. But it’s the story of a company that kept inventing the future and kept handing it to somebody else to own.

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

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Here’s a valuation puzzle I can’t stop turning over.

There’s a business that made $700 million in profit last year. It has 46 employees. No debt. Revenue of $7.2 billion flows through it annually. It pays more UK tax than Starbucks, IBM, and Microsoft combined. On raw numbers, it’s one of the most efficient money machines in the history of the internet…roughly $46 million of revenue per employee, against the couple of hundred thousand you’d see at Google or Salesforce.

If that business were a boring SaaS company, it would trade at 15 to 30 times earnings. Tens of billions. Instead, its owner spent over a year trying to sell it, watched an $8 billion deal collapse, and eventually settled for $5.5 billion from a firm most people have never heard of, which reportedly had to scrape the financing together because nearly everyone invited to invest said no.

The business is OnlyFans. And the gap between what it earns and what it’s worth is one of the cleanest demonstrations I’ve ever seen of something we in brand land say constantly and prove rarely: brand isn’t a soft metric. It’s a structural input to value. Sometimes it’s the whole discount.

The accidental empire

The origin story is almost comically small. In 2016, Tim Stokely, a serial founder of unglamorous adult sites, borrows £10,000 from his dad. One last loan, his dad says. See what you can do with it.

What he builds is, initially, not an adult platform at all. OnlyFans launches with adult content banned. The pitch was Patreon with sharper teeth: creators connect directly with fans, keep 80% of the revenue. The problem was that Patreon already existed and was doing a perfectly good job of being Patreon.

So in 2017, quietly, the ban gets lifted. Adult performers flood in for the first time able to earn directly from an audience without a middleman taking most of the cut. In 2018, a famously reclusive operator named Leonid Radvinsky buys 75% of the company. Then COVID hits, the world locks down, and the user base grows 75% in a single month. Beyoncé name-drops the platform and traffic jumps 15% overnight. By 2021, net revenue is nearly a billion dollars.

A £10,000 loan becomes one of the most profitable businesses on the internet. And almost nobody wants to own it.

The brand trust problem

Before we get to the valuation problem, there’s a brand problem underneath it that I find far more interesting.

What OnlyFans actually sells, the thing the customer believes they’re buying, isn’t content. It’s connection. A direct line to a real person. The parasocial relationship is the product.

Except, at scale, it wasn’t. As creators grew, an entire shadow industry of agencies emerged to run their accounts and specifically their DMs, where the real money was made. The customer thought they were messaging the creator. They were messaging a stranger in a call centre, possibly managing five of these “relationships” simultaneously, whose sole job was to get the credit card out as often as possible. The New York Times gave the practice a name: e-pimping.

This what i call the expectancy violation; the gap between promise and delivery doesn’t just disappoint people, it makes them feel betrayed, and betrayal makes people loud. This is that, industrialised. The entire value proposition rested on authenticity, and the operational reality was its exact opposite. The class action lawsuits have already started. The first three were dismissed. More are coming.

When your product is trust and your operations are a lie, you don’t have a business. You have a countdown.

Who actually regulates a brand?

Here’s the part of this story that I think matters most for anyone building anything, in any category.

OnlyFans was never really regulated by governments. It was regulated by other brands. In 2019, Metro Bank shut down its accounts with no notice. In 2021, Mastercard introduced a policy requiring adult platforms to verify and review every piece of content and every creator’s government ID, a compliance burden that nearly killed the business model outright. JP Morgan and others cut off wire services. At one point, OnlyFans announced it would ban adult content entirely , the thing the entire company was, because the banks left it no choice. It reversed the decision six days later, only after public pressure made the banks blink.

Think about what that means. The morality policing of the modern internet isn’t being done by legislatures or courts. It’s being done by risk committees at payment networks. Mastercard has more practical power over what exists online than most governments do.

And this is the mechanism behind the valuation discount. Huge pools of capital , pension funds, most private equity, most institutional money, are simply not allowed to touch this category. It doesn’t matter what the numbers say. The stigma isn’t a reputational inconvenience; it’s a structural exclusion from the buyer pool. Fewer eligible buyers, lower price. Pornhub, throwing off cash, sold for $400 million in 2023. Patreon, the polite version of this exact model, sold for $4 billion despite never turning a profit.

Same mechanics. Different brand. Ten-figure difference.

That’s the thing I want people to sit with. We talk about brand equity like it’s a warm feeling, a logo preference, a tracker score. Here it is expressed in the bluntest possible unit: billions of dollars of enterprise value, evaporated, purely because of what the business means rather than what it earns.

Getting out when the getting’s good

There’s a coda to this story, and it complicates the neat business lesson.

The obvious read on Radvinsky’s sale was that he saw the headwinds, the banking fragility, the lawsuits, the AI-generated creators already earning €10,000 a month on rival platforms and threatening to hollow out the marketplace entirely. Smart money exits before the cliff, not after. It’s the Blockbuster playbook: the billionaires who sold it did so precisely because they could see the future and didn’t fancy it.

Then, weeks after the sale reports, the news broke that Radvinsky had died of cancer at 43. He wasn’t just reading market signals. He was dying, and almost nobody knew.

I don’t have a tidy framework for that. But it’s a useful humility check for anyone who analyses businesses from the outside, which is most of us, most of the time: there is always information you don’t have. The strategy deck never contains the whole story. Sometimes the “brilliant timing” is a man putting his affairs in order.

The question I keep coming back to

Strip out the salacious bits and OnlyFans is a controlled experiment that brand strategists could never ethically run: take a business with flawless unit economics and attach maximum negative brand association to it. What happens?

The answer is now on the record. You lose the buyers. You lose the banks. You lose the multiple. You operate permanently at the mercy of other companies’ risk appetites. And no amount of cash generation, not $700 million a year, not tax bills bigger than Microsoft’s, buys you back in.

Brand isn’t the paint on the machine. It’s a load-bearing wall. OnlyFans just showed us, to the nearest billion, exactly how much weight it holds.

Would love to your thoughts in the comments, let me know beow…

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

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Most challenger brands would sell a kidney for an origin story like DASH’s.

Two founders from farming families. Roughly a third of Britain’s fruit and veg crop rejected by supermarkets for being insufficiently photogenic. A sparkling water built from exactly that wonky, unwanted produce, and aiming to ‘find a better way’ of creating a healthy soft drink. It’s the kind of narrative that writes its own PR, makes journalists misty-eyed, and earns you shelf space on vibes alone.

So the most interesting thing Bridget Hirst, DASH’s Brand Director, told me is that the smartest move they’ve made is to quietly demote it from its primary message.

We covered a lot of ground over an hour, from which four themes about how DASH actually scales kept surfacing. Let’s dive in.

1. Moving beyond the founding story

When DASH launched, wonky sat front and centre. It was the hook, the differentiator, the thing you remembered. And whilst it was a brilliant founding centre of gravity, the brand has now cleverly began to move beyond it.

“Wonky remains a complete hygiene factor for us, but it’s not the main reason people buy. People are buying us because they think we taste great, we’re a healthier option, and they’re really proud to be seen with the can.” Bridget Hirst, Brand Director, DASH Water

That’s a subtle but important shift, because whilst DASH hasn’t abandoned their founding story, they have stopped asking it to do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to selling. As Hirst puts it, the ambition is bigger than a waste story: they want to “drive a healthy hydration revolution.”

Simply DASH has moved it to where it belongs: the reassurance, not the reason. It’s a pattern I’ve seen before too. Olipop in the US started as a hardcore probiotic and grew into a modern soda that happens to be better for you. Same instinct: lead with the want, let the worthiness back it up.

When DASH launched, wonky sat front and centre. It was the hook, the differentiator, the thing you remembered. The trouble with hooks is that they’re brilliant at getting you noticed but not always the right answer to get you to a hundred million.

2. Taste is the table stakes

I am sure you have all seen that Kantar deck a thousand times. You know the one. The one that proclaims that taste is the number one driver of purchase in food and drink. Whilst it may be true, i do believe there are problems with it. me. My problem with it is that if everyone leads on taste, nobody owns it. You end up with fifty brands and one identical tagline, all shouting “delicious” into the same void.

Hirst’s instinct here is exactly right:

“Taste is everyone’s number one driver of purchase, but it’s the hygiene factor. Your drink would have to be doing something really fundamental for taste not to be number one.” Bridget Hirst, Brand Director, DASH water

Her answer to the trap is the platform DASH has built its last year around: a bold rejection of compromise. Not “we taste great”, everyone says that, but it’s not about what you give up, it’s about what you keep. The wellness aisle has historically spoken the language of sacrifice: less sugar, fewer calories, none of the fun. DASH flipped the script. You get the taste and the no-sugar, no-sweetener credentials, and you’re asked to surrender nothing.

The craft is all in the execution. This summer’s out-of-home doesn’t just say taste, it conveys it through the way product is treated and shown.

3. The in-house engine

There’s a quiet revolution happening in how brands and agencies work together, and DASH is a tidy case study. The original “rejection of compromise” platform, the TV idea that became campaign of the week, was built with an external agency as a one-off. Everything since has been made in-house: Dry January, the Pink Lady launch, this summer’s campaign. The platform was bought once and has been compounded internally ever since.

“The continuation of the platform has been done in-house. We are a small team wearing many hats at once… you can be the brand manager, strategist, creative director and producer all in one day.” Bridget Hirst, Brand Director, DASH water

This is a small, agile team,running national campaigns that out-score work made for several times the money. Their drink-that-has-it-all TV ad scored 5.1 on System One on a very modest production budget.

The clearest proof of the model is the campaign landing right now. Rather than reinvent, the team has taken last year’s award-winner and pushed it further: TV rolling out wider from the start of July, the high-reach London out-of-home repeating, and radio added for the first time as a complementary layer. The one thing they deliberately rebuilt was the out-of-home creative. The reshoot trades flat neon for crisp, premium product photography and a fresh run of those double-win lines: taste like a festival headline set, and eight hours’ sleep after; the returning taste like a summer fling, ingredients of a life partner; and, for the cherry can and its younger, 2am-Pasha-nightclub shopper, taste like dancing till 2am, ingredients of bed by eight. There’s even a long-format version that simply lists every quiet compromise modern life asks of you ( shared the suitcase, chosen the salad when you wanted the chips, pretended deep house is your jam) before offering a drink that doesn’t. The same thesis is heading to France too, dialled towards the functional reason-to-believe for an audience that’s never met the brand.

It isn’t all glossy brand work, either. Big DASH, the larger can that’s become a serious growth lever in Sainsbury’s and Tesco meal deals, gets a tactical on-pack promo this summer. The prize is a Mini, chosen with a straight face for a “very female-leaning buyer of a certain age,” which is exactly the kind of detail that separates a promotion that builds the brand from one that just shifts tins. Even a sales mechanic, in Hirst’s words, doesn’t have to be “really lame.”

4. The hustle

Ask any challenger marketer where the disproportionate returns hide and, if they’re honest, they’ll point at partnerships. Hirst has the receipts. At Proper, a Barbie collaboration, Pantone-matched pink, a handful of activations, unlocked two thousand units of grocery feature space the brand had never had before, and set the template for KFC and Netflix tie-ups that followed. At DASH, a Perello “clean dirty martini” box for Dry January cost next to nothing and delivered the best PR the brand has ever had.

The selection logic is sharp and entirely unsentimental:

“Either their awareness is higher than yours, or they’re more relevant or more cool than you and how can you borrow a bit of that equity?” Bridget Hirst, Brand Director, DASH water

But the part she kept circling back to wasn’t strategy. It was effort.

“This is the difference between challengers and big brands. It’s the hustle.” Bridget Hirst, Brand Director, DASH water

The unglamorous truth of a small brand is that the brand team also becomes the sales team, the CEO occasionally gets dispatched to take someone out for a drink, and a launch can hinge on whether you can physically track down the fruit buyer in Tesco and persuade him to shelve your can next to the apples, which is precisely how DASH got its Pink Lady flavour into incremental, out-of-category space. Big brands buy distribution. Challengers improvise it.

The four themes, in one place

If you take nothing else from an hour with Bridget Hirst, take these:

1. Moving beyond the founding story. DASH’s wonky-fruit origin is a hygiene factor and a source of permission, not the reason anyone buys. So do keep the ethics as a feature, but not as the main driver of purchase. .

2. You can’t win on taste, so don’t try. Taste is table stakes for the entire category. DASH made it ownable by building a platform around the rejection of compromise and by showing taste rather than claiming it.

3. Own the platform in-house. A small, agile team holding both strategy and creative buys you consistency and punches absurdly above its budget. You give up a little specialist polish; you gain a brand idea that compounds instead of resetting every quarter.

4. The hustle is the moat. Borrowed-equity partnerships pay back disproportionately but only if everyone, from brand to sales to the founders, is willing to graft for them. Big brands buy their way in. Challengers earn it.

None of this is exotic. That’s rather the point. DASH isn’t winning because it found a secret; it’s winning because it keeps asking the boring, disciplined question most brands to often skip.

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I’ve been trying to work out why a certain kind of horror film keeps landing so hard right now, and I think I’ve finally got it. The monster isn’t a ghost. It isn’t a demon. It isn’t a man in a scary mask either.

It’s a guy who thinks you owe him a date.

The internet has a name for this now: incel horror. And before anyone emails me to say it isn’t a real genre, you’re half right, and that’s exactly the interesting part. The label is ahead of the literature. It’s everywhere in criticism, in creator interviews, in the TikTok-Reddit-Letterboxd churn where culture actually gets named these days. It’s barely anywhere in formal academic genre theory. Which tells you something marketers forget constantly: a fear can become culturally legible long before anyone writes the textbook.

A monstrous metaphor

Look at what’s actually being made. Obsession, where the director Curry Barker built a “nice guy” so entitled the audience coined the genre name before the press did. You, which Netflix sells, with a completely straight face, as the story of “a dangerously charming, obsessive man.” Adolescence, which centres on a 13-year-old accused of murdering a classmate and which the UK government formally backed for use in schools to help students understand misogyny, online radicalisation and healthy relationships.

When the government starts putting your horror series on the curriculum, you are no longer dealing with a niche.

Here’s the thing I keep circling however. None of these films are reacting to vague “gender tension.” They’re dramatising a very specific script: men reading rejection as injustice, treating access to women as a reward for emotional labour, and dressing up control as care. The villain speaks the language of romance, self-improvement and nostalgia while doing something coercive. That’s why it lands. The Guardian’s Van Badham called it horror finding its current “monstrous metaphor” and tied it straight to anxiety about bodily autonomy.

And it sells. Obsession cleared more than $371m worldwide and became Focus Features’ biggest film ever. So this isn’t critic-bait that 400 people streamed out of obligation. It’s a premise with broad commercial traction, which means the fear underneath it is mainstream enough to move tickets.

That’s the bit brands should sit with. Incel horror isn’t telling you “horror is hot.” It’s a map. It shows you where a diffuse social dread has condensed into a shape ordinary enough to be the most believable villain in the room.

A failure to reach all

The structural story underneath all this is a gap that’s getting wider, not narrower.

The FT clocked “a new global gender divide” in early 2024, young men and young women pulling apart across rich democracies. Gallup put numbers on it: in the US, roughly 40% of women aged 18–29 now identify as liberal, against about 25% of men the same age. And critically, that gap is being driven by young women moving, while young men stay put.

It’s not just party labels, either. A King’s College London study found the sharpest split among 16–29s was over the phrase “toxic masculinity”, 37% of young men called it unhelpful, against 19% of young women. And a 29-country Ipsos study published this year found 31% of Gen Z men agreed a wife should always obey her husband, 33% thought the husband should have the final word, and 59% felt men are expected to do too much to support equality.

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Bank of America has been handing out collectible Fan Bands across the host cities, and the Houston Chronicle reported fans waiting up to four hours to get one. Four hours. For a bit of cheap plastic you build, trade and wear on your wrist.

Meanwhile, somewhere else, a sportswear giant has spent the GDP of a small nation on a six minute film with more famous faces than a charity single, and the main thing it has earned is views. Tens of millions of them. Possibly not much else.

That gap is the whole story of World Cup 2026.

A week or so in, YouGov had US buzz sitting well above the Qatar 2022 peak. This is not a niche sports crowd you are fighting over. It is a genuine mass cultural moment, earlier and louder in the North American cycle than anything before it. The prize is enormous and the noise is deafening. Everyone turned up. Most of them turned up with a logo and a prayer.

The bit everyone got wrong

Here is the thing the official roster was supposed to guarantee: if you pay FIFA enough money, you own the moment. The marks, the perimeter boards, the hospitality, the legal protection that stops anyone else playing in your sandbox. Sponsorship as a moat.

It sold out globally. Highest sponsorship revenue ever for a standalone sporting event, FIFA says. The top tier reads like a who’s who, Visa, Adidas, Coca Cola, Hyundai, Qatar Airways, Aramco, Lenovo, with Lay’s, Hisense, Verizon and a long tail of others buying in behind them. Nine figure cheques in places. Serious category warfare.

And then Nike walked in without paying a penny and convinced nearly a third of tournament followers it was a sponsor anyway.

Adidas actually holds the rights. Adidas actually has 58% of the brand conversation in the US. And yet 32% of people who follow the tournament are out here crediting Nike for a thing Nike did not buy. That is not a rounding error. That is a brand emotionally annexing an event it has no contract with.

How? A six minute film called “Rip the Script” that mashed footballers with pop culture cameos and buried it in memes and Easter eggs until the internet did the distribution for free. It passed 66 million YouTube views in under a week. Adidas’s own “Backyard Legends” managed fewer than 7 million in over a month. Nike did not buy the tournament. It bought the conversation about the tournament, which is cheaper and, annoyingly, more valuable.

This is the oldest trick in the book, dressed for 2026. The lawyers have a tidy name for it, ambush marketing, and they split it into association, intrusion and opportunism. The rule is simple enough. You cannot touch FIFA’s marks, official look or sponsor language. But you can absolutely market around the thing with generic football cues, original work and reactions to public moments, and nobody can stop you.

So the smaller challengers did exactly that. Crumbl is running what it pointedly calls “soccer week,” not the actual event name, with cookie flavours themed to host countries, social polls and app reskins. Generic enough to dodge the legal letter, specific enough that everyone knows precisely which moment it is hijacking. Olipop skipped the media game entirely and went physical, a thirty day block party in downtown Dallas and out of home near the stadium and hotel zones in Miami and Los Angeles. Prince St. Pizza ran a ticket giveaway tied to buying a slice and signing up to loyalty. None of these brands paid FIFA a thing. All of them are standing close enough to the fire to feel the heat.

The moat works, then. It just turns out it protects the trademark, not the feeling. And the feeling is the only thing anyone actually competes for.

Reach is not resonance

Now, before anyone decides the answer is simply “make a massive viral film,” let me ruin that for you too.

Nike’s film got the views. It did not get the love. When System1 ran the tournament’s ads through proper effectiveness testing, Nike did not even make the top of the ranking. The winner was Irn Bru. A Scottish soft drink, fronted by Susan Boyle, singing about being made in Scotland from girders, scoring 5.9 stars and beating accounts with a hundred times the budget. Behind it, Lay’s “Bandwagon” on 5.1, Guinness on 4.8, adidas’s big “Backyard Legends” film down on 4.5. The most watched ad of the tournament was nowhere near the most effective.

But the lesson underneath it is the one I keep banging on about. Fame is a tool, not a strategy. The work that wins hearts uses famous faces in service of one simple emotional idea. Irn Bru did not assemble a celebrity montage. It turned a returning nation’s hope into a joke the whole country wanted to be in on. The work that loses stockpiles the faces and forgets the idea, then wonders why the view count did not convert into anything you can bank.

Reach tells you how many people saw it. Resonance tells you whether it changed anything. We keep confusing the two because reach is the one with a number next to it.

Burberry, of all brands, understood the shift better than most. Its “A Good Sport” campaign deliberately took the perspective of the spectators rather than the players, then made it real with a ten day takeover of the Corner Bistro in New York, timed to England’s opening match. A luxury house effectively saying the World Cup is now a fan moment, not a media buy. Own the mood, not the marks. Very 2026.

They stopped making ads and started building machines

Here is the structural change hiding underneath all the films. The smart brands have stopped treating the World Cup as one ad burst and started treating it as an operating system that runs for six weeks.

Read more

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I went into this conversation braced for the usual creator-economy gospel. The “build your personal brand,” “post daily,” “here’s my content engine” stuff that makes my skin crawl a little.

I got none of it.

What I got instead was one of the more clear-eyed conversations I’ve had about what’s actually happening to our industry, from a man who has built one of the sharpest strategic voices on the internet in under two years. is a classically trained strategist and former lecturer who started posting his thinking online because, in his words, strategy is the one thing you can’t put in a portfolio. So he built a living one instead. And in his own words, it worked rather better than planned. The CEO of Microsoft AI has stopped him at Cannes. James Blake has reposted him. People recognise him at music festivals, which, if you’ve ever met a strategist, you’ll know is not the natural order of things.

But the interesting part isn’t the reach. It’s how he thinks. Here are the four ideas I haven’t been able to put down since.

1. Hire smarter people

The first thing I asked Eugene was what he’d do differently if he started again. His answer surprised me: almost nothing except he’d have built his team months earlier. He brought in a social media strategist, a manager and a researcher last September. He wishes he’d done it in February. That extra resource is what let him scale the platform in several directions at once, and freed him up to start other businesses on top of it.

For most of us running small shops, that instinct cuts against everything in our gut. Hiring feels like a cost you justify after the work arrives, not before. My own struggle with delegation cost me years, I tried to do everything myself, convinced that handing things off was either an indulgence or an admission that I couldn’t cope. Eugene’s framing was the antidote to this. The catastrophising voice that says it could all dry up tomorrow, don’t commit to anyone is, he reckons, just wrong:

“You can afford to put some other mouths on the table. It’s going to be worth feeding them.” Eugene Healey

And the people he’s fed aren’t juniors fetching coffee. His mum apparently asked why he’d hire anyone at all when he could keep the money himself. But the value isn’t cheap labour, it’s a second and third sharp perspective. They challenge his scripts, push back when a line is too dense, and own the genuinely hard craft of working out how to visualise an abstract idea in a way that travels.

Which leads to the deeper point, and the bit I keep returning to in an age where everyone’s quietly terrified that AI is coming for their job. The bottleneck has never been tools or output. It’s judgement. And there simply isn’t enough good judgement going around:

“Bigger and bigger companies are working with smaller and smaller consultancies. It turns out they just want the very consciously subjective advice of someone specific that they trust.” Eugene Healey

2. Mass, reached through the niches

If there’s one phrase from this conversation I’d tattoo on the inside of every CMO’s eyelids, it’s this one:

“Whilst mass reach still matters, it’s changed. Its mass through the niches, rather than the other way around” Eugene Healey

This is his “brand as mosaic” idea, and it’s where Eugene and I are in violent agreement. The mass medium isn’t being replaced by another mass medium. It’s being replaced by a thousand fragments. Tom Roach’s “lots of littles,” Eugene’s mosaic and the brands winning right now are the ones building for that reality rather than mourning the death of the thirty-second TV spot.

What’s interesting, however, is that even in this splintered world, Eugene still thinks in the old buckets; awareness, consideration, conversion. The funnel isn’t linear and never really was, but it’s still the most useful bad model we’ve got. He maps his content to exactly those roles: broad “come into the tent” content at the top, deeper mechanism-led pieces in the middle, the occasional direct ask at the bottom. The discipline is constant:

“I’m always thinking about what’s the maximum number of people that could be interested in a message, and what’s the right balance between depth and accessibility.” Eugene Healey

3. Trends are a Trojan horse, not the prize

I’ll admit a slightly embarrassing personal tactic here: I’ve learned that catching a trending topic on the rise tends to win favour with the algorithm. I wrote something about Stranger Things while Stranger Things was out, and it flew. So I assumed Eugene, plugged in as he is, must be hunting trends constantly.

He isn’t. In fact he’s almost allergic to it:

“I used to believe it was really important to be first. Now I believe it’s much more important to deliver a really strong, coherent take.” Eugene Healey

What he does instead is far smarter, and it’s the thing I’ll likely steal. He uses a familiar trend as the entry point to a much deeper idea, the recognisable thing the audience already understands, which lets him smuggle in something dense without losing them.

“I like to use trending topics to explain something that is a deeper trend. That’s the way of scaffolding in a complex concept.” Eugene Healey

His example: a video on “looksmaxxing,” posted weeks after the New York Times had already covered it, used as a way into Baudrillard and the idea of the body as the final frontier of capital. A genuinely difficult concept, compressed into two minutes, riding on the back of a trend everyone already had context for. A million views. The trend was the vehicle. The idea was the cargo.

4. The percentile reckoning

This is the one that’ll sting, and Eugene didn’t soften it:

“The bottom 90% of this industry are about to suffer. Every percent you get above the 90th percentile correlates to exponential gains.” Eugene Healey

His maths: the 95th-percentile strategist is a “$500,000 a year role” ad the 99th is “$1M a year role”. And the brutal truth is the climb from 90% to 95% to 99% is brutally hard, which is precisely why it pays. The commodity middle; the people doing competent, automatable, indistinguishable work… is the bit most exposed.

But the escape route isn’t just being clever. Plenty of strategists are smarter than me and going nowhere, because they make the classic error: needing the room to know they’re the smartest person in it, then getting frustrated when nobody follows. The easy part of this job is the thinking. The hard part is the persuading. As Eugene put it:

“Good thinking presented well always wins out in the end.” Eugene Healey

Eugene’s new course

The New Fundamentals of Brand is a course for marketers navigating today’s fragmented media, tech, and cultural environment.

Most marketing education was built for a stable world where brands moved glacially through segmentation, targeting, positioning, comms. Those fundamentals still hold. The environment doesn’t.

Brand building is now non-linear, always-on, and built bottom-up through influencers, partnerships, and collaborations. You can’t control that output tightly anymore — you have to orchestrate it. This course teaches you how.

You can click here to find out more and be notified about future cohorts:

https://www.eugenehealey.com/thenewfundamentals

In summary

In summary here are the four ideas Eugene and i covered.

1. Hire smart: Hire help sooner than feels comfortable, and trust that a specific, proven brain is what clients are really buying.

2. Mass through the niches. The mosaic has replaced the mass medium. Build for the fragments, but keep running the full awareness/ consideration/ conversion system rather than picking one.

3. Trends are a Trojan horse. Don’t chase being first. Use familiar trends as the entry point for deeper ideas, and win on the strength of your take rather than your speed.

4. The percentile reckoning. The commodity middle is in trouble; the gains above the 90th percentile are exponential. But great thinking only counts if it’s packaged to persuade.

The thread running through all of it: in a world drowning in cheap output, the scarce thing is a sharp, specific point of view, delivered well, by someone you trust.

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

Learn more about us HERE

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Last week I sat down with Andrew Geoghegan, Group CMO of William Grant & Sons. He has a CV most marketers would kill for. Currently he’s the custodian of Glenfiddich, Hendrick’s and Monkey Shoulder, and before that nearly two decades at Diageo where he ran marketing effectiveness across the entire business, and before that PepsiCo. Arguably the most important roles in marketing when it comes to proving the commercial impact of brand building.

His book, Effective Brand Building, is one of the most useful marketing books I’ve read in years. It does the thing almost no marketing book manages: it takes the science many of you will know (Sharp, Binet and Field, Kahneman, Ariely) and shows you how to make it work inside a real organisation, with real politics, real budget pressure, and real people who don’t read marketing books. I highly recommend it and you buy a copy here.

The conversation kept circling back to one idea: the gap between knowing what good brand-building looks like and actually getting it done inside the system you happen to be working in. Four themes stood out.

Knowing what you’ll tolerate

I began by asking Andrew what he wished he’d known earlier, at the beginning of his career.

“I’ve been fortunate in my career to work in some truly brand-centred organisations during periods of exceptional growth and innovation. I’ve also been fortunate to work with leaders who’ve created an environment where people were empowered, encouraged, and positively challenged. Inevitably his isn’t always going to be the case, and there will be moments in your career when you’ll need to be patient, but also where you will need to recognise the conditions may not be there for you to learn and thrive.“ Andrew Geoghegan

His advice to his younger self, and to anyone starting out, was to pay attention to the system you are in, and your relationship within that system. Understand what you can control, influence, and may need to accept in order to feel like your effort can make a real impact.

This is the setup for everything else we talked about. Andrew’s book is fundamentally about the relationship between marketers and the systems they work inside, and his career taught him the same thing the book argues: the system makes the work, far more than the work makes the system. If the system is broken, the marketing will be too. No amount of personal craft saves you.

The missing middle

The bit of Effective Brand Building I keep coming back to is Andrew’s “missing middle” idea. He puts it like this:

“If a brand is a sandwich, most teams have the bread. They’ve got a high-level long-term vision at the top, and a tactical request at the bottom (ie ‘we need an influencer toolkit.)’ What’s missing is the cheese and ham. The triggers and barriers. What you actually need to say or do to overcome them. Without that middle layer, the conversation collapses into either hand-wavy strategy or random tactics.” Andrew Geoghegan

This is the diagnostic he uses when he walks into a team. The questions he asks are designed to find out whether people know what their cheese and ham is. Often, they don’t.

What he’s really describing is a failure mode I see constantly. Teams have a beautiful brand book that lives on a server somewhere and a brief on someone’s desk asking for a Reels series, and absolutely nothing connecting the two. The strategy is too abstract to act on. The tactic is too specific to defend. Everyone is busy. Nothing compounds.

The book frames the cheese and ham as a sequence: what’s the job to be done, what are the triggers and barriers, what do you need to say or do to overcome them, and only then, what’s the work. Most teams skip steps two and three because they’re the slow, uncomfortable bit where you have to admit you don’t know things. Skip them, and the work that comes out is either generic or random.

Andrew’s first question to any team is “why is that a good idea?” If they can’t answer it without circling back to a slide somewhere, you’ve found the missing middle.

Why the 10% never gets spent

In the book Andrew argues marketers should spend 10% of their time on strategy and 10% on learning. I asked why so few brands actually do this.

“Some businesses are biased-to-action by culture. They reward doing, not thinking. Some teams are too busy. And many people genuinely haven’t been trained in how to frame thinking in a way that creates alignment and leads to action. But the bigger issue right now is the environment. There’s so much uncertainty that people have quietly given up on planning. The logic is ‘what’s the point?’ My counter is: you need a good plan precisely so you have something coherent to deviate from. The alternative isn’t agility. It’s chaos.” Andrew Geoghegan

I had nearly the same conversation with Tom Reignsford, former CMO of Beavertown, the day before. Quarterly pressure is more intense than ever. CMO tenure is shorter. Shareholder patience is minimal. All of it conspires against the 10%. Andrew’s response was that unpredictability has shifted emphasis onto reporting and sense-making rather than deciding. Organisations holding their breath, exactly like consumers deferring houses, cars, holidays, waiting for the world to feel certain again.

There’s a chapter in the book, chapter four, the most useful pages for me personally. Here Andrew lays out a framework for diagnosing the organisation you’re in before you try to do anything inside it. What are its biases? What does it reward? Where does the energy actually flow? It explains why his marketing-effectiveness work at Diageo wasn’t really about data. It was about building a cultural system people were excited to operate inside, with creativity weighted as heavily as numbers. Letting data alone make decisions would have stripped out the strategy and craft that made the brands worth building in the first place.

When he asks “have you thought about the system before you’ve thought about the work,” that’s the chapter he’s pointing at. And it’s why so many marketers struggle to find the 10%. They’re trying to install a planning practice in an organisation whose immune system is set to reject it.

Brands don’t endure like they used to

There’s a stat I keep coming back to: the average S&P 500 company in the 1960s had a 60-to-80-year tenure. Now it’s around 15. Andrew’s response was sobering:

“If you look at the world’s biggest brands now, the oldest are maybe 30 years old. A generation ago we were talking about Guinness, Johnnie Walker. Both 200-year-old brands that had endured world wars and economic crises. Increasingly that’s just not the case anymore.” Andrew Geoghegan

The category churn is brutal. Consumer goods, then telecoms, now tech platforms. He pointed out, almost as a throwaway, that you barely use your phone to make a phone call any more. The acceleration of categories is genuinely frightening, in his words.

This is where his book lands something most marketing books don’t. The playbook depends on the stage of growth. What grows a 200-year-old whisky brand is not what grows a five-year-old DTC brand. Startups run the Byron Sharp playbook and wonder why it doesn’t fit, when Sharp is writing observationally about Mars-scale brands that already dominate distribution. The brands that did break through, such as Netflix, Amazon, dominated a channel before they dominated a category. Channel dominance is a precondition most early-stage marketers underestimate. They reach for the wrong playbook.

The agency problem

Finally, we also talked about the agency problem. How that category is shifting and why so few agency strategists can go upstream and have greater influence. His answer was sobering, and so spot on.

Thirty years ago, creative and media sat in the same agency and effectively owned the brand on the client’s behalf. Then the media split off. Then clients pulled brand strategy in-house. Then the social platforms refused to play ball with media agencies, which forced even more in-house. Margin pressure has done the rest. And all of this has had a negative effect on agency strategists. As Andrew put it:

“Strategy has, in some cases, gone from being the start point of the work to being a sales tool that gets wheeled into the pitch and never seen again. The lifespan of an agency strategist is now about fifteen years. There’s a hard ceiling.” Andrew Geoghegan

He thinks the next model is more flexible. Smaller networked agencies. Project-based teams. Fractional senior talent that forms around a problem and dissolves afterwards. Retainers are mostly memories.

Reassuringly for me, that’s the exact model we have built at Defiant.

What I took away

Marketing teams aren’t failing because the theory is wrong. The theory is fine. They’re failing because they can’t operationalise it inside the systems they’re in. They’re stuck in the middle — between a vision they can’t act on and a tactic they can’t defend — and the missing layer is the part most marketing books skip and most marketing careers reward you for skipping too.

Andrew’s contribution is to put that middle back. He gives you frameworks to diagnose the organisation, not just the brand. He treats the cultural system as the thing you build first, because everything else depends on it. And he writes for people who’ve actually had to push a strategy through procurement, a finance director and a cynical regional team — which, it turns out, is most of us.

If you only read one marketing book this year, read this one. The second pass is where the cheese and ham is.

Conclusion

The thread running through everything Andrew said is that good marketing isn’t really a craft problem, it’s a systems problem. Most teams know the theory. What they lack is the cheese and ham: the diagnostic middle layer that connects vision to tactic, and the organisational self-awareness to know whether their system will even let them build it. That’s the gap his book closes. It’s the rare marketing read that takes the science you’ve already nodded along to and makes it survive contact with procurement, finance, and a sceptical regional team.

If you’re a marketer who’s ever felt stuck between a brand book nobody reads and a brief nobody can defend, Effective Brand Building is the most useful thing you’ll pick up this year. Buy a copy here and read it twice.

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

Learn more about us HERE

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

Learn more about us HERE

Fred Again’s promoter accepted the Best Live Event Marketing Campaign award at an industry ceremony by opening with a wry admission: his team would have told you they didn’t do any marketing at all.

That’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about.

Because if that’s true. If you can sell out arenas on four days’ notice, rack up 32 million YouTube views on a Boiler Room set, and headline a 77,500-capacity stadium without a press cycle, a media budget, or a PR firm…then what exactly is marketing for?

I think the honest answer is: it’s mostly for people who don’t understand how brands are built in the 2020s…and how marketing really works today…

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Big ideas beat campaigns

Every brand I’ve ever worked with wants the campaign before they’ve earned the community. They want the reach before they’ve done the depth. They want Fred’s numbers without Fred’s seven years of showing up.

It doesn’t work that way.

Fred Again didn’t think in terms of campaigns. Instead he did what all great brands do - they develop a big idea, a concept. The Actual Life trilogy, three albums released between 2021 and 2022, each titled with the precise date range of its creation. Each playing a chapter in a bigger story, Fred’s own personal journey and life over those years.

It was an identity system. Timestamped albums. Selfie cover art taken directly from his phone, filtered, lo-fi, intimate. Songs named after the actual people sampled in them: Delilah, Kyle, Danielle. Voice notes from friends. FaceTime recordings. Fragments overheard on nights out, processed into raw material.

One so specific, so internally coherent, that no competitor can rationally pursue the same space.

This is what brand theorists call inside-out positioning. Building from a genuine internal truth rather than from audience research and positioning maps. It’s rarer than it sounds. Most brands go the other way, they figure out what people want and then reverse-engineer a version of themselves that fits. The result is positioning that’s technically correct and spiritually empty.

Fred went the other direction. Made his process the product. Made his diary the brand architecture. Albums drop on Tuesdays when he feels like it, not industry-mandated Fridays. His 2023 collaboration with Brian Eno, Secret Life, released on Four Tet’s independent Text Records label, was announced by Kieran Hebden on Twitter two days before release. No press cycle. No campaign. Just a trusted peer vouching for the work.

The result is something Midia Research described as making Gibson “feel like a friend” and crucially, it turned his fandom into an expression of fans’ own values, not just admiration for his.

The 2% who do the work for you

Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans essay is sixteen years old now and most people cite it without actually doing what it says. Fred did though.

For the Actual Life 3 launch, he identified his most engaged Discord members and tasked them with hosting listening parties across 18 cities worldwide. Not branded activations with lanyards and gift bags. No, it was actual fans running events. Getting the album 24 hours early. Becoming the infrastructure.

Before his LA Coliseum debut (77,500 people attended) he threw a secret listening party for 150 fans he’d personally identified from his first LA show in 2021. Greeted each of them personally. Handed out mugs of tea. Played unreleased material.

Every new stage of his career is grounded in a prior act of genuine connection. The Spotify data backs it up: the top 2% of an artist’s audience drives 31% of streams, 52% of merch sales, 42% of total revenue. Fred’s strategy is a precision investment in that 2%. Everything else follows.

Scarcity isn’t a tactic. It’s a philosophy.

The Australia tour. He posted on Facebook that he was boarding a plane to play some unannounced gigs. Then seeded clues across Instagram over the following days. An Australian power adapter. A glimpse of a Qantas tail fin. A crew member watching a Jonah Lomu clip.

Fans became detectives. The detective work became content. The content became earned media. By the time shows were confirmed, 145,000 people had queued for fewer than 3,000 tickets at the Sydney Opera House…the biggest on-sale demand in the venue’s history for the Concert Hall.

Zero advertising spend. 200,000 tickets sold.

Most growth teams have one instinct: maximise reach at every point of the funnel. Fred’s instinct is the opposite. Constrain supply. Deepen the experience. Let FOMO create demand. The economics of attention mean rarity creates value. Ubiquity destroys it.

The thing is, it doesn’t feel manufactured, because it isn’t. His team genuinely plans on short timelines. The operational reality produces the experience design. As his promoter put it, the events themselves served as the marketing.

What this actually means for brands

I’m not going to tell you to announce your next product launch four days in advance and expect 145,000 people to queue. Context matters.

But the underlying logic is transferable. And it comes down to sequence.

Fred spent three years building community identity before he played his first arena. The Actual Life series, the Discord, the selfie cover art, these were brand-building acts, not promotional ones. Most brands reverse the sequence. They campaign before they’ve earned the community. The result is noise without resonance.

Campaign credibility follows from community depth. Not the other way around.

The other thing, and this is the one most briefs completely skip, is that Fred’s process is legible to his audience. The diary format. The voice note samples. The timestamp album titles. Audiences who can see inside the making of something don’t just consume it. They participate. Participation generates advocacy. Advocacy is the only marketing that scales without media spend.

The deepest lesson isn’t tactical. Fred has built a category of one. An identity so specific and so rooted in genuine human connection that there’s no rational competitive response to it. You can copy the Discord. You can’t copy the years of accumulated authenticity that made the Discord worth joining.

That’s the moat. And it wasn’t built through marketing.

It was built through being relentlessly, publicly, genuinely himself.

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

Learn more about us HERE

Learn more about us HERE

There’s a version of content brand strategy that gets easier the bigger you get. More budget. More leverage. More data. More room to make mistakes.

And then there’s the version Laura McNally is doing.

Laura runs Content and Social at Autotrader. The business now commands somewhere around 82% of all minutes spent on UK automotive marketplaces. Most brands would take that number, frame it, and spend the rest of the decade defending the perimeter.

But chatting to Laura last week, what struck me wasn’t the dominance. It was the unease. The category-leader-who-keeps-checking-the-rear-view-mirror energy. And the more we talked, the more I realised that her job, keeping a household name relevant in a category being rewired in real time, is actually one of the hardest briefs in marketing right now. Not because she’s losing. Because the rules under her are shifting, and 82% is no guarantee of future success.

Here’s four things i loved from our chat…

1. The leader that refuses to act like one

The thing I didn’t expect from a market leader was how much of the conversation sounded like a challenger brand.

Autotrader has been quietly running a carish positioning experiment, the idea that the car is “just enough car,” the enabler of a lifestyle moment rather than the moment itself. They’ve launched AI-powered search categories that look more like Airbnb than autotrader.co.uk: cars with big boots, family-sized, sports, and a deliberately mad OMG section for the visually weird stuff. They’ve sponsored Bake Off to reach an audience that wouldn’t naturally walk through their ‘app’ door. They tested an AI voice clone of their YouTube host to break a production bottleneck, then bookended it with the real voice so they didn’t pretend it wasn’t AI. They ran a UGC competition where the prize was a brand-new electric Mini and the entry barrier was high; 450 entries, but the kind of entries you can build a year of content from.

None of this is what 82% behaviour looks like. 82% behaviour is conservative. It defends. It optimises the funnel and tweaks the homepage and waits for someone else to take the risk first.

Laura’s team is doing the opposite. Her line was that the moment you stop being humble is the moment you’re done. And “humble” here doesn’t mean modest, it means treating yourself as if you still have to earn the audience every week. That’s the mindset they operate by.

Most brands have it backwards. They behave like challengers when they’re losing and like incumbents when they’re winning. Autotrader is doing the harder thing, which is behaving like a challenger when they are currently winning.

2. The audience problem nobody wants to admit they have

For years, the natural gravity of any car marketplace was the petrolhead. The person who already knows they want a 2019 Golf R in Lapiz Blue, manual, sub-50k miles. Easy customer. Knows what they want. Searches accordingly. Converts.

The problem: that person is shrinking as a share of the market, and the people replacing them don’t think in makes and models. They think in life moments. New baby. Dog. Move out of London. Job change. They’re more brand-agnostic in a way the previous generation wasn’t, partly because a wave of new entrants, particularly Chinese manufacturers, have eroded the loyalty that used to do half the cognitive work. Loyalty is a luxury you can afford when there are six brands. With 60, you start over every time.

Laura was clear they aren’t abandoning petrolheads. They couldn’t, even if they wanted to, because petrolheads are the trusted advisor in every friend group, and that role compounds quietly across millions of car-buying decisions a year. But they’ve stopped letting that audience define the centre of gravity. The brand has to be wide enough to hold both the enthusiast who knows the spec sheet and the new parent who just needs something with three ISOFIX points and a boot you can fit a buggy in.

Too many guru’s advise niching down and picking one audience. But if your category is being broadened by external forces, and automotive is, picking one is also how you end up positioned for an audience that’s slowly disappearing.

3. The front door is moving, and most brands haven’t noticed

Most of what I read about AI and search is written by people selling something. Laura’s framing was the cleanest I’ve heard:

If your customer used to type your category into Google and pick from a list of blue links, your brand was never really their first port of call. Google was. You just got lucky on rank. And now that AI overviews are eating the click, “lucky on rank” is becoming “thank you for your contribution to our training data.”

The strategic move, in her words, is to own the front door. Get people opening the Autotrader app before they open Google at all. That sounds simple until you remember the average car-buying cycle is three or four years. Habit doesn’t form on a four-year loop. So the work becomes manufacturing reasons to come back in between. It’s winter tyre reminders, valuation tools, content that lives inside the product rather than in some separate editorial silo you have to navigate to.

Best of all of this content does double duty. The more useful, structured, genuinely authoritative material you publish, the more likely the LLMs are to surface you when someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini “what’s my car worth” or “best family SUV under £20k.” Ranking in AI answers isn’t a side effect, it’s baked into the Autotrader content process. And when your brand becomes the source an AI overview cites, you’re not getting clicks. You’re getting cited. That’s an extra hit of brand awareness and consideration, baked in.

4. Content stops being a cost centre.

Autotrader didn’t have a content team eight years ago. Now their YouTube monetises (The CFO approves of course!). They’re working hard on TikTok and have started hitting million-view organic posts on lo-fi clips that wouldn’t have made it through a traditional approval process. Including, gloriously, one that opens with a line about Fiat Multiplas being uglier than any sunset. They’re launching a second YouTube channel pitched at non-enthusiasts, partly as an AI-visibility play. And they’re now taking inbound from Chinese manufacturers who want help breaking into the UK market.

That last bit is the interesting one. Content stops being a thing the marketing team spends money on and starts being a thing the business sells. The P&L conversation flips. The CFO’s posture flips with it. And once that happens, content stops getting cut first when budgets tighten, because it isn’t a cost any more, it’s a revenue generator.

Most brands are still treating content like a feature of campaigns rather than an asset of the business. Autotrader is several years ahead of that conversation, and the gap is probably going to widen.

What I took away

The brands that win in the next decade will be led by people who think like challengers even when the share-of-market says they don’t have to. The audience expansion, the front-door strategy, the content-as-infrastructure shift, none of it happens without that disposition first. Incumbents who get comfortable optimise. Leaders who stay restless rebuild. And 82%, it turns out, isn’t a finish line. It’s the bit where the questions get harder, the competitors get hungrier, and the temptation to coast becomes lethal.

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

Learn more about us HERE

Learn more about us HERE

I have a confession to make: I’m not your typical ‘bloke.’ Never really got hooked on football. Spent my youth reading books, playing video games and trying (and failing) to be an actor… a story for another time. Yet despite this, I’m a sucker for a good brand story.

That’s why this week on Behind the Brand, we tried to deconstruct the strategy behind Arsenal FC’s first Premier League win in 22 years… and how it can teach any brand that having a boring strategy is often the best one.

Let’s dive in.

BACKGROUND

On 19 May 2026 Arsenal won the Premier League for the first time in 22 years, and the thing that struck me wasn’t the trophy. It was how unspectacular it was. Manchester City scored more goals. Several clubs spent comparable money. Arsenal didn’t win because they were the most thrilling team in England. They won because they were the most reliable system in England. And reliability (ie being a bit boring), it turns out, is the most underrated competitive advantage there is.

Heres the four quite boring things they did to unlock new levels of growth

Commit to consistency

The most expensive habit in business is the reboot.

You hire someone, give them a mandate, lose your nerve at the first dip, and replace them. Football does this in public and at speed, which makes it a beautiful case study. Look at the churn: Chelsea’s recent manager list reads like a hostage rotation (Tuchel, Potter, Pochettino, Maresca, Rosenior) and United sacked Ruben Amorim after fourteen months and shuffled through caretakers in the same season.

Arsenal did the opposite. They protected Mikel Arteta through the ugly middle. Through the below-target finishes, the early turbulence, three straight seasons of nearly. As far back as November 2021, Josh Kroenke was openly framing the club as a “young manager, young squad” project built on continuity. The market wanted a pivot every twelve months. Arsenal refused to provide one.

“The power of continuity … is an underrated aspect of pro sports.” Josh Kroenke, Sky Sports, 7 November 2021

The lesson for brands is clear; be consitent and commit to the long term. At a time when CMO tenures are shorter, and people moving jobs and marketing plans more frequently than ever, committing to consistency really is a super power. We all know that brand building is a long term affair, but so very few live by it in practical terms.

Build a portfolio, not a sticker album

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A brand built to challenge, not conform

I had a great chat with Luke Forshaw, Head of Marketing at Back Market for Europe, the other Friday. Possibly too late on a Friday, judging by how much I went off-piste from the questions I’d sent him. But sometimes that’s when the most interesting stuff comes out.

If you don’t know Back Market, here’s the headline. They’re now the biggest refurbished tech player in the UK. Not the most famous, the biggest. And awareness sits at around 18% in London and 13% nationwide. Which, depending on which side of your brain you’re using, is either a problem or the most enviable position in marketing: a brand growing fast while still being mostly unknown.

Luke is three and a half years in. The work is sharp, the tone of voice has teeth, and the strategy underneath it is more disciplined than the playful executions might suggest. Four things from our chat stuck with me.

1. A leader refusing to lose its edge

Most challenger brands round off their corners the moment they start winning. They get serious. They get safer. They start sounding like the incumbents they used to mock. Back Market are at exactly that inflection point and Luke refuses to fall into that trap.

“Even becoming the biggest refurbished player in the UK, we would never rest on our laurels and say, okay cool, done that now. I still see Back Market for the next 5 to 10 years as being the challenger brand within the tech space.” Luke Forshaw, Head of Marketing Back Market for Europe

The reasoning holds. Around 80% of UK tech sales are still new. The category itself is the thing they’re challenging, not just the named competitors. As long as that’s true, they should keep the challenger spirit alive. He was very clear that diluting the tone of voice to follow the well trodden path of other brands would do them no service at all.

2. Never selling on price

This is where I think the strategy gets quietly impressive. I asked Luke straight out whether price was a bigger driver of purchase than sustainability. He didn’t dodge it.

“Yes, it is. Price is the biggest factor for people buying refurbished tech. On average a refurbished device costs 50% less than buying new.” Luke Forshaw, Head of Marketing Back Market for Europe

Sustainability comes third in the UK, behind price and behind lack of perceived innovation. So why isn’t their advertising plastered with price points and percentage savings? Because that’s the trap.

“If we were in a bit of a race to the bottom, the first thing that a low price does, aside from being like, oh that’s affordable, is like why is it affordable? What corners have been cut?” Luke Forshaw, Head of Marketing Back Market for Europe

This is the lesson a lot of category challengers miss. The minute you compete on price you lose long term. Specifically for Back Market, if they competed on price, they would become indistinguishable from the dodgy phone shop with the dirty window. That is why they sit price quietly in the background and let the brand work do the heavy lifting. The premium positioning is conveyed, never claimed. Which is super smart.

3. Built for online

I shared their iPhone Earth Month execution on LinkedIn a few months back, which is how Luke and I first connected. That work, and their recent anti AI slop campaign, and the pizza oven line running in Soho and Vauxhall, all have something in common. They’re designed for out of home but built to travel online.

“We would never approve or work on a concept with the intention of it solely going viral. But I do think the simplicity of the work that we’re now doing lends itself well to that. Single tagline, visual stem, often quite funny, ties a product into it.” Luke Forshaw, Head of Marketing Back Market for Europe

What I didn’t realise until we spoke is how deliberate the placement is. The Soho pizza oven line lands because of who walks past it. The GoPro execution about spraining your ankle 5k into a 5k speaks to skateboarders and the extreme sports community first, then everyone else gets the joke afterward. The work is broad enough for the London Underground and pointed enough for a Reddit thread. That’s a hard thing to engineer.

And critically, they don’t pay people to share it.

“If we paid for it to be there, the conversation wouldn’t feel quite as organic and natural. It just feels maybe a bit Pepsi and Kendall Jenner to try and artificially insert something into a public narrative.” Luke Forshaw, Head of Marketing Back Market for Europe

4. The biggest lesson is the least sexy one

I always ask people what they wish they’d cracked sooner. Luke’s answer wasn’t a flashy campaign idea or a big strategic miss. It was consistency.

“We often went quite scattergun with our messages and our sentiment. We changed our tagline quite a bit. We changed our visual world. We changed our logo. As a small brand internally, that felt quite exciting. Externally, when you were talking with people, they never drew that it was the same brand.”Luke Forshaw, Head of Marketing Back Market for Europe

I see this misstep many times from brands, driven by a combination of short term pressures and CMOs moving around more frequently. Whats brilliant about Back Market is they have openly acknowledged this and course corrected quickly. They now use their Mandara yellow, their black and white treatment for the activist work, the cleaner tone, and stuck with it. Now they are truly leaning into the power of the long term and compounded creativity.

The takeaway

Back Market are doing four things at once that most brands struggle with even individually. They’re growing the category, not just their share of it. They’re keeping a real challenger voice while becoming the leader. They’re letting price drive sales without letting it drive the brand. And they’re making work that’s strategic enough to land in specific communities and simple enough to travel everywhere.

The thing I keep turning over is this. They’re not trying to manufacture a moment. They’re not chasing the algorithm. They’re building a properly distinctive brand on top of a product people already want, and trusting the work to find its way. There’s a quiet confidence in that which a lot of bigger brands could learn from.

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

Learn more about us HERE

When I sat down with Chris Mucklow-Norell, Head of Brand Marketing for Monzo’s personal and business banking, what emerged was a much more interesting picture of how modern brands grow. Not through brand alone. Not through product alone. But through a more joined-up model, where brand, product, creativity and culture all work together to move people from awareness to action.

That matters because Monzo is now at a very different stage of growth. This is no longer just a cool fintech winning early adopters in East London. It is a serious banking brand trying to shift mass-market behaviour in one of the most inert and trust-sensitive categories there is.

Across our conversation, five themes stood out.

1. Product and brand are inseparable

One of the clearest things Chris said was that Monzo is not trying to solve a brand problem in isolation. Nor is it relying on product-led growth alone. The two are deeply intertwined. As he put it:

“At Monzo, we say that our brand is our product, our product is our brand. So they are very intertwined.” Chris Mucklow-Norell, Head of Brand Marketing, Monzo

That line gets to the heart of the challenge. Monzo’s product is not simply a proof point for the marketing. It is the thing that creates belief. It is what turns customers into advocates. It is why people love the brand in the first place.

Chris made that distinction when reflecting on the shift from Klarna to Monzo. At Klarna, he described a business where marketing had a much louder voice and brand sat high on the agenda from the outset. Monzo, by contrast, was built product first. In fact, when he joined, there was not even a formal brand team or a full brand book in place.

That is what makes Monzo interesting. It was not a brand-led success story that happened to have a good app. It was a product-led success story that eventually recognised brand could help accelerate growth. In the last 2.5 years they have proven the value of Brand and how it helps growth both in the short term but also in the long term

But crucially, the role of brand is not to distract from the product. It is to help more people understand it, trust it and experience it.

That is a useful lesson for any modern marketer. In categories where the user experience is powerful, the job of brand is not to wallpaper over weaknesses. It is to make the strengths legible at scale.

Behind the Brand, ranked one of the fastest growing business newsletters on Substack. The strategy team at Defiant spend half their week interviewing the people who build the world’s most interesting brands and unpacking strategy case studies. If you like what you read, consider supporting us by subscribing.

2. The real battleground is consideration, not awareness

Most marketers still default to awareness as the primary challenge. Chris was very clear that for Monzo, that is no longer the case.

“Our brand awareness is not the challenge, it’s consideration.” Chris Mucklow-Norell, Head of Brand Marketing, Monzo

That is a subtle but important distinction. Plenty of people know Monzo exists. More and more people now understand it is a bank. But that does not necessarily mean they are ready to move their salary across, make it their primary account, or trust it with more of their financial life.

That gap between knowing and choosing is where the real commercial battle sits.

Chris described it as a mix of trust, inertia and limited understanding.

“A lot of people feel like, you know, I’m not loving my bank, but it’s fine and it seems to be a hassle to change.” Chris Mucklow-Norell, Head of Brand Marketing, Monzo

He also pointed out that most people simply do not realise how much better the experience can be until they try it.

His analogy was brilliant.

“A lot of people have their understanding and impression of what a bank is and what kind of services and functionality that delivers. But if you compare any traditional bank or any other incumbent bank, their apps, compared to Monzo’s app, it’s day and night, but if you haven’t tried Monzo, how are you supposed to know that?” Chris Mucklow-Norell, Head of Brand Marketing, Monzo

That is the challenge in a sentence.

The issue is not that Monzo lacks salience. It is that banking is one of those categories where behaviour lags belief. People do not switch unless the reason feels overwhelming. Which means marketing cannot stop at broad fame. It has to build enough reassurance and enough intrigue to tip people into trial.

That is why consideration matters so much. It is the bridge between admiration and action.

3. Fame must drive commercial action

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation was Chris’s honesty about Monzo’s earlier brand work.

The Money Never Felt Like Monzo campaign was successful in driving awareness. But as Chris admitted, it did not do as much to shift the next stage of the funnel.

“That campaign was super successful in terms of brand awareness... But what that campaign didn’t do as much of was to drive consideration.” Chris Mucklow-Norell, Head of Brand Marketing, Monzo

That is a useful reminder that fame, on its own, is not the goal. It is only valuable if it moves people closer to behaviour change.

Chris explained the problem plainly.

“We don’t need to drive brand awareness. We need to drive consideration and we will drive consideration when we succeed to explain how great our product is.” Chris Mucklow-Norell, Head of Brand Marketing, Monzo

That thinking helps explain the shift toward more concrete, useful, product-adjacent work such as The Book of Money. Rather than relying purely on abstract brand theatre, Monzo started creating things that could help customers navigate real financial moments: pensions, savings, mortgages, divorce, marriage, investing.

“Money Monzo was quite intangible and quite abstract... whereas The Book of Money that we launched last year, explained it in a much better way.” Chris Mucklow-Norell, Head of Brand Marketing, Monzo

This is where so many brands go wrong. They chase cultural visibility as if attention alone will do the job. But if that attention is not connected to a product truth, a distinctive advantage, or a useful reason to believe, it rarely compounds commercially.

For Monzo, the lesson seems to be this: get famous, yes, but only in ways that make the product easier to understand, easier to trust and easier to choose.

4. Creativity is a challenger’s unfair advantage

Monzo is a big business. But in the context of banking, it is still a challenger. It does not have the budgets, sponsorship muscle or sheer media weight of the incumbents.

So what do you do when you cannot outspend the market leaders?

You make creativity work harder.

Chris put it simply: “Creativity is something that we honor.” And that shows up not just in campaigns, but in the way Monzo thinks about ideas more broadly: the book, the 1p Coventry shop, the Greggs partnership, the attempt to create things that earn talkability rather than simply rent reach.

On the book in particular, Chris made clear just how difficult it was to produce in a heavily regulated category. “No one else has written a finance book, but we did it.” He went on: “Writing a radio script of 30 seconds can take months. So writing a book, you can imagine what a huge lift that was.”

That is what good challenger creativity looks like. Not just witty advertising. Not surface-level disruption. But ideas with enough distinctiveness and craft to generate disproportionate value.

As Chris said, “We try to really put time and effort into the craft and our campaigns and the creative, and that then hopefully will generate additional kind of buzz and noise around our campaigns.”

In other words, creativity is not decoration. It is leverage.

5. Bold work starts with culture

The final theme was perhaps the most overlooked, but maybe the most important.

When I asked Chris whether there was anything I had missed, he did not mention another campaign or channel. He talked about culture.

“Monzo has a very... democratic and humble culture.” Chris Mucklow-Norell, Head of Brand Marketing, Monzo

He went on to say that the brand people see on the outside is closely connected to the company inside the walls. “How the brand is perceived from a customer point of view is very much how it is within the walls amongst us. For being a bank, I think Monzo has created something very unique that’s far from what the perception sometimes can be for our industry”

That matters more than most marketers admit.

Because the truth is, bold work rarely happens in fearful organisations. Distinctive ideas do not survive in cultures where every decision is optimised by committee. Creativity does not flourish where hierarchy crushes instinct.

Chris linked Monzo’s culture directly to the kind of work it is able to make. “I think that helps us also deliver the type of creatives and campaigns that we are ultimately launching.” He added that ideas like the book, the 1p shop and Money Monzo only happen because people feel able to bring daring ideas forward.

That is a lesson worth underlining. Strong brands are not just built through positioning decks and media plans. They are built by cultures that give good ideas room to live.

In summary

If you strip the conversation back, five principles sit at the heart of Monzo’s approach.

First, product and brand are inseparable. The role of marketing is to amplify and translate a genuinely useful product, not compensate for a weak one.

Second, the real battleground is consideration, not awareness. In a category like banking, the challenge is not being known. It is being chosen.

Third, fame must drive commercial action. Attention matters, but only when it helps move people toward trust, trial and deeper usage.

Fourth, creativity is a challenger’s unfair advantage. When you cannot outspend the category, you need ideas strong enough to create disproportionate impact.

And fifth, bold work starts with culture. The best creative output is usually a reflection of an internal environment where people are trusted, empowered and open to risk.

That, to me, is what makes Monzo such an interesting modern brand. It is not simply a fintech with a good app. It is a business learning how to turn product love into broader market growth, and doing it with a level of honesty and creativity that most banks still struggle to reach.

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

Learn more about us HERE

You've heard of AI slop. The low grade images, the lazy posts, the recycled ideas clogging your feed. But what if i was tell you there is far worse kind of slop headed our way. One that goes straight to heart of leadership & has deep implications for strategy. Let me show you what it is, by first beginning with a story.

There’s a CEO in South Korea called Changhan Kim who runs Krafton, the company behind PUBG. A few years back, he bought a small games studio called Unknown Worlds, the people who made Subnautica, and as part of the deal he promised the founders $250 million if their next game hit certain targets.

He thought there was no way they’d hit those targets. That’s why he agreed to it. The whole structure was a polite fiction designed to make the deal sound generous while costing him nothing.

Then Subnautica 2 started topping Steam wishlists. Internal projections had it absolutely demolishing every commercial milestone. And Kim a sensible man by some definitions, did what any sensible man would do in 2026.

He opened ChatGPT and asked it how to get out of paying.

To its credit, AI initially told him it would be difficult. Which is also what his lawyer & CFO said too. But Kim, being a CEO, didn’t take no for an answer from a person or a piece of software. So he kept rephrasing. Reframing. Prompt-engineering his way out of a contract like any good tech bro would.

Eventually AI t caved, because that’s what they do, and handed him a corporate takeover playbook. He followed it like an IKEA manual. Fired the founders. Seized the game. Locked them out of their own publishing platform. Even posted a letter to the Subnautica fan base that ChatGPT had ghostwritten for him.

A Delaware judge has now thrown out the lot. The deleted ChatGPT logs (deleted, in his mind, because he clicked a button) have been resurrected and submitted as evidence.

I’m telling you this story because I think it reveals how many leaders are misusing AI & the deep implications it will have for strategy.

Trends slop

Around the same time as the Krafton story, researchers at Esade, Sydney and NYU Stern ran a study you should know about. They tested every major model, GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, Grok, across seven of the most fundamental tensions in strategy. Should you differentiate or commoditise. Centralise or decentralise. Automate or augment. Real choices, the kind that decide whether a business survives the next five years.

Every bot gave the same answer. Every single time.

They clustered. Regardless of context, regardless of industry, regardless of how the prompt was framed. Differentiation. Collaboration. Long-term thinking. Augmentation. Always. Forever. Amen.

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The ones who have to convince people to do something genuinely counter-cultural, pay for something they could get for free, trust a legacy player when “legacy” has become a slur, stay rigorous when the rest of the internet has given up on rigour entirely.

The Guardian has all three of those problems at once. And the way Joel Midgley and his team are navigating them is, frankly, one of the smartest pieces of brand strategy I’ve seen in along while.

Here are the four things Joel spoke off…

The competition isn’t who you think it is

Most news brands, if you asked them who their competition is, would name other news brands. The Times. The Telegraph. The New York Times. The FT. That’s the obvious answer.

It’s also the wrong one.

Here’s Joel:

“We’re not shy of acknowledging that in some instances we’ll be competing with a broader spectrum of brands. We ask ourselves, is somebody going to tap on the Guardian app or are they going to tap on Spotify? At the attention level it’s news brands versus really big new media players. When it comes to competition for wallet, because of our model we’re also competing with a far broader spectrum of subscription based brands.” Joel Midgley, Director of Brand & Marketing, The Guardian

I think it’s one of the most clear-eyed pieces of competitive positioning I’ve heard in awhile. The Guardian isn’t competing with The Times. It’s competing with Spotify for thumb-time, and even with charities for direct debits.

This is the thing most brands get wrong about competition. They look sideways at the people in their own category. The Guardian is looking at the actual moments in a person’s day where attention and money get spent and figuring out where they fit into those moments, regardless of category.

This is exactly what Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk mean by Category Entry Points. How what matters is the moment of need. For the Guardian, those moments happen all day. Things like “I want something interesting to think about on the train.” And in that moment, they’re not just up against other newspapers, they’re competing with every podcast, app, newsletter and TikTok out there. Ignore that, and you get out-flanked.

Behind the Brand, ranked one of the fastest growing business newsletters on Substack. The strategy team at Defiant spend half their week interviewing the people who build the world’s most interesting brands and unpacking strategy case studies. If you like what you read, consider supporting us by subscribing.

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Look back to go forward

Anyone who follows me on LinkedIn will know I love the recent campaign work by the Guardian. But being a strategist by trade, I want to dive into the thinking that led to that and the brief on the table. Joel was generous enough to unpack that for us.

“We need to drive brand salience, we need to mean more to more Americans. The Guardian’s total brand awareness has organically grown to 59% in the US. So just short of two-thirds of the US public know that the Guardian is a news brand they can read. But a lot of the traffic that we receive comes to us less regularly. There’s just less of a sense of the Guardian as a destination.” Joel Midgley, Director of Brand & Marketing, The Guardian

Awareness wasn’t the problem. Salience was. People knew the Guardian existed; they just weren’t reaching for it. So the job was relevance, turning passive recognition into active preference.

That distinction matters because it changes everything that follows. The creative isn’t trying to introduce you to a new brand. It’s trying to make you remember a brand you already know at the moment it counts. Different problem, different solution.

And then, almost as an aside, Joel said the thing that I think a lot of news brand marketers wish they could say out loud:

“It’s always been very difficult to translate the ownership structure into something that feels like compelling communications. But all of a sudden in the last couple of years, ownership of news is a story in and of itself. So there’s a sense of harvesting demand from an audience who now care about that, that wouldn’t have previously.” Joel Midgley, Director of Brand & Marketing, The Guardian

The Guardian has been independent for 200-odd years. And what had changed, is how now at a time of mistrust and skepticism about ownership, this was more relevant in culture than ever.

That’s a lesson worth holding onto. Sometimes the right move isn’t to invent a new positioning. It’s looking to the past and finding the thing that resonates most in culture.

Fewer, bigger, better

The outdoor element of the campaign ran in New York. Just New York. One city, deliberately chosen because it’s where the consumer audience and the advertising audience both index hard.

Joel was honest about why:

“We needed to get the biggest bang for buck that we possibly could. It wasn’t the biggest media buy in the world, so everything needed to punch above its weight.” Joel Midgley, Director of Brand & Marketing, The Guardian

Subway carriages. Stations. Two impact placements at Penn Station. And then the bit I genuinely missed first time round, a one-day interactive billboard in the Meatpacking District where the public physically peeled away a censored layer to reveal the headline beneath. News in America can’t publish the whole picture. Then social content of real New Yorkers doing it.

That’s the bit that turns a static OOH campaign into something that earns a second life on social. It’s also the bit that costs almost nothing relative to a hero TV film, but punches considerably harder.

I asked Joel what he’d do more of next time. His answer was instructive:

“One of the big things that we’d take from this is the redacted billboard. That type of idea where in investment terms it’s a relatively small buy, just really backing ourselves to be quite brave with how we show up.” Joel Midgley, Director of Brand & Marketing, The Guardian

This is the trade-off most brands get backwards. They spread the budget thin to feel safe and end up invisible. The Guardian concentrated the budget into one city, one big idea, and a handful of placements brave enough to be talked about. Result: the campaign feels national even though the buy was local.

It’s the Nike City Attack model, that i learnt working at Wieden & Kennedy, but applied to journalism.

The brand challenge is bigger than the campaign

Towards the end I asked Joel what the next 12 months looks like. His answer surprised me, because it wasn’t just about the US.

“Driving relevance with ‘the whole picture’ globally and making sure that we show up in key calendar moments, both aligned with hard news and other news-adjacent events in sport, lifestyle, and culture, to drive some of the non-news category entry points so that we’re positioning the Guardian for lots of moments in people’s lives, not just breaking news.” Joel Midgley, Director of Brand & Marketing, The Guardian

Translation: the Guardian isn’t just a news brand anymore, and it can’t afford to be marketed like one.

And on cue, on Tuesday 5 May, the proof landed. The Guardian brought The Whole Picture home to the UK by reinventing its iconic Points of View advert, 40 years on from the original, with Kathy Burke returning to the same Elephant & Castle street, original director Paul Weiland back behind the camera, and members of the original crew along for the ride. Same street, same line “It’s only when you get the whole picture that you can fully understand what’s going on” and a brand reaffirming that while the world has changed, its job hasn’t. Timed to the Guardian’s 205th birthday, it’s a sharp reminder that the Guardian’s independence…no billionaire owner, no fear, no favour… is the whole point. And one that can hold true to everything the Guardian does. Recipes. Wellness. Sport. Culture. Comment.

Four things I’m taking away

1. Compete on the moment, not the category. Spotify is a competitor. Charities are a competitor. The brand next to you on the shelf is the least interesting answer to the question of who you’re up against. Find the moments your audience actually lives in, and figure out who else is fighting for them.

2.Look back to go forward. The Guardian’s independence has been true for two centuries. And its a USP that has become even more powerful in the last two years.The lesson here is sometimes the best way to move forward, is to look to the past. To look for those powerful USPs in the brands toolkit.

3.. Fewer, bigger, braver. One city. One big idea. A handful of placements with enough creative punch to be talked about. That’s how a small US media generates far greater impact. Spreading thin to feel safe is the most expensive mistake in marketing.

4. A platform should be elastic, not narrow.The whole picture works as a tagline, but it works harder as a frame the brand can pour anything into news, sport, lifestyle, culture. The brands that win the next decade won’t be the ones with the sharpest positioning. They’ll be the ones with the most useful one.

Behind the Brand is written by the team over at Defiant. We bring together big agency brains with Effie winning writers, comedians & creators with millions of followers. We help brands define razor-sharp strategy & develop creative ideas that win the war on attention.

Learn more about us HERE

That doesn’t happen often. Let’s be honest most film marketing is generic. This one campaign, however, was different. It’s one that rips up the traditional comms strategy playbook and one we can all learn from.

Here are four things worth noting…

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