If you want a long-lived brand, avoid strategy altogether — instead have an Ideal (like Nike, Apple) or an executional device (Andrex, The Economist). Anything with a strategy is doomed never to outlive your client. Discuss.

Like the late Alan Clarke, who “would not queue for anything under any circumstances” I am driven practically insane by the time wasting procedures of many service industries. For example the check-in procedure at hotels regularly induces a kind of Tourette’s: “You’ve known I was coming for two weeks — why couldn’t you have my twatting key ready,

Then reality comes into it, and actually, the reason they buy the iPad is that they know that every time they get out the Samsung, all their friends will say: “why did you get that, why didn’t you buy the iPad?” and that this will bring with it a little burst of anxiety and a little burst of effort. Never, never underestimate the importance of

To use a phrase popularised in a famous FT article: great brands are often built obliquely. They are generally a by-product of something (ideals, vision, focus) and not a product of anything.

Sales promotion agencies (the good ones) are familiar with this approach… that of: “make people buy and hopefully they’ll love you” rather than “make people love you and hopefully they’ll buy.” Their philosophy needs to be as much at the heart of what we do as any other.

Wine does defy logic in one sense — in nearly everything else we buy we value consistency. If one in three bottles of whisky we bought, or one in three pints of beer we bought in the pub were total shit, we would never go to that pub again, and yet one in three glasses of wine we try are just rubbish, and yet we persist in trying to drink wine, and

What you actually find is that if you do good science rather than bad science, if you accept that actually this is seduction not persuasion, that it’s much more oblique than clients and researchers like to think, that reason plays a much smaller part in it than people realise.

Regret is a huge emotion, and people will pay huge sums to avoid it. You just need to watch Deal or No Deal to see this.

they were too busy going: “well you can get a 5am