I think if you set out to build a great business, you’ll stand a fair chance of building a great brand.

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.

When you are accustomed to living life at an online pace, you live in a world where every action results in an immediate response. Click on the link and, after just a few seconds, up comes the page. Hence when you order a coffee and 10 minutes later it hasn’t arrived, your first response is no longer. “Gosh, they must be quite busy!” No, your

In a single sentence my view is “Planning + Creative = Good. Planning > Creative = Bad.”

This is why, fairly early on, Microsoft placed whiteboards along the corridors on the Redmond campus; for they found that the accidental meetings which took place in hallways were in fact more productive than the scheduled ones which happened in meeting rooms.

Why has no other retail brand attempted this? Why do my M&S corduroy trousers not simply contain a URL and a reference number if I wish to reorder them? Or allow me to order a second pair by text?

“People don’t do what they say they believe, they just do what’s convenient and then they repent.”

Yet marketers very rarely acknowledge this distinction when debating the role of the brand — and it pays little attention to the job of being assuredly not crap — even though I suggest it is by far the more valuable economic role that brands play: not to be a promise of ultimate superiority but a cast iron assurance of pretty dependable

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.