In 2022 I was commissioned to write a book on brand building by a B2B book publisher. It was going to be about brand building in the platform age (which was also its rather dull working title). I found it tough going, and only got 50% through. The first half (broadly on the fundamentals of brand building) went ok. The second half (on how to apply it all to today’s marketing eco-system) was where I got bogged down.
I gave myself various excuses at the time, mostly about not having time alongside the day job, and not having gathered enough great case studies or data and evidence to make my case. But the excuse that I think is most true is that things were changing too quickly, AI was kicking off and evolving rapidly, agencies and brands were only just starting to grapple with the new tools and what it could all mean, and I hadn’t yet formed the views or gained the experience to write with authority on how that was changing things. So I stopped.
It’s left me with some material I’m going to share anyway, just not in printed, 80,000 word book form, which at least means a few more people may get to see it.
Anyway, here’s the preface. I may publish the full introduction and some early chapters here too.
- Preface
Business books are usually just one good article stretched way beyond breaking point to a dozen or so chapters. Blueprints for ‘how to succeed’ by one uncommonly lucky individual with a career spanning one or two sectors, which they then arrogantly assume applies to all. At their worst, egotistical hero stories dressed up as The Truth, that tell you more about the author’s worldview than anything that’s easily applicable to your own situation.
Most marketing books are not much different. There are a couple of basic varieties. There are the thick, blue, evidence-rich, professorial but indigestible textbooks. Then there are the more distinctive, opinionated and maverick ones with eye-catching orange or yellow covers designed to stand out from the blue textbook crowd. Either kind often has an illustration of a human brain on the cover to add a sheen of scientific, objective rigour to the highly subjective contents within. Both types are attempts to give the arty, crafty, creative business of marketing an air of authority; the former to give it some business school gravitas, the latter a whiff of science and the air of a mad scientist at work in their lab.
No matter how much academic research or pseudoscience you stir into the mix, no business or marketing book can ever be truly objective or the absolute and final word on a topic. All are ultimately just one individual’s highly skewed perspective on an extremely complex system written at one particular moment in time. They’re a map, and a map is not the territory; a way of thinking, a mental model. And as mathematician George Box famously said, ‘all models are wrong, but some are useful’.
As I write this, with an as yet unknown number of virtual but really empty pages stretching intimidatingly ahead of me, I have no idea whether with this book I will have succeeded in avoiding the stereotypes and elephant traps outlined above. In fact I’m pretty sure I won’t.
But it’s absolutely my intention to try. To blend some experience, research, marketing science, real world examples and personal anecdote. To include enough of the subjective and personal so that this has a chance of engaging, resonating and entertaining. To bring in some generalised guidelines, principles and frameworks borne of real world experience that can have genuine utility when taken off the page and applied to a real brand with a real life problem or challenge. To include enough facts and information about some of the key marketing levers we have today so as to educate and inform. But not so much of that that it gets weighed down with things that will date too quickly or fill it with things that you could just google yourself. To select some case studies any marketer can feel has relevance to them regardless of the category their brand operates in. And to infuse the whole with just enough ‘scientific’ evidence to persuade, but not so much as to confuse, slow things down, or worst of all, bore the pants off you.
I want to take what I’ve learnt from working with dozens of brands across 25 years working in advertising and marketing, and what I’ve learnt from writing about it every couple of years for IPA Effectiveness Awards case studies, every month in blog posts and Marketing Week articles and every week (or my wife would say every minute) writing tweets, twitter threads and the odd platform-appropriate self-promoting post on LinkedIn. I want to share what I’ve seen to be the questions and issues that keep coming up from marketers I’ve worked with and the sometimes helpful answers I’ve seen people offer up or that sometimes I’ve been able to offer up too.
I want to bring to bear my own experience working in some of the best creative advertising agencies the UK (and even the world) has ever had and my last few years’ experience working at a very new kind of digital-first marketing services company, Jellyfish.
I also want to bring to bear on this book what I’ve learnt from working with some of the brilliant people I’ve been lucky enough to work with in my career so far. From founders and marketers, strategy people, to brilliant account people and creative people, from people who work at the platforms themselves, from researchers and data specialists keeping us honest about what actually works today and how. And in particular from Les Binet, ex-colleague, ‘Godfather of Effectiveness’, mentor and friend who’s done more to prove the commercial impact of advertising and commercial creativity (alongside his research and writing partner Peter Field) than anyone else in the entire history of advertising.
But most of all I want to bring balance. A balance of the old, established principles we know to work, with some new ones we believe work now too. A balance of discussion of some of the levers we’ve had for a century and some we’ve only had available for a few years. A balance of longer term tactics and shorter term. A balance of creativity and data, message and medium, humanity and technology, art and science. A balance of logic and magic.
Because, whatever the title and the optimised-for-SEO subtitle on the cover says, this is a book about balance, about ‘bothism’ in marketing and advertising, how to achieve it and how to reap rewards from it.
I want this book to be universal and evergreen but also timely and specific – and I realise this is me wanting to both have my cake and eat it, and will likely prove impossible. All business and marketing books have a shelf life. My own bookshelf is littered with great books whose greatness lasted a decade but no more. I’ll be happy if this book proves to be merely a good one, with a five year shelf life. Let’s see.
Tom Roach 