Distinctive communication

Mark Ritson added fuel to the fire of debate about distinctiveness versus differentiation in a recent column (1). “There is a worrying trend to favour distinctiveness over [...]

Nike’s new Colin Kaepernick advert* has been effective at provoking the desired political controversy and polarised opinion: 30% of US consumers feel more positive about Nike after seeing the ad, [...]

We Transfer’s co-founder and President Damian Bradfield explained in a recent Times article (1) how he and his team have built a successful brand by focusing on being brilliant at ONE [...]

Big brands are the knock-out winners in a recent eBrand ranking (1) of performance in UK online retailers, despite the popular view that big brands are losing out to smaller, more digitally savvy [...]

Big brands get a lot of stick for being slow and cumbersome compared to smaller ‘insurgent’ brands. But British Airways (BA) show how big brands can be agile, with their brilliant guerrilla-style [...]

[Guest post by Prasad Narsimhan, Managing Partner based in Bangalore, India] Few brands have the courage to remain thematically consistent in their communication over a long period of time, [...]

I love the new ad from Hostelworld. It features Mariah Carey in full diva mode being shocked at being booked into a hostel but gradually warming to the better-than-expected facilities and [...]

The story of Mr Kipling has some great learning about the dangers of ditching distinctive assets. Back in 2014 in a post on the cake brand I warned about “the risk of forgetting what made you [...]

“Emotion is everything” for effective communication according to many experts. The IPA prominently promote “the power of emotion in ad campaigns”, for example (1). However, this view [...]

Fame, fluency and feeling are the three key drivers of brand growth, according to extensive research shared with us by one of our insight agency partners, System 1, at our global brandgym Partner [...]