Andy Milligan

Why organisations work with Andy Milligan

• Seven books across Kogan Page and Financial Times imprints, including Bold (CMI Management Book of the Year, e-book category, 2012) and On Purpose with Shaun Smith, give him a documented track record on brand-led growth that consultants without published evidence cannot match.
• He works the full chain from purpose to promise to operational delivery, which is rare. Most advisors stop at strategy or stop at touchpoint design. He has spent thirty years on the connection between them.
• Client work spans Nissan, McLaren, Barclays, Unilever, FIFA, IHG, Roche and WWF across Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the USA and Europe. The breadth of categories and geographies means his examples land with audiences in heavily regulated, consumer, and B2B sectors equally.
• His starting position is that brand lives in employee behaviour before it lives in customer perception. For leaders trying to align a fatigued workforce behind a customer promise, that is the more useful framing.

Biography highlights

• Founding partner of The Caffeine Partnership, the UK brand and growth consultancy he co-founded in 2006.
• Began his career at Interbrand in London; ran the firm’s Singapore office and later led its Internal Brand Management practice.
• Co-author of On Purpose (Kogan Page, 2015) and Bold: How to be Brave in Business and Win with Shaun Smith.
• Bold won the CMI Management Book of the Year award in the e-book category in 2012.
• Co-author of Myths of Branding with Simon Bailey (Kogan Page, 2017; second edition 2022).
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; media commentator for BBC, Sky and CNN on brand issues.

Biography

Brand is an operating discipline, not a marketing one. That has been the thesis of Andy Milligan’s work since his time at Interbrand in the 1990s, where he ran the Singapore office and later led the firm’s Internal Brand Management practice. The argument is now unfashionable enough to be useful again: customers do not experience strategy decks, they experience employees, products and service moments.

In 2006 he co-founded The Caffeine Partnership, a brand and growth consultancy that has advised Nissan, McLaren, Barclays, Unilever, FIFA, IHG, Roche, WWF and Thai Airways across Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the USA and Europe. The work moves between purpose definition, customer experience design and employee engagement, treated as one connected problem rather than three departmental ones.

The same argument runs through seven books. Uncommon Practice and See, Feel, Think, Do with Shaun Smith examined the link between corporate culture and brand experience. Bold: How to be Brave in Business and Win won the CMI Management Book of the Year in the e-book category in 2012. On Purpose (Kogan Page, 2015) set out a practical framework for translating purpose into a branded customer experience. Myths of Branding with Simon Bailey, now in its second edition with Kogan Page, dismantles the assumption that brand work is a logo problem.

Milligan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and comments regularly for BBC, Sky and CNN. The reason senior teams bring him into commercial growth conversations is straightforward: he has spent thirty years arguing that organisations get the customers their employees deserve, and he can show them where the gap is.

Key speaking topics

• Brand-led business growth
• Customer experience strategy
• Employee engagement and brand
• Purpose and commercial strategy
• Brand culture and organisational alignment
• Marketing and brand myths

Ideal for

• CMOs, CCOs and brand directors aligning marketing with operational delivery
• CHROs and CPOs connecting employee engagement to customer outcomes
• CEOs and boards repositioning a business around a sharper purpose
• Customer experience and transformation leads moving from strategy to execution

Audience outcomes

• A clearer view of where brand promise and customer experience are diverging in their own organisation
• A working definition of purpose that can be tested against employee and customer behaviour, not slogan
• Named case examples across consumer, financial services, automotive and sport that translate to the audience’s category
• A short list of brand myths their leadership team is probably still operating under