Kevin Roberts
Most brands compete on rational benefits and end up interchangeable. Loyalty thins, price pressure rises, marketing budgets get cut first. The harder question for any commercial leader is what makes a customer feel something strong enough to choose you again when the cheaper option is one tap away.
Kevin Roberts is the former CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi and author of Lovemarks, who helps commercial leaders build brands customers love rather than tolerate.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Kevin Roberts
- He led Saatchi and Saatchi globally for seventeen years, so brand and creative conversations land with the authority of someone who ran the network, not observed it.
- Lovemarks is one of the few brand frameworks from the 2000s still cited in marketing rooms; Advertising Age named it an Idea of the Decade in 2009.
- His operator track record covers Mary Quant, Gillette, Procter and Gamble, Pepsi-Cola and Lion Nathan, which gives commercial teams a counterpart who has run P&Ls, not only advised on them.
- 64 Shots gives leadership audiences a structured, opinionated playbook for operating in volatile markets, written from inside a creative business rather than a business school.
Biography highlights
- CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi from 1997 to 2014; Chairman until 2016.
- CEO of Pepsi-Cola Middle East at 32, then President and CEO of Pepsi-Cola Canada.
- Chief Operating Officer and Director at Lion Nathan, the Australasian brewer, from 1989 to 1996.
- Author of Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, published in 18 languages, and 64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World.
- Honorary Professor of Creative Leadership at Lancaster University, with parallel honorary chairs at the University of Auckland Business School and the University of Victoria in Canada.
- Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business and the community.
Biography
Lovemarks reframed a question marketers had been answering badly for years. Instead of measuring respect and recognition, Kevin Roberts argued that the brands that survive are the ones customers actively love, and that emotion, not rational benefit, is the real driver of long-term commercial value. The book travelled into 18 languages and became one of the few brand frameworks from the period still in active use.
The argument carries weight because of where it came from. Roberts spent seventeen years as CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi, after running Pepsi-Cola in the Middle East and Canada, and serving as Chief Operating Officer at Lion Nathan. He has sat on the operator side of brand decisions at scale, including categories where price is brutal and differentiation is mostly emotional.
64 Shots: Leadership in a Crazy World extended the work into leadership. The book is a set of sixty-four short, opinionated entries on running creative businesses in volatile conditions, drawn from his own career and the leaders he has worked with. It gives commercial audiences a way to talk about culture, decision-making and creative risk without the abstraction that usually surrounds those topics.
Roberts now runs Red Rose Consulting and chairs My Food Bag and The Herdy Company. He holds honorary chairs in creative leadership and innovation at Lancaster University, the University of Auckland Business School and the University of Victoria in Canada, and is a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to business.
Key speaking topics
- Brand strategy and emotional brand equity
- Creative leadership in commercial organisations
- Marketing transformation and customer loyalty
- High-performance culture
- Leadership in volatile markets
- Innovation inside legacy businesses
Ideal for
- CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding loyalty in commoditised categories
- CEOs and boards of consumer-facing businesses where brand is the main commercial moat
- Marketing, creative and customer experience leadership teams
- Sales and growth conferences in retail, FMCG, media and advertising
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of what separates a brand customers respect from one they actively love, and why the second is worth more
- Language for talking about emotion as a commercial asset rather than a soft variable
- A clearer view of how creative organisations make decisions under pressure, drawn from inside one of the world’s largest networks
- Practical positions on culture, risk and leadership taken from 64 Shots that audiences can argue with rather than nod at
Talks
A working session on moving brands from respect to love, using the mystery, sensuality and intimacy framework from Lovemarks.
Key takeaways:
- Why high-respect brands still lose to high-love competitors
- How to audit a brand’s emotional equity, not only its functional position
- What creative, marketing and CX teams need to change to build love at scale
A leadership keynote drawn from 64 Shots, aimed at executives running businesses through volatile, fast-moving conditions.
Key takeaways:
- A working set of leadership principles for VUCA conditions, drawn from inside a global creative business
- How to make faster, more confident decisions when the data is incomplete
- What separates leaders who energise their organisations from those who drain them
A session on combining behavioural data with emotional brand-building to drive customer engagement and growth.
Key takeaways:
- Why data without emotion produces accurate but forgettable marketing
- How to connect brand strategy with measurement without flattening it
- Where customer engagement is heading in screen-led, attention-scarce categories