Marketing & Branding

Why organisations work with Dave Stewart Stewart’s credibility is operational, not academic. He has built multiple businesses across music, media, film, and technology – from Weapons of Mass Entertainment to The Hospital Club to RARE Entity – and can demonstrate from firsthand experience what the structural conditions for creative output actually look like at scale. No case study is borrowed. His book, The Business Playground (Financial Times/Pearson, 2010), co-written with branding expert Mark Simmons and published in eight languages, provides a replicable methodology for applied creative thinking in business contexts. It draws on scientific research, structured exercises, and interviews with figures including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – with a foreword by Richard Branson. He has worked inside major corporations as a practitioner, not an outside voice: serving as Nokia’s «change agent» and as US creative director at The Law Firm. Clients including Nokia, Visa International, and Credit Suisse have drawn a direct line between exposure to his thinking and changes in how they approached innovation. His current venture, RARE Entity (launched January 2026), is a venture builder that shifts IP ownership and commercial control back to the creators who generate it. He is speaking to one of the most urgent tensions in business today – who owns creative output and who benefits from it – from the position of someone actively building companies to solve it. The credential combination is genuinely unusual: a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and Grammy Award winner who has also built media ventures, co-authored a business book for a major publisher, scored West End and Broadway musicals, and spent four decades proving that the artist’s approach to making things is also the most commercially effective approach. Biography highlights Co-founder of Eurythmics with Annie Lennox; over 100 million album sales across a four-decade career Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee (2022); Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee (2020); UK Music Hall of Fame inductee (2005) Grammy Award winner; Golden Globe Award winner; four Ivor Novello Awards (Best Songwriter); four BRIT Awards (Best Producer), including a Lifetime Achievement Award Author of The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide (Financial Times/Pearson, 2010), co-written with Mark Simmons, foreword by Richard Branson, published in eight languages Founder and chairman, Weapons of Mass Entertainment; co-founder, The Hospital Club, London, with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen Served as Nokia’s «change agent» and US creative director at The Law Firm; executive producer, NBC series Songland (2019) Co-founder, RARE Entity (2026) – a venture builder dedicated to returning IP ownership and commercial control to creators Biography For most organisations, creativity is somewhere between a priority and a problem. It is cited in strategy documents and killed in planning meetings. The organisations that get it right tend to have someone who understands it not as a mindset but as a structural challenge. Dave Stewart has spent 40 years being that person. As co-founder of Eurythmics with Annie Lennox, Stewart helped build one of the most commercially successful creative partnerships in music history – over 100 million album sales, a Grammy Award, a Golden Globe, and induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. The creative process that produced those results was not accidental. It was the product of specific conditions, specific constraints, and a specific willingness to go into the unknown. Stewart has spent the decades since making that process legible for organisations that want to replicate it. His book, The Business Playground (Financial Times/Pearson, 2010), co-written with branding expert Mark Simmons, is the clearest articulation of his argument. Organisations that treat creativity as a personality trait will always struggle; those that build the right environment will consistently outperform. Published in eight languages, with a foreword by Richard Branson and interviews featuring Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, it remains a practical reference as much as a business book. His corporate work has included serving as Nokia’s «change agent» and as US creative director at The Law Firm. His most recent venture, RARE Entity (launched January 2026), is a venture builder that shifts IP ownership and commercial control back to the creators who generate it – the same argument he has been making for 40 years, now applied to one of the most contested challenges in the modern creator economy. Key speaking topics Creativity as a commercial capability Applied creative thinking in business Innovation culture and organisational conditions Entrepreneurship and venture building The creator economy and IP ownership Branding and cultural influence Technology, media disruption, and the future of creative industries Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers and innovation leadership teams seeking to move beyond idea generation into repeatable creative output CMOs and marketing leadership working on brand distinctiveness, creative culture, and commercial differentiation Leadership teams at media, entertainment, and technology organisations navigating disruption to existing business models Entrepreneurship and growth strategy conferences; founder, scale-up, and creative industries audiences Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of why creativity fails as a corporate programme – and what structural conditions actually produce it Practical frameworks and exercises drawn from The Business Playground for running better creative processes, from problem framing to idea development A model for thinking about the relationship between creative ambition and commercial discipline – from someone who has built businesses where that relationship was the point A sharper view of the creator economy: who controls IP, what AI and platform concentration are doing to that landscape, and what organisations need to do now The ability to distinguish between organisations that talk about innovation and those that have built the conditions for it

Why organisations work with Christian Howes He reads social and behavioural data the way a broadcaster reads a room, which means boards and marketing teams leave with a view of their customers that feels observed rather than modelled. He has been trusted on live television, from Big Brother’s Bit on the Side with Emma Willis to BT Sport and Channel 4’s alternative election night, to make data intelligible to audiences who are not data people. His corporate work spans PlayStation, Diageo, HSBC, Lloyds, ASOS and Barclays, so he arrives already fluent in the commercial contexts most clients are operating in. He doubles as a host, MC and panel moderator, which makes him a practical choice for events that want one credible voice across keynote, stage linking and awards. Biography highlights Regular social-data contributor on Big Brother’s Bit on the Side (Channel 5), 2011-2012, alongside Emma Willis. Television appearances on BT Sport (The Clare Balding Show, BT Sport Panel, BT Sport Live), ITV’s This Morning, BBC1 National Lottery, Good Morning Britain, and Channel 4’s alternative election night coverage. Co-founder of Mr Bridger, a content business developing formats for production companies and broadcasters. Corporate and keynote work with Sony PlayStation, Diageo, HSBC, RBS, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, ASOS, UMG, Channel 4, GoCompare, Skoda, Microsoft, Teradata and Cornerstone. Works as keynote speaker, conference host, awards presenter and panel moderator across UK and international business audiences. Biography Social data arrived in most boardrooms as a dashboard before it arrived as a story. Christian Howes built a career out of closing that gap. His route in was unusual: he started by modelling Twitter traffic around the Big Brother house to predict weekly evictions, which led to a weekly sofa spot on Big Brother’s Bit on the Side with Emma Willis, translating audience sentiment back to a live TV audience. That pattern, turning raw social signal into something a non-specialist can act on, became the core of his commercial work. He has gone on to appear as a data and digital contributor across BT Sport, ITV’s This Morning, BBC1’s National Lottery show, Good Morning Britain, and Channel 4’s alternative election night coverage. The broadcast craft is not decoration; it is the reason his corporate sessions land with marketing, CX and customer-service teams who have sat through too many unreadable analytics decks. His corporate roster reflects where social and behavioural data actually matters in large consumer businesses. He has worked with Sony PlayStation, Diageo, HSBC, RBS, Lloyds, Barclays, ASOS, UMG, Skoda, GoCompare, Microsoft and Teradata on what audiences are doing, what they are signalling, and how customer-service and merchandising operations should respond. In 2015 he co-founded Mr Bridger, a content business developing formats for production companies, which keeps his feet in the studio as well as the boardroom. The second half of his offer, and often the reason he is booked, is hosting. He anchors conferences, moderates panels and presents awards, and clients buy the combination: one voice that can deliver a substantive keynote on digital and data, then carry the rest of the room for the day. Key speaking topics Social media analytics and audience sentiment Big data and consumer behaviour Digital marketing and branding Customer experience and customer service transformation Conference hosting, awards presenting and panel moderation Media, broadcast and the attention economy Ideal for CMOs, brand and marketing directors in consumer-facing businesses Customer experience, customer service and digital transformation leads Conference and awards organisers needing one host across keynote and stage Retail, financial services and entertainment audiences working with large consumer datasets Audience outcomes A clearer read on what their customers are signalling on social and digital channels, with examples they recognise from their own category. A practical sense of where social and behavioural data should connect to operational decisions in marketing, CX and service. Concrete case references from consumer brands, financial services and broadcast, rather than generic digital theory. For hosted events, a single credible voice across keynote, interview and awards that keeps the room with you.

Why organisations work with Chris Brogan A defined framework for online influence, not just opinions about it. Trust Agents named what separates real customer traction from noise, and the CREATE equation in The Impact Equation turned the same idea into a model a marketing team can actually apply to a campaign. Three decades of working through every online wave in real time. He was blogging before the term existed, co-founded the PodCamp unconference series in 2006, and signed up as the 10,212th user on Twitter. His read on what AI will do to marketing is calibrated by having been early on the last four platform shifts. Credibility with the brands others want to sell into. Disney, Google, General Motors, Microsoft, Coke, PepsiCo, Cisco, Humana, and Sony USA have all retained him as a consultant or keynote speaker. He has sat inside the marketing functions of the companies most audiences are trying to reach. A thousand keynotes’ worth of calibration. Audiences have ranged from the Coldwell Banker GenBLUE conference to the royalty of the United Arab Emirates. Forbes named him one of its Must Follow Marketing Minds; Success magazine commissioned him to interview Richard Branson for its cover story. Biography highlights New York Times bestselling co-author of Trust Agents with Julien Smith (John Wiley & Sons, 2009; 10th Anniversary Edition 2019), also a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Author or co-author of nine business books, including The Impact Equation (Portfolio, 2012) and The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth (Wiley, 2014). Named by Forbes as one of its Must Follow Marketing Minds of 2014; chrisbrogan.com listed by Forbes among the 100 best websites for entrepreneurs. Co-founder of the PodCamp new-media unconference series (launched 2006 with Christopher S. Penn). Former monthly columnist at Entrepreneur magazine; featured in The Boston Globe, Forbes, Success, and USA Today; appeared on the Dr. Phil Show. Over a thousand keynote speeches delivered to clients including Disney, Google, General Motors, Microsoft, Coke, PepsiCo, Cisco, Humana, and Sony USA. Biography The cost of reaching customers online has fallen dramatically. The cost of earning their belief has climbed. Trust Agents, the 2009 New York Times bestseller Chris Brogan co-authored with Julien Smith, was among the first mainstream business books to name this problem. Its argument was that influence online accrues the way reputation does anywhere else, through consistent and useful contact with a defined community. The book’s “trust agent” framework set a vocabulary for a commercial category. With AI now flooding every inbox and feed with plausible noise, the framework has aged unusually well. The follow-up, The Impact Equation, made the same argument operational. Impact equals Contrast multiplied by the sum of Reach, Exposure, Articulation, Trust, and Echo. The formula tells a marketing team which of five dials to turn when campaigns underperform. Brogan’s work has been tested inside some of the companies with the most to lose on this question: Disney, Google, Microsoft, General Motors, Coke, Cisco, Humana, Sony USA. His authority on this stretches back further than most in the category. He was blogging before the term existed, co-founded the PodCamp unconference series in 2006 with Christopher S. Penn, and was signed up as the 10,212th user of Twitter. Forbes has listed him among its Must Follow Marketing Minds and named chrisbrogan.com one of the 100 best websites for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur magazine ran his monthly column for years; Success commissioned him to interview Richard Branson for its cover. The point Brogan keeps returning to in keynotes and advisory work is commercial. Every competitor runs broadly the same automation stack and the same CRM vendors. The organisations that win real customer loyalty are the ones willing to do slower, more specific work for a defined audience. A thousand keynotes across audiences from the Coldwell Banker GenBLUE conference to the royalty of the United Arab Emirates is the track record that stands behind the argument. Key speaking topics Trust and influence in digital markets Customer relationships in the age of AI marketing Content strategy and online community building The CREATE framework for campaign impact Human-centred approaches to digital transformation Executive leadership in a distracted marketplace Ideal for CMOs and marketing leaders rebuilding channel strategy as paid reach plateaus and AI transforms audience behaviour Sales and customer experience leaders responsible for converting digital attention into durable revenue Communications and corporate affairs teams rethinking how their organisation earns trust at scale Founders and senior operators in content-heavy businesses where audience, community, and media are the core assets Audience outcomes A usable way of diagnosing where marketing effort is being wasted, drawn from the CREATE equation A sharper read on where AI and automation extend customer relationships and where they erode them Shared vocabulary for internal debates about attention, trust, and audience value Specific examples from Fortune 500 marketing functions that clarify what “doing business the human way” looks like in practice

Why organisations work with Blake Mycoskie He built a consumer brand that sold 50% to Bain Capital at a $625 million valuation in 2014. When he talks about purpose-led growth, he is talking from the operator seat. His 2016 Harvard Business Review piece, “The Founder of TOMS on Reimagining the Company’s Mission,” is one of the few founder accounts of what breaks when purpose meets scale and how to rebuild a mission after its original story stops working. TOMS famously ran on almost no traditional advertising, relying on customers as marketers and the Argentina origin story as the brand’s centre of gravity. For CMOs and brand leaders working on authentic purpose positioning, that is a working case from the person who ran the experiment. He speaks openly about the founder arc after the exit: loss of purpose and the long work of rebuilding. For senior leadership audiences where executive mental health has moved from taboo to agenda item, he is genuinely useful. He is currently building ENOUGH, a nonprofit-owned mental health brand launched in 2026, alongside his $100 million psychedelic research philanthropy anchored at Johns Hopkins. His material stays live. Biography highlights Founder of TOMS Shoes; creator of the One for One business model Sold 50% of TOMS to Bain Capital in 2014 at a reported $625 million valuation Author of the New York Times bestseller “Start Something That Matters” (Spiegel & Grau, 2011) Harvard Business Review contributor: “The Founder of TOMS on Reimagining the Company’s Mission” (January/February 2016 issue) Recipient of the Secretary of State’s 2009 Award of Corporate Excellence from Hillary Clinton; invited by Richard Branson to join The B Team alongside Paul Polman and Muhammad Yunus Anchor donor to the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research; founder of ENOUGH (2026), a nonprofit-owned consumer brand supporting NAMI, Active Minds and other mental health partners Biography TOMS was one of the first consumer brands to make giving the centre of its commercial engine. For every pair of shoes sold, a pair was given away. The model scaled globally on the back of customer advocacy and almost no advertising spend, and TOMS gave more than 100 million pairs over its first decade. Blake Mycoskie built that company from a trip to Argentina in 2006. By 2014, Bain Capital had bought 50% of it at a $625 million valuation. What started as one founder’s shoe business had become a reference case for purpose-driven commerce, studied at Harvard Business School and written up across the business press. He has since been unusually open about what broke. In the January/February 2016 issue of Harvard Business Review, he wrote “The Founder of TOMS on Reimagining the Company’s Mission.” It remains among the most candid founder accounts of what happens when a purpose-led business scales past its origin story. Operations become routine and the brand loses touch with its why. The whole thing has to be rebuilt from the inside, which is not a familiar subject for founders at that scale to publish on. The arc has pushed further since. After leaving TOMS in 2019, Mycoskie went through a serious depression, which he now discusses openly, and has pivoted his philanthropy and new ventures toward mental health. He is an anchor donor to the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research and a member of Richard Branson’s B Team. His newest venture is ENOUGH, a 2026 nonprofit-owned consumer brand that directs 100% of profit to mental health partners including NAMI and Active Minds. For audiences working on purpose-led brand building, or on the long arc of founder leadership, he offers what most case studies stop before: what happens after the exit. Key speaking topics Social entrepreneurship and purpose-driven business One for One and buy-one-give-one business models Conscious capitalism and stakeholder value Purpose-led brand building and customer advocacy Founder journeys from startup to exit and beyond Mental health for senior leaders Catalytic philanthropy and mission investing Ideal for C-suite and founder audiences in consumer and brand-led B2C businesses thinking about purpose as commercial strategy CMO and brand leadership teams working on authentic purpose positioning and customer advocacy Business schools, executive education programmes, and founder/CEO cohorts working on venture creation and scale Leadership offsites where executive mental health and founder identity are on the agenda Audience outcomes An inside view of how One for One worked commercially: the role of customer advocacy in place of advertising spend, and the mechanics of scaling a purpose-led consumer brand An honest assessment of where the model hit its limits, including what Mycoskie published in Harvard Business Review about rebuilding TOMS’ mission after the original story lost its energy Language for talking about executive mental health and founder identity, drawn from a CEO who has put both on record publicly A reference case for putting giving at the commercial core of a consumer brand, from someone who built the category-defining example

Why organisations work with Anthony Thomson He is one of the very few operators in the world who has launched three licensed banks on three different models: a physical high-street challenger, a UK app-only bank, and an Australian smart bank. His Metro Bank launch ended a century-long drought of new UK high-street banks and set the reference point for what a customer-centred retail banking proposition looks like. He speaks from the chair’s seat, not the analyst’s gallery. Every argument he makes about challenger strategy, brand, and regulation has been tested against a real balance sheet and a real regulator. With Lucian Camp he wrote No Small Change (Wiley), a direct manifesto on why financial services marketing is broken and what has to replace it. He can brief a boardroom on what it actually takes to turn a strategy deck about “customer obsession” into a licensed, funded, operating business. Biography highlights Co-founder and founding chairman, Metro Bank, the first new UK high-street bank for over a century. Founder and former chairman, Atom Bank, the UK’s first app-only bank, licensed in 2015. Co-founder and former chairman, 86 400, Australia’s first smart bank, later acquired by NAB. Chair of Zip UK, the UK arm of the Australian buy-now-pay-later group. Co-author, No Small Change: Why Financial Services Needs A New Kind of Marketing, Wiley, 2018, with Lucian Camp. Co-founder and former chairman, The Financial Services Forum; Visiting Professor at London Metropolitan University and David Goldman Visiting Professor at Newcastle University Business School. Biography Metro Bank opened its first branch in Holborn in July 2010, the first new high-street bank to enter the UK market in more than a hundred years. Anthony Thomson co-founded the bank and served as its founding chairman, steering it from concept to licensed, trading retail institution. He did not stop there. A few years after leaving Metro, Thomson founded Atom Bank, the UK’s first app-only bank, which secured its banking licence in 2015. He then co-founded 86 400, Australia’s first smart bank, which was later acquired by National Australia Bank. Three licensed banks, three distinct models, one consistent thesis: the industry is overdue a redesign around the customer. That thesis is argued at length in No Small Change (Wiley, 2018), co-written with Lucian Camp, which treats financial services marketing as a discipline in need of serious reconstruction rather than a cosmetic refresh. Earlier in his career, Thomson co-founded City Financial Marketing, later acquired by Publicis, and The Financial Services Forum, giving him a practitioner’s view of brand and proposition design across the sector before he ever chaired a bank. Today he chairs Zip UK and speaks to boards, executive teams, and regulators about what it actually takes to launch and scale a new financial business. His work holds a precise answer to a question many incumbents struggle with: where does customer-led transformation stop being a slogan and start being a balance sheet. Key speaking topics Challenger banking and fintech strategy Customer-led retail banking models Launching regulated businesses from scratch Brand and marketing in financial services Digital and mobile-first banking Entrepreneurship inside regulated industries Ideal for Boards and executive teams of banks, insurers, and asset managers reviewing customer strategy. CMOs and brand leaders in financial services rethinking proposition and marketing investment. Founders, investors, and transformation leads building or funding fintech and regulated ventures. Audience outcomes A clearer view of what separates a challenger proposition that scales from one that stalls at launch. A concrete account of how a licensed bank gets designed, funded, and brought to market. Sharper questions to take back to their own customer, brand, and distribution strategy. A realistic sense of where regulation helps and where it quietly kills good ideas.

Why organisations work with Alex Hunter He ran Virgin Group’s global digital strategy and Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital presence. That is rare operator experience at the intersection of corporate brand and personal brand at global scale. As a founding-team member at Virgin America, he built the marketing campaign that won the airline public support during its certification process. His work was covered by Time, CNN and CNBC. His travel series Attaché has been named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards four separate times. He has had to build and keep a digital audience himself, which sharpens how he thinks about customer loyalty for the brands he advises. His client work spans Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, L’Oréal, Pepsi and McDonald’s. The pattern recognition he brings to a brand question comes from operating across categories where customer expectations look nothing alike. Biography highlights Former Global Head of Online for the Virgin Group, including oversight of Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital strategy. Founding-team member at Virgin America as Manager of Interactive Marketing. Work honoured with ad:tech and Webby Award recognition and covered by Time, CNN and CNBC. Creator and host of Attaché. Named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards in 2016, 2017, 2023 and 2024. Co-host of Layovers, an air travel and aviation podcast that has charted at number one in more than fifty countries. Venture Partner at Ignite Accelerator. Former trustee of UK alcohol education charity Drinkaware and advisor to the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Trust on social media engagement. Speaker and advisor to organisations including Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, Twitter, L’Oréal, Pepsi, McDonald’s and the BBC. Biography Virgin runs across airlines, telecoms, music, trains, space travel and wellness, and the brand reads as a single personality in each. Getting that kind of consistency out of a global portfolio is a specific operational discipline. Alex Hunter spent years running it. As Global Head of Online for the Virgin Group, Hunter oversaw digital strategy across the entire brand portfolio and ran Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital presence. Before that he was a founding-team member at Virgin America, where his marketing campaign won the airline public support during certification and was covered by Time, CNN and CNBC. He has also worked the other side of the table, as a creator. His travel series Attaché has been named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards four times since 2016. His aviation podcast Layovers has charted at number one in over fifty countries. Both have required him to build and hold an audience himself, which is what the brands he advises are trying to do at scale. His client list runs through Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, L’Oréal, Pepsi and McDonald’s. What he gives each is a view shaped by running Virgin’s digital brand at portfolio scale and then earning his own audiences from zero. The first taught him that brand consistency is a daily editorial discipline. The second taught him that customer loyalty is won episode by episode and can be lost in one. Key speaking topics Brand strategy in a digital-first market Customer experience and loyalty Digital marketing and audience engagement Content, storytelling and brand voice Building brands at corporate scale and startup pace Customer expectations across industries Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and Chief Customer Officers setting brand and loyalty agendas Digital, e-commerce and customer experience leadership teams Agency leadership and in-house creative teams briefing against enterprise clients Board and executive forums where brand reputation sits alongside revenue and risk Audience outcomes A sharper view of where their brand actually lives in a customer’s day, and where it does not The specific places digital investment earns loyalty and the specific places it wastes it A working definition of customer experience that separates noise from the decisions that move repeat business Examples from inside Virgin, Virgin America and his own Attaché audience of what consistency costs and what it earns

Why organisations work with Adam Morgan Morgan coined the challenger brand concept in a named, commercially researched framework – the eight challenger credos in Eating the Big Fish – giving organisations a specific strategic vocabulary that has been in active use across global marketing for over two decades. His most recent research project, The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, quantifies in IPA-backed data what strategic sameness actually costs a business: dull communications require up to 2.6× the media spend of interesting ones to generate the same commercial result – a figure that reframes brand strategy as a finance conversation. Where most brand strategists stop at positioning, Morgan extends the argument to internal culture: The Pirate Inside addresses the behavioural and organisational conditions needed to sustain a challenger strategy over time. A Beautiful Constraint gives leadership teams a practical method for treating budgetary and structural limitations as strategic inputs rather than blockers – directly applicable to any growth brief operating under resource pressure. His work sits at the junction of brand strategy, marketing effectiveness, and organisational behaviour – a combination that is unusually rare in a single practitioner. Biography highlights Founder and Chair of eatbigfish, the international challenger brand consultancy Author of Eating the Big Fish (Wiley, 1999; 2nd ed. 2009) – international bestseller, translated into eight languages; coined the term “challenger brand” Author of The Pirate Inside (Wiley, 2004) and co-author of A Beautiful Constraint (2015, with Mark Barden) Former Joint European Planning Director, TBWA\Chiat\Day; TBWA clients included Apple, Absolut, and Sony PlayStation Co-creator of The Extraordinary Cost of Dull – multi-partner research with Peter Field, System1, the IPA, and Dr Karen Nelson-Field Speaker at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2023 and 2024 Host of the Let’s Make This More Interesting podcast (eatbigfish) Consultancy clients have included IKEA, Unilever, Lexus, and PepsiCo Biography Adam Morgan spent the formative years of his career at TBWA\Chiat\Day, the agency behind Apple’s relaunch, Absolut, and Sony PlayStation. When he left to found eatbigfish in 1997, his question was specific: how do brands with fewer resources than the market leader compete – and win? Eating the Big Fish, published in 1999, answered that question with a named framework: eight challenger credos drawn from research into forty brands that had grown rapidly against dominant incumbents. The book introduced the term “challenger brand” to a global marketing audience, became an international bestseller in eight languages, and established a body of research – The Challenger Project – that has continued to evolve through four further books and three decades of consultancy work. The most recent extension of that work is The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, a research collaboration with Peter Field, System1, the IPA, and Dr Karen Nelson-Field. Analysing IPA Effectiveness Databank data, the project quantifies what strategic sameness costs organisations at the P&L level: brands running dull communications need up to 2.6 times the media investment of those running interesting ones to achieve equivalent commercial returns. The finding moves brand strategy from a marketing conversation into a boardroom one. What makes Morgan’s perspective directly useful to senior leaders is the consistency of the underlying argument across all three registers – strategy (Eating the Big Fish), culture (The Pirate Inside), and resource constraint (A Beautiful Constraint). The thesis is the same in each case: ambition and specificity of point of view are not optional extras for challengers. They are the mechanism. Key speaking topics Challenger brand strategy Differentiation and market positioning Growth under resource constraint The commercial cost of strategic sameness Brand culture and internal challenger behaviour Marketing effectiveness and creative impact Constraint as competitive advantage Ideal for CMOs and marketing leadership teams responsible for brand growth and differentiation CEOs and strategy directors in organisations competing against dominant category incumbents CFOs and senior leadership teams seeking to connect brand investment to commercial return Brand and innovation teams operating under budget or resource pressure Audience outcomes A working definition of challenger strategy – and a clear way to assess whether it applies to their organisation’s current position Familiarity with the eight challenger credos as a practical diagnostic and planning tool A data-backed understanding of what strategic sameness costs in media spend terms, and how to use that argument internally A framework for identifying where organisational constraints can be reframed as strategic advantages rather than blockers Specific behavioural markers of a challenger culture – and how to diagnose whether their organisation has them

Why organisations work with Simon Moore He runs a working behavioural science consultancy, IB (formerly Innovationbubble), with documented commercial case results including a 51% conversion uplift for a fashion brand and an 11% churn reduction in a banking client. He is a chartered psychologist with a PhD in psychobiological psychology, not a populariser of other people’s research, which is rare in the behavioural-economics speaker market. He won the Gold Retail Nudge Award in 2015 for retail behavioural work, a credential that maps directly to commercial decision-makers. His client list spans BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times, so the work has been pressure-tested in regulated, high-stakes commercial environments. He moves between consumer-facing strategy and internal employee behaviour, which lets the same engagement speak to a CMO and a CHRO without breaking apart. Biography highlights CEO and Partner of IB (Innovationbubble), an award-winning behavioural science consultancy applying psychology to commercial strategy. PhD in psychobiological psychology and Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. Former Academic Leader in Psychology at London Metropolitan University. Co-author of the undergraduate textbook “Complete Psychology” (first edition 2008). Winner of the Gold Retail Nudge Award (2015) for behavioural work with retail clients. Has advised commercial clients including BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times, and is a regular UK media commentator on consumer psychology. Biography Most commercial strategies are built on what people say they will do. Surveys, focus groups, stated-preference research, customer panels. The data is clean, the models are tidy, and the behaviour at the till, the renewal point, or the checkout button still surprises everyone. That gap is where Dr Simon Moore works. Moore is a Chartered Psychologist with a PhD in psychobiological psychology and CEO of IB, the behavioural science consultancy he founded as Innovationbubble. The firm uses psychological methods, not opinion, to investigate why customers and employees actually behave as they do, then translates those findings into pricing decisions, brand communications, retention design and internal change programmes. Clients have included BBC, HSBC, Aviva, Virgin Atlantic, Pfizer, Sony, FedEx, Microsoft and the Financial Times. Before founding the consultancy, he was Academic Leader in Psychology at London Metropolitan University and is co-author of the textbook “Complete Psychology”, used on undergraduate degree programmes. The academic foundation matters because most of the behavioural-economics speaker market is built on a few thin layers of summary. Moore is one of a small group of practitioners who built the underlying science before commercialising it, and the difference shows up in the specificity of what he recommends. In 2015, Innovationbubble won the Gold Retail Nudge Award for retail behavioural work. The case studies that travel with him are unusually concrete for the field: a 51% conversion uplift through reworked product descriptions in fashion, an 11% churn reduction in a banking client. He is a regular UK media voice on consumer psychology and behavioural intervention, but the booking case is operational, not editorial: he is hired by commercial leaders who have run out of conventional explanations for the numbers in front of them. Key speaking topics Behavioural science in commercial strategy Consumer decision-making and the say-do gap Psychology of brand communication and storytelling Customer loyalty, trust and retention Pricing, value perception and choice architecture Psychology of organisational change and employee behaviour The psychology of AI and human response to automated systems Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and customer experience leads are facing flat returns on conventional campaigns and CX investments Commercial directors and pricing leads working on retention, subscription and value-perception problems CHROs and change leads running internal behaviour-change programmes alongside the consumer-side work Boards and executive teams in regulated sectors (financial services, healthcare, telecoms) where customer trust drives commercial outcomes Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the psychological drivers behind specific commercial problems they own Concrete examples of behavioural interventions that have moved retention, conversion and trust metrics in named sectors A clear distinction between what behavioural science can credibly do and the marketing claims made on its behalf Direct prompts for re-examining pricing, messaging or CX assumptions that test well in research but underperform in market A more accurate read on how customers and employees will respond to AI-driven products, services and internal tools

Why organisations work with Robert Cialdini His Seven Principles of Influence – Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, Scarcity, and Unity – are the most widely referenced persuasion framework in business, grounded in peer-reviewed experimental research rather than practitioner observation. No comparable model carries equivalent scientific credibility. Pre-Suasion introduced a counterintuitive and commercially actionable argument: the moment before a message is delivered determines whether it will be received. That gives leaders, negotiators, and commercial teams a lever – the deliberate management of attention and context – that most organisations have never systematically deployed. His research has been applied across contexts from US presidential campaign strategy to national energy conservation policy, demonstrating that the principles are not industry-specific – they describe universal mechanisms of human decision-making. Influence is listed in Fortune’s “75 Smartest Business Books” and CEO Read’s “100 Best Business Books of All Time”; Pre-Suasion was a Financial Times Best Business Book of 2016. The durability of both titles means organisations are reinforcing, not introducing, a framework that their people already partially know – which accelerates adoption. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology has named a prize in his honour – a signal of the field’s verdict on the quality and societal relevance of his research, not merely its commercial reach. Biography highlights Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing, Arizona State University; visiting scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Ohio State, and the Annenberg School of Communications Author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984) and Pre-Suasion (2016) – combined sales of over seven million copies in more than 44 languages Pre-Suasion was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller; named a Financial Times Best Business Book of 2016 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018) and the National Academy of Sciences (2019) Described by Harvard Business Review as “the foremost expert on effective persuasion”; Influence listed in Fortune’s “75 Smartest Business Books” and CEO Read’s “100 Best Business Books of All Time” President and CEO of INFLUENCE AT WORK; holds honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Wroclaw), and the University of Basel Biography Robert Cialdini’s foundational research did not begin in a laboratory. He spent three years working undercover inside the professions of compliance – car dealerships, fundraising organisations, telemarketing firms – observing how influence actually operates in real commercial settings. That methodology produced Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, published in 1984. The Six Principles it identified – Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, and Scarcity – became the most applied persuasion framework in business, referenced from sales training programmes to business school curricula to the annual letters of Berkshire Hathaway. More than thirty years later, Cialdini returned with a second argument. Pre-Suasion proposed that the persuasive moment does not begin when a message is delivered – it begins before. The conditions set in the moments prior to communication determine whether an audience is receptive. Changing minds, he argued, requires changing states of mind first. Pre-Suasion became a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, and a Financial Times Best Business Book of 2016. It also introduced the seventh principle – Unity – based on the finding that shared identity is among the most powerful drivers of influence. The commercial applications are direct and cross-functional. Sales and marketing teams use the principles to structure offers and sequence communications. Leaders apply them to change management and stakeholder alignment. Negotiators use the Pre-Suasion concept to set the conditions before a position is stated. Harvard Business Review has described Cialdini as “the foremost expert on effective persuasion.” Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge, has said no psychologist’s research has been applied more often or more successfully. Cialdini is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and has held visiting scholar appointments at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communications. He has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology has named a prize in his honour – awarded for research that demonstrates societal relevance through field methods, which is precisely the standard his own work set. Key speaking topics The Seven Principles of Influence Pre-Suasion and the psychology of attention Ethical persuasion in leadership and negotiation Behavioural science in sales and marketing Social proof and organisational decision-making The Unity principle and collaborative alignment Science-based communication strategy Ideal for CMOs, sales directors, and commercial leadership teams seeking evidence-based frameworks for customer and stakeholder communication C-suite and board-level audiences navigating change, alignment, or strategic persuasion challenges Heads of marketing, brand, and communications responsible for message design and audience receptivity Negotiation, procurement, and business development professionals Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Seven Principles of Influence – including Unity – and how each applies in commercial, leadership, and negotiation contexts A clear grasp of the Pre-Suasion concept: how to shape audience receptivity before a message is delivered, and why this is distinct from refining the message itself A framework for distinguishing ethical influence from manipulation – and a practical understanding of why the distinction matters commercially as well as reputationally Specific, research-grounded adjustments to the sequencing, framing, and context of communication that improve persuasive effectiveness Confidence to apply the principles immediately across sales, leadership, and change management settings without requiring institutional change first

Why organisations work with Dr Darren Coleman He treats brand as an investment asset with measurable commercial return, giving CMOs and CFOs a shared language for defending budget when growth tightens. His Brand Experience Blueprint maps the path from strategy to frontline delivery, closing the gap between what marketing promises and what operations execute. Twenty-five years of B2B and services brand work across Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia and Japan, with named delivery for Johnson & Johnson, Singapore Airlines, Goldman Sachs, FUJIFILM, Nikon and Maybank. A doctoral grounding in B2B services brand performance, peer-reviewed publication in Industrial Marketing Management and the European Journal of Marketing, and a Kogan Page book in three languages. Visiting lecturer at the University of Warwick, with a teaching practice that keeps the frameworks tested against current MBA cohorts and corporate clients in parallel. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Consultant, Wavelength Marketing. Author, Building Brand Experiences: A Practical Guide to Retaining Brand Relevance (Kogan Page); translated into Korean, Turkish and Mandarin. PhD in B2B services brand performance; MA in marketing. Visiting Lecturer in Corporate Brand Management, University of Warwick. Peer-reviewed publication in Industrial Marketing Management and European Journal of Marketing. Keynote speaker at Electronic World Marketing Summit (Kotler Impact), Brand Week Istanbul, B2B Marketing Ignite and Fifteen Seconds Graz. Biography Service brands sell something customers cannot pick up, weigh or return. What they buy is an experience, and the gap between what marketing promises and what operations actually delivers is where loyalty, pricing power and referral are won or lost. Closing that gap is the work Dr Darren Coleman has spent twenty-five years on. His Brand Experience Blueprint is built around three operating layers: the environment shaping customer perception, the strategic essentials that anchor the brand, and the enablers that translate strategy into frontline delivery. Clients including Johnson & Johnson, Singapore Airlines, Goldman Sachs, FUJIFILM, Nikon, Maybank and Orange have used it to rebuild positioning, justify brand investment to finance, and make service consistent across markets. The intellectual foundation is academic. Coleman holds a PhD in B2B services brand performance, has published in Industrial Marketing Management and the European Journal of Marketing, and teaches Corporate Brand Management at the University of Warwick. The applied output is Building Brand Experiences, published by Kogan Page and now in Korean, Turkish and Mandarin editions, used by marketing teams and MBA programmes as a working operating manual rather than a theory text. What CMOs and CEOs take from him is a way to argue for brand investment in commercial terms. He reframes brand from a cost centre defended on faith into a measurable asset that protects margin when competitors discount and acquisition costs rise. Key speaking topics Brand experience strategy and execution Brand-driven growth for service organisations B2B services branding Brand as a commercial investment asset Customer experience and brand relevance Employer brand and internal alignment Sustainable brand differentiation Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams in B2B and service businesses C-suites in financial services, professional services, technology and healthcare evaluating brand investment Customer experience and operations leaders responsible for closing the strategy-to-delivery gap Executive education and senior leadership programmes covering brand, growth and customer strategy Audience outcomes A commercial argument for brand investment that holds up in a finance conversation A working model for translating brand strategy into operational customer experience Diagnostic clarity on where the brand promise and the customer reality currently diverge Practical reference points from Johnson & Johnson, Singapore Airlines, Goldman Sachs and other named service brands

Why organisations work with Alexis Abramson A PhD in Gerontology from USC’s Leonard Davis School combined with 25 years consulting the product and marketing teams of L’Oréal Paris, Marriott, Walmart, and Procter & Gamble. The academic credential and the commercial track record rarely come together in the same person. Direct product build experience, not commentary. She helped launch the AARP Innovation Lab as Entrepreneur-in-Residence, built BMO Private Bank’s enCircle caregiving programme, and developed Century 21’s MatureMoves programme for agents selling into the boomer market. Two decades of quoted commentary in TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Financial Times, and Entrepreneur, and hundreds of appearances on NBC’s Today, CNN, and MSNBC as the on-air expert on ageing and generational trends. The Emmy and Gracie Awards confirm she can explain a demographic shift in plain English. Ten years as a primary caregiver for her grandmother inform her work on caregiving as a workforce productivity issue. The material lands because she has lived it. Biography highlights PhD in Gerontology, University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology Former AARP Entrepreneur-in-Residence; led the launch of the AARP Innovation Lab Developed BMO Private Bank’s enCircle caregiving programme, Century 21’s MatureMoves programme, and Delta Airlines’ mature-adult frequent flyer programme Consulted for L’Oréal Paris, Walmart, Marriott, Comcast, Northwestern Mutual, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, Philips, Humana, Ameriprise, and Harvard University Featured in TIME, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Financial Times, and People; on-air expert for NBC’s Today, CNN, CBS, FOX, and MSNBC Emmy and Gracie Award-winning broadcast journalist Author of The Ultimate Longevity Guide, The Ultimate Caregiver, The 55+ Fact Book, STOP FRAUD, and Home Safety for Seniors Biography The 50+ consumer market is now the largest block of discretionary spending in most developed economies, and brands still misread it. Marketing teams design for a demographic that has not existed since the early 2000s. Product teams assume needs that never land. This is the territory Alexis Abramson has worked inside for 25 years. She trained first as a gerontologist at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School, then moved into commercial consulting. Her client list includes L’Oréal Paris, Walmart, Marriott, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, Comcast, and Northwestern Mutual. Her work is concrete. As AARP’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence she played a leading role in the launch of the AARP Innovation Lab. She built BMO Private Bank’s enCircle caregiving programme and developed Century 21’s MatureMoves programme for agents selling into the boomer market. She also shaped Delta Airlines’ frequent flyer programme for mature adults. Each required translating demographic research into a product a real customer would use. She is also the author of The Ultimate Longevity Guide, The Ultimate Caregiver, and STOP FRAUD, and an Emmy and Gracie Award-winning broadcast journalist. Hundreds of appearances on NBC’s Today, CNN, and MSNBC have built a skill most academics never develop. She can explain a demographic shift in two sentences an executive team actually remembers. Key speaking topics The longevity economy and 50+ consumer behaviour Multigenerational workforce dynamics Generational marketing strategy Product and service design for ageing populations Caregiving as a workforce productivity issue Demographic change as commercial opportunity Ideal for Marketing and brand leaders responsible for growth in mature or multigenerational consumer segments Chief Product Officers and product strategy teams designing for the 50+ market CHROs and people leaders running workforces with four or five generations in the room Board and C-suite teams setting strategy against long-horizon demographic change Audience outcomes A sharper read on where the 50+ consumer is actually spending, and where brands are consistently losing the sale Concrete examples of age-inclusive product and marketing design, drawn from her work with named brands A realistic view of caregiving as a workforce productivity issue with direct cost implications A framework for making the five-generation workforce a source of commercial advantage

Why organisations work with Farrah Storr She has repositioned three major consumer media brands through structural decline in print and can speak with evidence about what actually protects audience, authority, and commercial performance when the category is shrinking. She launched Women’s Health UK from a three-person team with minimal budget into what industry records call the most successful women’s magazine launch of the century, a concrete case of building inside a constraint. She crossed from legacy publishing to Substack and now runs its international writer business, so she has operator experience on both sides of the media disruption that most leaders only read about. Her book The Discomfort Zone and the BMD method give her a published leadership argument on how individuals and teams perform in conditions most organisations try to engineer away. Her MBE for services to Media and Diversity, her Social Mobility Commissioner role and her National Theatre board seat give her a public record on social mobility and diversity in creative industries that goes beyond corporate talking points. Biography highlights Head of Substack International, previously Head of Writer Partnerships at Substack UK. Editor-in-Chief, ELLE UK, 2019 to 2021. Editor-in-Chief, Cosmopolitan UK, 2015 to 2019, where the title became the UK’s number-one women’s glossy. Launch Editor-in-Chief, Women’s Health UK, from 2012. MBE, 2024 King’s Birthday Honours, for services to Media and Diversity. Commissioner, Social Mobility Commission, from 2018; Board Member, National Theatre, from 2021. Author, The Discomfort Zone: How to Get What You Want by Living Fearlessly, Piatkus, 2018. BSME Editor of the Year 2012, 2018, 2020; PPA Editor of the Year 2018, 2019. TEDxExeter speaker, 2018, “The Discomfort Zone”. Biography Women’s Health UK was a three-person team with almost no budget when Farrah Storr launched it in 2012. By industry count it became the most successful women’s magazine launch of the century, and the pattern repeated at the titles that followed. Cosmopolitan UK, where she was Editor-in-Chief from 2015, became the country’s number-one women’s glossy inside her tenure. In 2019 she moved to ELLE UK to do a similar job on the luxury end of the same portfolio. Her argument as an operator is that consumer brands hold their authority through hard editorial judgement under constraint, not through more budget. That case is easier to make now because she has left the category she was running. In 2021 she joined Substack as the first Head of Writer Partnerships in the UK, building the writer base that anchors the platform in this market, and has since stepped up to lead Substack International. That arc, from print consumer titles into the paid newsletter platform that is reshaping them, is unusually clean. It gives her a credible view on what moves with a writer, what stays with a brand, and what the economics of direct subscription actually demand from a team. Her book The Discomfort Zone, published by Piatkus in 2018, sets out the BMD method, her shorthand for Brief Moments of Discomfort as a training discipline for individuals and teams. It is read alongside the public work: her 2018 appointment as a Commissioner on the Social Mobility Commission, her 2021 appointment to the board of the National Theatre, and the 2024 MBE for services to Media and Diversity. Key speaking topics Brand reinvention in consumer media Leading through structural change and category decline Platform economics and the paid newsletter shift The Discomfort Zone and the BMD method Social mobility and diversity in creative industries Women in leadership Editorial judgement as commercial discipline Ideal for CMOs, editorial leaders and heads of content in consumer brands, publishing, and media CEOs and executive teams running heritage brands through audience and format change CHROs and leadership programmes focused on leading in constrained, shrinking or contested categories Networks and conferences on women’s leadership, social mobility and diversity in creative industries Audience outcomes A named operator’s read on what actually protects brand authority when a category is contracting. A working view of the paid newsletter shift from the inside of the platform now reshaping consumer media. A concrete account of launching and repositioning brands on small teams and tight budgets. A usable leadership argument from the Discomfort Zone on how people and teams perform in uncomfortable conditions. A credible perspective on social mobility and diversity in the creative industries, grounded in public roles and personal record.