I have a very short attention span and I get bored very easily. I’m not unique in that respect and I can pretty much guarantee that some of you are already ducking out of this blog to chuckle over a hilarious gif or fawn over a perfectly filtered insta-sunset.
I am as guilty of this as the next person, which is why I’ve always sought out novelty and the next thing, because boredom fuels creativity & drives change but it also forces businesses and brands to work harder and be better, more engaging, more multi-faceted, fresher and crucially more relevant.
I’m often asked what I do for a living and when I tell people I’m a brand strategist I’m usually met with a pretty blank look, confronted head on with the inherent intangibility of my day to day, at least to anyone outside of the world of brands. So what I tell them is that I help brands tell more interesting stories, launch new and interesting products and to mean something beyond the provision of a simple product or service. Ultimately all of that boils down to helping brands become relevant or maintain or increase their existing relevance.
To date that perpetual challenge has taken me from ad land where I started off at BBH, cutting my insight & planning teeth on the likes of British Airways, Audi and Lynx, to repositioning Pot Noodle during my first sojourn into brand consultancy. From there I ventured client side to the marketing team at Metro working on editorial, digital, marketing and consumer engagement strategies and back into brand consultancy creating a beer brand for the Russian market, building brands for some of the world’s bestselling authors and developing a comms strategy for Durex, amongst a mountain of other international projects on anything from fabric conditioner to cat food to whisky, from Tanzania to Thailand to China and India.
It’s been quite the non-linear journey to TVE but I suppose it’s fitting that I’ve landed somewhere that is so centred around change. And so, if you’re still here, here’s to boredom, here’s to short attention spans and most importantly, here’s to change.