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“In organisations where everybody sees themselves as a brand-builder and has a role to play, my experience is, it leads to dramatically different outcomes.”
In this episode of The Persuasion Game podcast, Adam is joined by Andrew Geoghegan, an experienced global CMO whose career spans nearly two decades at Diageo as well as senior roles at PepsiCo, William Grant & Sons, and PZ Cussons.
Andrew makes the case that brand building can be an engine for growth in an era of transformative times that we are living in.
We explore what it really means for everyone in an organisation to be a brand builder, why marketing should champion the process rather than own it, and his view on why some brand building exercises fail.
He also shares his perspective on the current state of marketing capability, and why leading with humility is the key to success.
Andrew’s work on marketing effectiveness won him a Gold at the IPA Effectiveness Awards, and he has now distilled everything he knows into a book: “Effective Brand Building”.
CHAPTERS:
(00:00) Introduction
(03:07) Organisational Alignment Matters
(11:53) Everyone Builds Brands
(17:02) Capability Training Gaps
(22:29) Leadership In Chaos
(28:28) Strategy As a Blueprint
Transcript:
Andrew: Your brand is in a state of decay permanently. People are just forgetting about it. But your job is to stop the inevitable decay of that brand and turn it into growth.
Adam: Welcome to the Persuasion Game, Forge’s podcast all about growing brands and influencing consumers in the modern age, brought to you by MSQ. My name’s Adam Rowles. I’m the Marketing and Business Development Director for Forge, a consultancy that helps brands to grow in transformative times through future forecasting, dynamic demand spaces, growth in brand strategy, and innovation.
Find out more at forgemsq.com.
So my guest today is someone I’ve been wanting to get on this podcast for a while. Andrew Geoghegan is an experienced global CMO who’s worked at businesses such as Diageo, PepsiCo, and William Grant & Sons, as well as PZ Cussons. In his nearly 20 years at Diageo, he led multiple teams, including working on marketing effectiveness across the business, and his work on effectiveness won him a gold at the IPA Effectiveness Awards, and he’s now poured it into a book called Effective Brand Building, published by Kogan Page.
Andrew, welcome.
Andrew: Thank you. Lovely to be here.
Adam: Well, firstly, congratulations on publishing your book. With this story of effectiveness that runs through your career, I’m guessing what led you to write it, but maybe you could share what led you to write that book.
Andrew: Yeah, good question. I mean, obviously writing a book is quite an undertaking.
You start with a blank page, and it’s quite intimidating, but before you know it, you’ve got 85,000 words and you’re ready to go. And I guess the point of doing it is I wanted to help people who were doing the actual work, people who were practicing marketing because my observation is that in the last decade it’s become incredibly challenging to do that work within an organisation, particularly when you’re surrounded often by voices, external voices, sometimes consultant voices who are very critical.
The social media around brands is unforgiving, and actually people in organisations are doing the best they can, often in quite difficult situations, in a world where there’s less investment in capability, the environment is more challenging. And so the point of the book was to create something very practical, very easy, that people could have in their kit bag, and that would fill in some of those gaps that they might have in their own knowledge or in their own teams.
So it was really to be helpful and useful.
Adam: I’ve been reading the book, and it really is that. It’s a very practical guide. It draws on a lot of the marketing theory, the behavioural economics theory, all the stuff that I think has become a bit of a consensus.
Andrew: Yes.
Adam: Or I think we’re closer to a consensus about what makes for effective brand-building more than we were historically.
But still, it’s very difficult, isn’t it, to get these brands firing on all cylinders in the way that you want them to?
Andrew: Yeah, I think that’s right. You’re right in so far as the marketing fraternity or sorority, whatever you want to call it, has reached something of a consensus. So you talked about some of the things that we increasingly agree on, and that’s great, so that’s real progress.
However, I’m not sure that that necessarily is translated beyond the marketing world. So if you look within an organisation, broader functional teams have not necessarily got that memo about what we now know about how brands grow and what we need to do in order to achieve that. So there’s progress there, but marketers still haven’t done an effective job in helping their finance colleagues, the people in supply understand that.
And I often, I’m struck by, there’s a narrative about how marketing people need to understand and speak the language of the CFO. But also I think the CFO needs to learn to speak the language of the consumer and the customer, and it is actually our responsibility as marketers to enable that conversation to happen and to up-skill organisations in that quite simple foundational knowledge that’s emerged.
Adam: So I mean, you do make this point in the book quite clearly that when brand-building fails, it’s rarely marketing that’s at fault alone. It’s not just the positioning or the insight or the creative that gets lets it down, and it’s much more often the organisation itself. Why is that?
Andrew: Yeah, I mean, marketing will often get the blame, of course, and sometimes rightly so, for not really understanding what’s going on in the external environment. But my encouragement is that marketers need to be as acutely aware of the system in which they’re operating as they are of the external system.
So it’s often something will fail, not because they’ve got the wrong strategy or the wrong creative work, but because the organisation isn’t really aligned behind it, or the work that they’ve got actually is missing some critical element of how the organisation works and its openness to what enables brand building.
And that’s things like the right culture, the right strategy, that the marketing folk understand what motivates the organisation and the people, that they understand how decisions are made, where power lies, how information flows. So really understanding and starting with a real view of the organisation as a system, just as the external world is a system. It really sets you up to be successful, much more so than having the right strategy, the right work.
Clearly, you need those things, but I think it’s the interplay of having those two things aligned that really leads to success within an organisation.
Adam: I think that’s fascinating. You know, we often talk about the diagnosis phase of the beginning of brand building, but actually diagnosing your own organisation is a fascinating place to start. What are the one or two or three key things to cover off there that you would advise?
Andrew: I mean it’s funny. A specific example comes to mind of actually a failure, one that I was involved with. Actually, a very famous UK household brand, I won’t say which to spare blushes.
But it’s a really good example where it was an organisation wanting to shift from trading to brand building, and this was a brand that had really benefited from COVID and had a bit of the, you know, wind in its sails, and actually had the right strategy, had the right work. It also had econometrics that showed that basically you could have spent four or five times more, and yet that business never rerun any of that work.
And of course, the reason was because of a fundamental misalignment in the culture. The organisation said it wanted to become brand building, but still the people who were really in charge of making decisions hadn’t really evolved their own capability and understanding of what that meant. And therefore for them, it felt like a huge risk to put more money on something which was unfamiliar to them.
And as a result, it never happened, despite the evidence. So you’ve got the best work. You’ve hit the nail on the head. The marketing director in the UK business had done an extraordinary job but was unable to cut through because… Not because anyone was being bloody-minded, but because the conditions weren’t there for brands to be invested in for the future.
It felt like risk.
And of course, that marketing director, and actually the one that came after her, both left pretty soon after because the fundamentals weren’t there for that work or a brand-building process to flourish. Sometimes you just have to call it.
Adam: Or do the hard work I guess in those situations to kind of re-educate, if that’s really where you wanted to take it would require changing the organisational culture before you land it.
Andrew: Yes, that’s right.
And if you can’t change that culture, you can’t make the progress that you need.
Adam: Yeah.
Andrew: And, and also I think it’s worth recognising that maybe unlike the finance function, the marketing function is less codified, so it’s really dependent on the type of industry the organisation as to the role that marketing plays.
It’s radically different in a… one of the classic academy consumer businesses, like a Unilever or Diageo than it would be if you were the marketing department at Manchester United or an insurance company or something. So really understanding the role and what’s expected and therefore, what kind of powers and control you’ve got is important.
If you don’t have that clear, you almost can’t pass first base on getting anything done.
Adam: Yeah. And asking those searching questions of the board, of the leadership team about, like, what real appetite they have to go on that journey.
Andrew: And I think as well because people grow up in organisations and spend a long time there, they become a little bit blind to the system that they’re in.
Adam: Yeah.
Andrew: So my encouragement is always be very conscious of that, be aware of it, and notice how it’s changing, and, you know, pay as much attention to that as you do to the consumer and the external environment. And it should be a really important component of any audit that you do when you’re trying to work out the situation your brand faces.
Adam: So we’ve talked a bit about the bigger brands and the ones that have the luxury of being able to create a Diageo way, for example, or their own schools of branding within the academies. What about, you’ve also mentioned smaller brands. Like Man United, if you’re a marketing team there, it’s gonna operate slightly differently. How should you operate differently in those environments?
Andrew: I think the first thing is to know what the role is. And that’s often the relationship that the marketer has to the core product or service. And a football team’s a good example. You know, the reality is the marketer is not going to affect who’s in the team, what the play is on the pitch, you know, all of those kind of things.
Adam: There’ll be a marketing director somewhere that wants to have that influence.
Andrew: There would be. But they’re not going to, let’s be honest.
Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Andrew: But their role then is really about understanding the fan, and really building connection between the audience and the team. And providing kind of access, and then obviously monetising that as best as possible. That’s really different from if you’re working on a consumer good, on a whiskey brand or a beer brand. And it’s different again from if you’re working in the insurance industry.
The insurance industry, it will be the actuaries who are defining what the products are, and there’s a high, an important legal component to what’s being sold. So your role is really different in all of those different circumstances and situations. The tech businesses, those businesses have grown up being led by technology development and R&D, and then it’s up to the marketing team often to find the usage for those things and how to turn them into money.
So start by going, how does this business make money? What kind of business is it? What is the role of marketing here? And, you know, that can range from fundamental and strategic right to in some of the kind of hotel chains, it might just be about filling rooms and getting bookings, but really understand that.
Adam: Yeah.
Andrew: And you may not like where it sits on that continuum but ensure that you really know what the role and expectation is.
Adam: Yeah. I think you’re very careful in your book to say that marketing should be central rather than lead the brand-building process, and that everybody is a brand builder. Why does that distinction matter, do you think?
Andrew: I think, or certainly my experience has been in organisations where everybody sees themselves as a brand builder and has a role to play, be it in making products with exceptional quality or distribution or sales or whatever, tends to lead to better outcomes.
And marketing, by the way, should champion brand building, but doesn’t necessarily need to own it, and if they can create an environment where it feels as if everybody is playing a part in that, my experience is it leads to dramatically different outcomes than if marketing tries to be front and centre, you know, and risk kind of annoying people in so doing.
Adam: Yeah.
Andrew: Or doesn’t actually put the effort into really building that consensus and that belief against the work that’s there to be done. I’m really struck, thinking of examples, a good friend of mine worked for Costa for some time and would always talk about how consistent it felt internally as a brand to externally in terms of what the consumer or their customers felt.
I don’t know whether that’s the case now, but that’s such a good example where everything is aligned from, you know, the choice of beans, the experience, both internally and externally, and that’s gonna show up.
I worked at Diageo for a long time. That’s a portfolio business. Obviously, you don’t have the luxury of achieving that synergy internally and externally, but that was a business when it first came together, I joined probably about seven years after that, that they put in place something called the Diageo Way of Brand Building, which created that common foundation and framework-
Adam: Yeah.
Andrew: that meant that everybody across that whole organisation saw themselves as a brand builder. As part of it in service of those marvelous brands. And, so you can create that culture, but it needs to be done in a way that’s really deliberate, very conscious, not just, you know, a bunch of values or statements on a wall.
It needs to flow through people’s veins. In fact, at Guinness, people used to talk about, if they cut them, they would bleed black.
Adam: Yeah, I know that Tom Goodwin is constantly talking about this, the very small things that, like, have a material impact on your brand, whether it’s a positive impact or a negative impact.
They’re not actually often coming out of the marketing department. It might be the way the website does something, or being able to cancel as quickly as you can subscribe, or being able to reach someone on the phone, or have someone reply to your email, or like there’s so many parts of the whole brand-
Andrew: That’s right.
Adam: world and experience that can make a humongous difference that got nothing to do with marketing, so yeah.
Andrew: Well, and increasingly that, you know, that user experience of all touchpoints is how brands are judged. And as you described that, you know, a failure at customer services or a poor response to something actually can have much more of a negative long-term impact on, you know, the mental patterns that people create around that brand than anything else.
Adam: I guess it’s one of those things — everyone’s a brand builder. It’s easy to say, but hard to live.
Andrew: Yeah.
Adam: So where have you seen it work, like, really well? Or where, where is it naive? Where, where should this kind of come alive, do you think?
Andrew: I think it really comes down to whether the organisation truly believes and wants that and has it in its heart and soul.
I gave you the example of Diageo. Certainly from the beginning of that business, it made a very conscious choice that everybody would be a brand builder, that it would create a distinctive culture around that because it was managing at the time a business that wasn’t just alcohol. It included fast food and other consumer goods.
So I think it needs to come from a conscious decision that that’s what you’re going to do and going to create. I think it’s easier typically in smaller founder-led businesses because the culture and the belief in the brand, you know, really comes through in everything that that founder will do.
As it grows, it becomes about codifying it, making sense of it, and enabling everybody to really understand their role in it. But it can be naive if you’re just saying, “Let’s be brand builders,” but you’re not putting in place the foundations, the beliefs. You talked earlier about that common set of evidence now about what happens.
If you don’t have a well-articulated philosophy of how brands grow and what that means for you, a set of capabilities and some repeatable processes, you’re just talking about it. You’re not really gonna commit to doing the actions, the consistent investment in the work that’s actually gonna lead to that kind of brand-building output.
Adam: Over the last few years, we’ve obviously seen the landscape changes a lot, the operating environment change a lot, the way that consumers make decisions, how fast businesses have to move, the threat of new entrants. And I think we’ve also seen the rise of the marketing capability kind of industry.
Andrew: Yes.
Adam: You know, whether it’s a mini MBA or other training courses, and I think the kind of importance around that. What do you see as the kind of current state of, like, marketing capability and where we need to kind of either do better or we’re doing well? What are your thoughts on where we’re at?
Andrew: It’s an, I think, a fascinating area. It’s changed fundamentally. It’s gone from a world in which big businesses invested massively in creating their way of doing things at scale. And under financial pressure and margin pressure, that’s gone away a lot. It was also the case that some of the big training bodies, such as the Chartered Institute of Marketing, played a much more front and centre role in training people.
And I think, as you said, the sheer disruption in the external environment in the last five years, which, you know, is extraordinary, has meant that businesses have really had to make some quite hard choices. And that has opened up the opportunity. It’s created a gap in the market that’s been, you know, filled very admirably by things like the Mini MBA programme.
And that’s great. However, it gives an individual training experience, and therefore, what’s missing within organisations is that common belief way of doing things. And certainly when I’ve joined… In fact, the last two organisations I’ve joined both lacked those foundations, and one of the first things to do was to recognise that people knew what they were doing, but they just had different ways of thinking and doing and talking about it, and that took time, time that frankly wasn’t available.
So investing time and going, “Okay, these are the core things that we need to believe. This is what the core processes are, and here’s how we’re going to do them, and what we’re going to call them,” is really important. So that industry that’s built up is really valuable, but it’s actually not going to have the impact internally that’s required, which comes when the marketing leaders go, “Right, this is what we believe. This is how we’re going to approach it, and this is what we’re gonna call it.” That’s when I think you get the real benefit from that.
Adam: A lot of what we’ve seen, you could argue is about the two speeds of marketing, right? You’ve gotta make sales today, but you’ve gotta build your brands for tomorrow. Perhaps it’s the kind of more forward-looking stuff that has taken a backseat recently.
Andrew: Yes.
Adam: You know, we’ve been trying to kind of figure out what’s going on, and move quickly and pivot. Where do you see brands today? What do you see them needing to do in order to kind of overcome some of these challenges?
Andrew: Yeah, it’s… I mean, the sheer challenge of, you know, COVID, followed by a massive geopolitical realignment, followed by some pretty big conflicts and inflation and it’s been a very, very challenging time. So it’s unsurprising that many businesses have put aside having a long-term strategy, and they’re just fighting for survival today.
And, you know, I certainly can see that things have become much more reactive and much more short-termist. And my, what I urge people to do is to find balance. So unfortunately, you can’t be credible talking about the long term unless you’re delivering the numbers in the short term. So it’s about being clear on the direction.
It’s about being clear on the priorities based on real understanding of the situation that you face, and ensuring that the work that you’re doing is in service of those jobs to be done. And having that as a North Star that enables you to basically check in that what you’re doing in the short term is still laddering up to where you need to be in the long term, and to gradually, if you are facing that real short-term pressure and inability to get into a planning mode, is to slowly but surely tip things so that you are doing more and more things which are in service both of tomorrow, but also the longer term.
But I think it’s a real existential challenge for many people in many businesses.
Adam: Yeah. And, you know, if your team is stretched, and you can only get a few things right, where would you be focussing, do you think?
Andrew: I think it’s absolutely those things. It’s being clear on the two to three priorities that you’ve got in order to win, in order to grow penetration, and basically capture a sale-
Adam: Yeah.
Andrew: from the competition. And if you are really clear on the triggers and barriers or the opportunities and challenges that your brand has and can ensure every single piece of work that you do is focussed on those things, then you’ll start to change the needle because you’ll be stopping doing the things that you probably feel comfortable doing but, you know, might not actually be delivering against those two to three imperatives.
So it’s really as simple as just lining things up against a consumer-centric view of what it will take to grow.
Adam: I think one of the really interesting things in all of this is the leaders that are having to kind of pivot and change themselves into this new landscape. How have you seen leadership change over the last few years?
What are the kind of big changes that have happened there for the individuals involved?
Andrew: I think the culture of leadership that we see, not just in businesses, by the way, in the world, has changed fundamentally, and not for the better. I mean, you just look at some of the big political figures who’ve gone from being very purpose-driven, to being actually very dogmatic, very authoritarian, very tell do, but not always playing with a full deck of cards or the information that’s available.
And I think I see that type of leadership show up much more, whereas, you know, a decade ago, maybe longer, there was much more emphasis on servant leadership, on purpose-driven leadership, on the leader being, you know, in service of the people, of the business, of the brands. And I can see why it’s happened and under pressure, but I don’t think it’s leading to better outcomes.
I think marketing leaders continue to try and do the right thing to lead in a way that’s setting clear direction, removing barriers, empowering others, developing capability, but I think that’s slightly out of fashion at the moment, and I think that’s quite problematic.
Adam: Yeah. We’ve seen big changes in the speed that you’ve gotta work at. We’ve seen big changes in the level of understanding of new technologies. You’re expected to be able to do the long and the short at the same time, and kind of corral an entire organisation around the brand-building journey. I mean, what are the kind of key opportunity areas do you think for leaders in pushing forward into this? Like, what, if they’re to work on themselves. What do you think are the kind of key spaces that are most beneficial?
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, listen, you’re right. The world’s a mess. Technology is fundamentally changing how we connect with consumers, and, you know, internally, businesses are really struggling with how they adapt to those situations.
So I think marketing leaders have to approach this with real humility and recognise that they don’t necessarily have all of the answers, and they are working in a world where the kind of where power sits has fundamentally changed. It now sits with all of the big tech platforms.
It’s really challenging.
So, the work needs to be on who I am as a leader, what the organisation requires of me, what people need of me, and to, I think, show up with some vulnerability and some humility to those people is probably one of the most empowering and, for many people, counterintuitive things to do. Because clearly we’re in a world where hubris rather than showing, you know, vulnerability and humility are, you know, more the norm.
But I do think taking time to do the work yourself, you know, get a coach, focus in that way is, is probably going to preserve your sanity better, as well as enabling you to connect your teams better to the mission that you’re on in the ever-changing circumstances that you’re trying to do it.
Adam: Yeah. And just that constant learning. I think you say in your book, learning, unlearning, relearning.
Andrew: Yeah.
Adam: Yeah.
Andrew: But I mean, we’re here… This is slightly Buddhist, isn’t it? We’re here to learn.
Adam: Yeah.
Andrew: And if we accept that. And that we don’t have the answers, but that’s part of what we’re there for.
Then that’s sometimes the best thing we can do for the people and our brands, because even when we engage with marketing work and we put it out there, it’s always a leap of faith.
Adam: Yeah.
Andrew: No matter how much research you do, you don’t know how it’s gonna work with the audience in the real world. Your job is to take that leap of faith and then to learn and make it better.
Adam: Yeah. It’s almost like the, you know, the pursuit of growth is now requiring the growth mindset more than ever.
Andrew: Yeah. And humility, because one thing is for certain is, you’ll probably get more things wrong than you’ll get right in the pursuit of ultimately cracking the code of how to make a brand grow.
I’m always struck, it’s very easy for, you know, the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and all of these people to tell us what the principles are. It’s far harder for a marketer to do them in real life-
Adam: Yeah…
Andrew: and to do them well when everyone’s a critic. Nobody, you know, you can’t really prove what’s gonna work before it’s done. It’s all a leap of faith.
Adam: Yeah. It’s just, like, you know, to take an example like portfolio planning. Your portfolio might make sense one, in one decade or year, or whatever it is, but as needs change, you suddenly find all your brands are in one space, and you haven’t got any over here, but you can’t just kill them all or merge them. So yeah, there’s some sort of messy, imperfect world you’ve got to manage as well.
Andrew: Yeah, your brand is in a state of decay permanently. People are just forgetting about it, and it is pretty depressing, right? But your job is to stop the inevitable decay of that brand and turn it into growth. It’s quite a challenge.
Adam: Yeah. You described it as a product wrapped in a myth, and the myth is constantly changing.
Andrew: Yeah, because culture is moving around brands. The brands that are successful retain true to what’s at their core, but they’re able to re-express that in a way that is sympathetic to how culture’s moving around them.
It’s this, you know, your job is as a custodian, it’s not to impart your own ego on that brand. It’s to help it thrive.
Adam: Yeah. So I mean, I don’t know if I want to ask this question because we’re a growth and a strategy consultancy. But you describe in your book how the strategy is there so that you have something to deviate from.
Andrew: Yes.
Adam: Or words to that effect. I’m paraphrasing you slightly. What do you see as the role of the strategy, you know, in all of this if it can change so much and chaos can kinda happen around it?
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, listen, I’m fundamentally a strategist as well. I really believe it’s critical to have a clear view of where you’re going.
And for that to be as aligned as it can be across the organisation. And it really doesn’t matter whether it’s entirely right or 70% right. It does matter if it’s entirely wrong. Because if you don’t have that, you don’t have direction, you don’t have a blueprint against which to judge how you’re going and to make decisions.
The courageous thing to do is to see it as a blueprint, and that be able, as new information comes in, to interrogate it, not to throw it out, but just to go, you know, how does this affect what I believed the right things to do were and how to do them effectively. And that, I think if you create that dialogue, revisit it formally once a year.
But if you’ve got that, you’ve actually got something that enables you to take action, because the most important thing is being able to take action. So fundamentally, strategy brilliantly grounded in understanding of the environment that you’re in internally, externally is critical. But you also can’t be a slave to it, because unfortunately, consumers in the real world are more complicated.
Adam: Yeah, I really like that. I think that’s a great note to leave it on. Although I have one more question for you, Andrew.
Andrew: Go on.
Adam: So if there’s one move a marketer listening to this podcast is gonna make on Monday morning, what would you want it to be?
Andrew: I would want them to take a step back, look at their organisation holistically, at its strategy, what motivates the people, how information flows, how decisions are made, and really understand if they truly are aligning their work to that environment and have set it up to be successful.
To really focus on, do I understand my organisation and what it takes in order to succeed in that? That would be the one thing.
Adam: Brilliant. Well, that’s been a fascinating interview. Thank you so much for joining.
Andrew: Thank you.
Adam: I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. I’ve been looking forward to getting Andrew on the podcast for a while because we clearly live in transformative times, and the book that Andrew has written is about how to help brands grow in that environment. I felt he really helped to understand the big challenges that marketing directors and CMOs are facing and what we need to do about it next. So hopefully you enjoyed that too.
If you wanna find out more about how Forge helps brands to grow in transformative times, you can go to forgemsq.com.
