UK users

Jeremy Bullmore's latest book is a typically perceptive collection of essays and musings on the nature of brands, advertising and marketing in general. Bullmore is something of a household name in the UK (providing of course that the occupants of the household in question happen to work in the advertising industry). A former chairman of JWT during the 1980s, Bullmore has for many years been a weekly columnist for trade bible Campaign, as well as a prolific contributor to the likes of Management Today and The Guardian newspaper. He is also a former director of WPP, and a serving member of that group's Advisory Council. For the last eight years he has contributed an essay to WPP's annual report, and it is six of those pieces which form the core of this collection, along with Posh Spice & Persil, which began life as an address to the British Brands Group, and other writings.

Bullmore's work is always distinguished by its elegant and witty insight into the curious paradoxes of modern marketing, setting out above all to strip away the business-speak to uncover a more meaningful truth. He is especially fond of Ted Levitt's epigrammatical warning to Harvard Business School students: "People don't want quarter-inch drills; they want quarter-inch holes". It reappears no less that three times in this volume, serving each time as the springboard for a different set of musings. The opening piece, for example, sets out to decode the real function of marketing when seen from the client's point of view. Taking Levitt's illustration as his inspiration, Bullmore provides a more instructive definition of various marketing disciplines. ("The product that is sold is called Direct Marketing. The product that is bought is more like a prospector's sieve, screening out the mud and waste and exposing a few bright glints of gold"). Other pieces explore the need for marketers to back up their brands with solid customer service, the impossibility of quantifying creativity, and the evils of "sizzle marketing" (style without substance). 

Highlight of the volume is Posh Spice & Persil, a lengthy piece which makes up almost a third of the book. A meditation on branding, it explores 13 "deeply disturbing" but undeniably true brand facts, such as, "products are made and owners by companies. Brands, on the other hand, are made and owned by people... by the public... by consumers". Or "much of what influences the value of a brand lies in the hands of its competitors". Bullmore effortlessly gets to the heart of the marketing conundrum, exposing its real meaning with wisdom, wit and often startling insight. The resulting collection should be required reading for anyone engaged in the business of selling brands.

Added 27th April 2006