10 years on from How Brands Grow and it’s fair to say it’s transformed the marketing thinking of many of the world’s (especially FMCG) brands... but I’m always intrigued by the islands in marketing that seem to try and ignore it ever happened.

Take data, targeting and personalisation... of course there are ways to approach this space with a HBG mindset but typically it goes out the window in the persuit of the possibilities of hyper targeting, efficiency, and dynamic creative. EB research highly sceptical.

Or social media... the big brands that can present the huge importance of mass reach and penetration and still allow their social media teams/agencies to trundle out fun real time creatives which no one sees... and often see no conflict in the two. just interesting.

Many consumer insights teams have struggled to pivot to a world where their job isn’t to paint a vivid pen portrait of a single valuable customer everything can be thrown at... so do it anyway ‘for the creatives’

And creatives... well Martin Weigel’s How (Not) To Fail presentation captures powerfully that consumer indifference is not the end of the need for cut through creativity, it’s literally the biggest call to arms a creative person could have.

Oh and media teams love it but are far from immune... there’s a whole dance of rich & complex connections planning strategy some do unnecessarily on every brand & small campaign when simple principles can do 90% of the work leaving us to focus on what really differentiates.