I can’t switch it off

You already know what these brands did. The why is the bit I’m after.

The what is trivia. It wins a pub quiz and changes nothing on Monday morning. The why is the part that transfers, because the mechanism underneath a famous campaign is almost never about the product it was selling.

So I take it apart until I can explain it to someone in a completely unrelated business, and then I write that down.

Every Tuesday I take one famous marketing move, pull apart the psychology that made it land, and hand you the bit you can lift and use somewhere completely unrelated.

What it is not:

• a news roundup, because what happened last week is rarely the interesting part
• case study worship, because the brand being famous is not the lesson
• gated, because a newsletter you cannot read is not a newsletter

One move, the research behind it, and my read on what it did to the person paying. Free, in full, every week.

15 years in marketing, and I have spent them deliberately far apart.

• marketing director at a boutique computer builder
• a decade building an online retail business, then exiting it
• a stint in esports and entertainment
• now biotech, which has been a ride

The rooms could not have been more different. Teenagers arguing about frame rates. A warehouse at 2am in December. An esports arena that sounded like a cup final. A lab where the buyer holds a PhD and 6 competing quotes.

Same job every time. And after 15 years of it, I will tell you the one thing that never moves: the psychology.

That is the education you only get from range, and it is why the principles behind a powerhouse brand work anywhere you point them. Global brands, international markets, a decade in retail, and the same brain doing the buying every time.