Guest
John Morris
Group Chief Executive Officer, Design Bridge and Partners
Two decades inside one brand and design business, now leading it, on why brand is the commercial engine of growth and why the hardest decision is what to leave out.
About
John Morris is Group Chief Executive Officer of Design Bridge and Partners, the WPP brand and design group that started life as Design Bridge 40 years ago. He has spent 22 of those 40 years inside the business, and he is known for arguing that brand and design are commercial tools that build businesses, backed by data and a boardroom-ready case.
Morris traces his start to the Audi Vorsprung durch Technik commercials of the 1980s and 1990s, the ones that pitted a flash BMW driver against a cooler Audi driver. He says he watched it, decoded the strategy, explained it to his friends and concluded that creativity in service of business was the industry for him. He began his career in advertising and moved into brand and design as the world of marketing changed around him, joining the business then known as Design Bridge, by his account 22 years ago, and seeing it evolve from visual codes to structural codes to building global brands.
He led the business through its merger into Design Bridge and Partners and its life inside WPP and WPP Brand and Design, which he says gives him access to a broader community and to tools including BAV, brand asset valuator, and Brand Finance. Morris describes the merger as a lesson in his own medicine: roughly 12 months in, the business had to go back and ask what its story was, then repeat that message internally to rebuild the culture. He now spends much of his time arguing the commercial case for long-term brand building with clients across CPG, banking and beyond, and pushing conversations past the brief towards what he calls the soul of a business.
Career32 years
- 2004 to now Design Bridge and Partners Group Chief Executive Officer
- 2000 to 2003 Publicis London Board Director
- 1996 to 2000 Lowe Howard Spink Account Director
- 1994 to 1996 CDP Account Manager
How John thinks3 convictions
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Brand beyond the visual
Morris treats design as a far wider toolkit than a logo and a colour palette. He lists language, sound, ritual and even the haptic feel of a brand as codified elements a business can play with. His point is that a set of consistent ingredients, built on a single truth, is what makes a brand recognisable across fragmented channels and findable inside an answer engine.
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Proof before persuasion
Morris refuses to let brand sit outside the commercial conversation. He cites brand asset valuator and Brand Finance data, and says emotional connection in design drives around four times the sales effect. His test of a good agency relationship is whether it arms a marketing team to win an argument in a tough boardroom.
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Culture as growth engine
Morris describes the two-way bargain he calls me, we: what the business gives the employee, and what the employee brings back. He applied it to his own agency after the merger, going back to why the business exists and repeating that message until the culture caught up. For him the chief executive of any business carries the same job.