Brand is a long-term growth tool. One truth, repeated, beats 30 messages. And the brave decision is made in the boardroom.

There is a very simple answer for me, and I remember the turning point clearly. The Audi campaign in the 1980s and 1990s, Vorsprung durch Technik, and the famous commercial where a yuppie drives a BMW, with the lifestyle and the choices and all of it a bit flash, and at the end the cooler guy jumps into the Audi. I watched it and thought it was really clever, then found myself explaining it to my friends. I understood the strategy and what they were trying to do. At that point I thought, I love creativity and I can see what it does for business, so this is the right industry for me. On the plane out here I saw Sir John Hegarty, as he is now, and I said well done.

That pulled me into creativity and marketing. I started in advertising, watched the whole world of marketing and creativity changing, and moved into brand and design, which is where I am today at Design Bridge and Partners. We started as Design Bridge 40 years ago, so this is our 40th year, and I have been there for 22 of those years. We have evolved from design as visual codes to structural codes to building global brands.

Performance marketing drives the short term, and if you are going to build brands, which in turn build businesses, you have to think long term. That is where brand and design really play. There have been phenomenal talks here, debates, disagreements and agreements between Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson about what it means to build long-term brands. Brands have to have meaning behind them and distinctive brand assets they can use to get noticed, and they have to tell stories that connect people with creators and with influencers. I use the phrase timeless and timely. You need the elements of a brand that are timeless, kept relevant and evolved but true to the brand and the business, and then the timely application of them. With media and channels fragmenting, and creators and influencers growing, brands still need some form of control.

None of that means ignoring the commercial side. You have to prove the role brand and design play through data and commercial arguments. We are fortunate that Design Bridge and Partners is now part of WPP and WPP Brand and Design, so I have access to a broader community, to BAV, brand asset valuator, which shows how brands have moved against certain metrics, and to Brand Finance, which tells us about the commercial side of how brands grow. Armed with data and a strong commercial argument, we can justify the long-term brand building approach.

Whatever the audience, B2B or B2C, you have to think about the people. You have to think about the consumer or the customer or the person, and the brand and the business need to think about those individuals and how to service their needs rather than chase a quick gain. You are building long-term loyalty, and that means trust. Trust is a two-way street between the brand and the individual, and from that you get respect, and that is what drives growth and sales.

AI was the big topic here last year. This year it has been the combination of humanity and AI and how they work together. A brand has to have a truth and a meaning to tell that story, and it becomes even more important in the world of LLMs. Volvo have won a few Lions this week with a great piece of work, and they have gone consistently back to their message about safety. If you have a single-minded message on repeat through everything you do, a model can pick it up easily. Having that story, keeping true to it and constantly replaying it gives you consistency, and it means you get found. So rather than generating multiple content, take a step back, work out the true meaning you have and find the way to replay it consistently.

For me that is done through design, and when I say design I mean something much broader than visual. A brand is visual, aural and oral: the language it uses, the sound it may use, the ritual it may have, even the haptic, the feel it may have. Those are the codified elements of a brand. If you have your truth and that set of ingredients, you can be consistent, appear far more regularly, and be easier to find through an LLM. I think that gains more traction over the next few years.

If you have built a good brand you have already cut through. It is the sacrifice moment in the decision making that all businesses go through, about the true story they want to tell about themselves. It is a sacrifice, and it happens in the boardroom, so you have to have the bravery. Everyone talks about creative bravery. I think the businesses are the brave decision-makers, saying that if we go out there with 30 messages we are going to miss our point. We have to be confident about who we are, what we are and how we tell our story, then deliver it consistently, and that is when the business cuts through.

Sometimes the boardroom has dictated to the marketing team that this is the challenge, and the team must go and fix it. It feels like a dictated path that reaches a solution, and that solution may not be solving the right problem. Uncovering the problem and thinking differently requires bravery in the boardroom. It starts a bit further up the food chain in the conversation, rather than with the designer or the creative at the far end saying this is the most amazing cut-through thing.

When I have been chatting to people this week I have been asking what they do, because of these multifaceted titles. A few years ago the trend was that we all needed to be T-shaped, with deep-rooted expertise. Now everything is M-shaped, and that is true on the client side, where they need to understand the role brand plays in marketing, in commercial performance, and in how you bring technology and data in. In the end all of our roles are to build businesses. I use the phrase brand and design, but my job is to help business grow. I just use the tools I have to do it.

We are going to end up with long titles and long CVs, and it has to simplify. Is the chief marketing officer title and role obsolete? Potentially. I work with a lot of CPG consumer businesses and they started by adding, so it became chief marketing and digital officer. Then you think, you cannot use the word digital, everything is digital, that is the role. What has moved since is the chief growth officer, and I have seen chief customer officer, which is about the relevance the function has in driving growth, and that is a far more intelligent way of thinking about it. Maybe we should simplify titles to the T-shirt test. If you can put what you do on the front of a T-shirt, it is all very clear.

Brand as the engine of the world is a line I am quite jealous of, and I would steal it with pride, because engine of growth, I love it. That is what brand does, and it colours in what the role is. I was taught very early on to keep it simple. For building businesses it is about having a fantastic product that people want, great relationships with your customers, and a culture people want to work in. That has not changed. That is how businesses are successful, and how people are successful.

We are all talking about technology, AI and impact, and we are in a phase of learn, relearn and learn again. It is the intuitive nature of things we have known in the past that we are learning again and bringing back into our strengths. It is there in our memory banks and our structures, and it comes down to basic human instinct if you are in this industry. This is an industry driven by people with human skills. High EQ matters, and you pull something out of the memory banks that you learnt years ago and find it is still relevant.

Clients almost always arrive with a brief. They have identified a problem and want a solution, and sometimes it is good and strong, but it is a starting point. My starting point is to take two steps back and ask what the real problem is they are trying to solve for the business, rather than what they want from us from a brand and design perspective, whether that is an identity system. Once we understand the business problem properly, there may be a different approach and solution. I like to keep things simple, a stand for message and an identity system that creates stand out, but I do not want to get too formulaic. I want to understand the problems rather than drive a process that drives an executional solution, because every brand and business has a slightly different challenge. I use the phrase, let us dig deeper. I want to get to the soul of a business.

Forty years of growing a business, then becoming part of WPP, then going from Design Bridge to Design Bridge and Partners when I merged with another business. About 12 months into that merger we suddenly realised we had to ask what our story was, and we went back to the basics of why we do what we do, then communicated and repeated that message to everyone to build the culture. I use the phrase me, we. What do we as a business need to give to you as our valued employee and brand ambassador, and what do you need to bring back to us? The chief executive of a large business needs to think in exactly the same way, because then your team are the most powerful people in the world to go out and drive your business growth. With a lot of businesses I say we have to get the brand down to a page, distilling the single-minded truth and the meaning of it. We have done manifestos and I love them. That single page tells the story, and if everybody gets it, the chief executive has done an amazing job.

I am an advocate of brand and design, but to help clients we cannot be only about the aesthetic of design or the storytelling of brand. We have to link it to the data and the commercial effect. I talk about brand performance data showing how brand increases saliency and drives sales, and we can prove that brands designed with emotional connection drive deeper meaning, around four times in terms of sales. Marketing and brand teams have to walk into tough boardrooms. As agencies you sometimes forget that, because you think you are servicing your client. For me, you are servicing the brand or the business. It is also tougher in some sectors. I have a client in banking where the old nickname was the colour-in guy, because it is hard there to prove the value and the commercial drive. We have to consistently repeat the same thing. And if you are just the promotions department, good luck, you will be undercutting yourself before you know it.

Examine your brand and do the due diligence of understanding the problem you face as a business, rather than the potential of what you want the brand's purpose or story to be. Make sure the brand links to a truth about your business. There is no point making something up with no connection to the product or service you are offering, because it is superficial and you will get caught out. Then build a good relationship with the chief financial officer and build a commercial understanding of the business, and be seen to do it. I went through that learning curve myself, sitting down and making sure I understood every element of a P&L. When we were an independent business it was liquidity ratios and the simple stuff: enough money coming in, enough in the bank, selling our services and looking after our clients.

Talking to as many people as possible and gathering as many thoughts as possible. Listening, truly listening, especially early on, understanding as much as I can and then processing it in my own brain. Then the Alan Partridge a-ha moment arrives in a bizarre way, and it comes back to learn and relearn. You may have intuitively had the inspiration already, but by listening to lots of people you absorb it, play it back and gather it into a singular thought. The solutions are already out there. We just have to navigate through the maze, or the mess, and keep it simple.

One, do not seek perfection. I went down that rocky road myself, thinking I had to perfectly solve every single problem, and the 80/20 rule does apply. It is better to get it out there than not do anything at all. Two, it is a marathon, not a sprint. Absorb the learnings and the setbacks, because setbacks are just a learning moment and you will build and grow over time. Three, smile. If I travelled back 10 years I would say, John, just smile a little bit more and have a bit of fun through everything.