Common Interest

It was always the plan at Common Interest, to grow the company through a ‘buy and build’ approach - acquiring brilliant businesses leading the way in their space AND creating new companies we knew would be fundamental to our vision, but simply didn’t yet exist. Today, I am excited to share the launch of Common Interest’s first start-up; CultureLab, a new technology company that helps brands and businesses unlock the power of popular culture. CultureLab will be led by the super-talented and extremely culturally-connected Jed Hallam, so this is also an official and public warm welcome to him too. Jed and I spoke to Lucy Shelley at Campaign UK (thank you 👊) about why this new cultural intelligence platform is crucial to our vision, and how it helps CMOs with the (until now) challenging task of developing a robust, data-backed, business case for building brands in popular culture. (Link in comments👇 )

Design ✅ Motion graphics ✅ Innovation ✅ Invention ✅ Comms ✅ Culturally connected ✅ Introducing the newest member of the Common Interest family – the multi-talented, super-cool OTHERWAY. Creators of Lucky Saint | B Corp™ (The Marketing Society’s current Brand of the Year), Butternut Box | B Corp (the fastest growing petfood brand in the UK) and their own seven-figure EBIT earning watch brand FARER (not bad for a side hustle). Inventors of INCH'S CIDER LIMITED for The HEINEKEN Company. Re-inventors of Strongbow Cider (another Heineken collab), Fortnum & Mason, Smythson of Bond Street and many others.   Along with TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, we warmly welcome Jono Holt, Ben Lewin, Stuart Finlayson and the 50 or so other smart and talented people at Otherway. We love your ability to create and imbue brands with cultural relevance and resonance. And are looking forward to sharing the next exciting chapter of your journey.   Thanks to Will Green at Campaign UK for the chat and the great piece. https://lnkd.in/eBVHipaM

Following on from Mr Ritson’s hot take on the state of US effectiveness culture (which mainly focussed on advertising effectiveness) I’m sharing more 21CB thinking on measuring overall brand effectiveness. Most CMOs are also responsible for overall brand effectiveness but the measurement playbook is far less researched and understood. Due to the upstream nature of our work, 21CB faced the same issues as our CMO clients so we devised a new type of framework to measure the potentially transformational value that brand investment creates internally and externally, based on a twenty year literature review and our experience of working with over 75 of the world’s leading  brands. The model is based on four dimensions of impact, laid out in the order they tend to take effect, starting with Employee value which leads to initiatives that create Customer value which translates to Financial value and ultimately wider Cultural value. We partnered with some of our client CMOs to identify a pool of lagging and leading indicators measures for each dimension, to authentically reflect the messy reality of how brand creates cross-company value over time. We know that today’s brand leaders are data-rich but feel overwhelmed and challenged to make a convincing case for the company-wide value of brand investment. Working this way helps our CMOs evolve the perception of brand from a ‘marketing thing’ owned by marketers and agencies, to a ‘company thing’ that all leaders benefit from HR to Product to Investor Relations. Giving the business case for brand greater clout in the boardroom as a result. We’re proud that this embedding this thinking into our culture and ways of working contributed to 21CB being the first brand consultancy to be accredited by the legendary IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising). But we also know getting this right will be an ongoing journey so please do give us your thoughts. Neil #marketingeffectiveness #brandeffectiveness #cmoinsights #cmo #businesscaseforbrand #brandstrategy #branding #measurement

No stranger to building globally influential brands, Jonathan Mildenhall discussed how to create a thriving marketing practice for iconic brands with a group of the world’s leading CMOs from Marketing 50 (part of World 50 Group). Read his key thoughts, learnings and pieces of advice which have laid the foundation of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand’s approach to brand strategy, and still guide the company today in its collaboration with the most influential brands of our time, right here: #brandstrategy #cmo #cmoinsights #marketing