There is one certainty about the recent Brexit vote and that is that it will be an uncertain environment for some time to come. Yes, uncertainty delivers challenging circumstances but as I watched the Tour de France last night, it struck me that just as the strongest and best prepared riders use the mountain stages to overtake their competitors, there are opportunities for the strongest and best prepared businesses to...

In his excellent book “What would Google do?”, published as long ago as 2009, Jeff Jarvis said: “The real-estate business is ripe for disruption”. The reason was that as an industry it was focusing on its own needs rather than those of its customers and was not delivering the level of value it thought it did. In 2013, the Dent Consultancy conducted some research on the UK property market which...

As a branding and marketing consultancy, we take our own marketing pretty seriously. So much so that we recently conducted some research amongst both current and potential clients to see how we could improve our act. One of the questions we asked was “If the Dent Consultancy was an animal, what kind of animal would it be?” There were some interesting answers. We paid one client to say “dolphin” (you...

How to damage to a brand – a true story… Ever since it was invented in Australia in 1922, the Vegemite commitment to naming comedy has been relentless. When Cyril P Callister (apparently true) came up with his Marmite-esque spread in 1922, he didn’t know what to call it, so decided to give the Fred Walker Cheese Company (also apparently true) responsibility for naming it. The Fred Walker Cheese company...

The Royal Mail has an amazing heritage. Its origins can be traced to 1635 when Charles I opened up his “royal mail” for usage by the general public. Oliver Cromwell was responsible for establishing the General Post Office in 1657 and Charles II allowed it to distribute the “royal mail” shortly after the restoration in the early 1660’s. Few brands can claim anything like such a rich legacy. However, for...

The idea of individuals being brands is old hat. David Beckham, Elle Macpherson, Paris Hilton, Derren Brown, the list is endless. But, don’t forget, you too are a brand. I bet Danny MacAskill’s pals on the Isle of Skye would never have dreamed of the brand he would become when they were growing up. When he was riding his bike, they probably thought he was pretty cool, but I doubt...

I’m not sure if it is my fault or not, but at least two major brands seem to have completely misunderstood my last blog post. When I urged brands in general to be very careful about not going the way of Formula One and fundamentally damaging their brand in a short term desire to chase money, I must somehow have confused both M&S and BA. Almost immediately after the last...

Although an overzealous desire to win has always led to some unsavoury incidents, broadly speaking sport used to be about fair competition. Not anymore. If diving in football, match fixing in cricket, drug taking in a number of sports and “Bloodgate” in rugby, previously held up as an example to other sports, wasn’t enough, Formula One has now trumped the lot. Caring not a jot for the safety of drivers,...