The Subthread

Luxury has traditionally been about creating desirability through things other people can’t afford. Ffern has developed a different proposition, one based on scarcity, storytelling, and craft but without the usual luxury price point. Ffern, a Somerset-made natural fragrance brand, only releases four perfumes a year, one for each season, and produces them in small batches. Customers can’t buy a bottle whenever they feel like it.

As Noli searches for product–market fit, its brand is evolving alongside it. Every week brings new customer data, new product iterations and new questions about what the business stands for. Rather than handing an agency a finished brief, chief marketing officer Firdaous El Honsali has invited creative agency Ingo into the process itself, helping to define everything from the brand personality to the value exchange with consumers. “We are building the brief together,” Firdaous says.

"I had always been into music, culture, and voraciously read literally everything I possibly could.” During the 1990s, Nate Skinner devoured GQ, Melody Maker and the cult design publication Ray Gun. He'd buy CDs not just to listen to, but to pore over the liner notes, tracing producers, photographers and collaborators from one band to another. "That opened up a whole other trove of culture,” Nate tells Hannah Bowler in a recent episode of Brandmakers.

Every year, brands invest millions trying to anticipate the next big cultural moment. From the ongoing Tour de France and the upcoming Premier League to recent heroics of Wimbledon, these events command enormous audiences and even greater marketing budgets. But the challenge is no longer identifying the biggest moments on the calendar. It’s understanding how consumer intent evolves before, during, and after them.

After a few days of having my meetings in various sun traps in the south of France and going to sessions at beautifully designed brand activations along La Croisette, I noticed how various people had the same thoughts around whether brands were reaching an inflection point, the point at which they realised that they should stop chasing fast culture and change tactics. One of them was Dr Felipe Thomaz, associate professor of marketing at the University of Oxford.

Early on in 2021, when Connor Archbold and his co-founder Matt Herbert bootstrapped brand-tracking platform Tracksuit, they measured one thing and one thing alone: how many meaningful conversations they were having each week. They spoke to every brand believer they knew, shared their vision, listened, refined and did it all over again until they knew they had a product people would use and pay for.

Cassie Hall is a marketer who is ready and excited to adapt to the technological advancements that are reshaping the industry she’s been working in for 17 years. “The highest performing organizations and the best marketers are going to be the ones who are nailing both pieces and becoming more like builders, or conductors of these new systems and workflows that you are just ultimately going to have to use.” Register for free to continue reading Register Here

In today’s media landscape, “credibility” no longer automatically translates to a citation by an established journalist. Credibility in this current world of influence comes from people who display authenticity and, above all, personality. Do you remember when the notion of crying into a camera on Instagram was unthinkable?

Register for free to continue reading Register Here Already have an account? Sign in Uncut with Tyler Berry and Rob Pratt, Creative Partners and Co-founders of YeahNice Uncut with Emma Shuldham, Managing Director at Attachment Tracking Joy No One Is Searching for Your Brand Story Why Art Schools Could Replace Business Schools Reframing Brand Building for the Age of AI Search

Live sport has a measurement problem, but not because it lacks data. We can track everything from who booked, who attended, what they engaged with, whether they returned, and more. For investing sponsors and organizations, that is progress. But more data doesn’t automatically mean more understanding. A person can spend a couple of hours at a fanzone, scan a QR code, and never think about the sponsors again.