Our Monthly Round-up of the key pieces in Marketing for July – we’ve chosen five key articles, and a podcast this month – if you missed any of them, have some time they are well worth a catchup. It’s been a hectic month in Henley, I hope you’ve managed to have some holidays and look forward to catching up. All our monthly reviews are available on our website. http://haiconsulting.com/category/views/

Our July highlights:

1. Our top pick, every Sunday for the last three years, Rishad Tobaccowala has published a post on a different topic in his thought letter ‘The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of The Past’ which is read by over 25,000 people and is available free. In this seminal edition, he highlights the popular pieces curated, and they are categorised.

Here is the link: https://rishad.substack.com/p/three-years-later?

2. Secondly, this month is a piece on ‘Scaling the company’ from Mckinsey. Chief revenue officers are boosting revenue at not only start-ups but also established companies. Scaling a company—large or small—is no easy feat. For start-ups, 80 percent never reach critical scale. At bigger companies, the challenge is even greater. Only 10 percent of S&P 500 companies have achieved growth surpassing the GDP for a continuous period of 30 years or more.

Here is the link: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/a-bigger-bolder-vision-how-cros-are-propelling-growth-from-the-c-suite

3. Thirdly, what will happen to Uncommon London? Five years in – strong founders, fantastic creatives, brilliant work, a super runway, a reference point already. This was the big agency news in July with Havas taking a majority share, a partnership, or at least making an investment in the business. We came across this interview of Nils Leonard by John Evans on Uncensored CMO, and it’s a great podcast. Exciting times lie ahead for Uncommon – especially with their entry into the US.

Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEsQ2NCYEe4

4. Fourthly, we pick a piece from the HBR July-August edition, on how AI can augment human creativity. There is tremendous apprehension about the potential of generative AI—technologies that can create new content such as text, images, and video—to replace people in many jobs. But one of the biggest opportunities generative AI offers is to augment human creativity and overcome the challenges of democratizing innovation.

Here is the link: https://hbr.org/2023/07/how-generative-ai-can-augment-human-creativity

5. Fifthly, we liked this piece. When companies are creating profiles of possible target customers, there is a dimension they often overlook: the urgency of the need for the offering. This article provides a process for segmenting prospective customers in this fashion and creating a sales strategy.

Here is the link: https://hbr.org/2023/07/let-the-urgency-of-your-customers-needs-guide-your-sales-strategy

6. Sixthly, Campaign always has a close eye on the UK creative scene, school reports, and league tables, Gideon Spanier gives his view on a new era of mega-mergers.

Here is the link: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/will-stars-align-agency-mega-merger-10-years-publicis-omnicom-failed/1831878

Media: We’re a fan of the Digital Native substack by Rex Woodbury. Well this month, interestingly he has come up with 10 charts that capture how the world is changing. https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/10-charts-that-capture-how-the-world-12e

Time for the Work: We’ve gone for the AA this month, so it’s congrats to MSQ’s -The Gate, and Media agency Goodstuff for this fabulous campaign. https://marcommnews.com/the-aa-launches-its-ok-im-with-the-aa-campaign/

Back to Henley: We’ve had Regatta and Henley festival this last month. Our weekly column in the Henley Standard continues where we interview local entrepreneurs – it’s called Let’s Get Down to Business. We were delighted this month to interview advertising legend & local gem – Micky Denehy. https://www.henleystandard.co.uk/news/let-s-get-down-to-business/182168/lets-get-down-to-business-micky-denehy.html

We are here to help you with your agency resourcing structures, agency reviews, and benchmarking to improve your marketing performance, do give us a call with anything we can help you with.

Kind regards,

Will