Strategy. It's complicated. But it doesn't have to be! That's the central argument of Mick Mahoney’s and Kevin Chesters' new book, Destrategise. Comes out on November 19. Pre-order here.
You can watch our full conversation below. Or skip the video and get to the core themes afterwards. Or – should you be so inclined – read the full transcript of our chat, like a mad person.
Core ideas
Complexity is a costume
Jargon makes people sound clever. The seductive allure effect, complexity bias and the effort heuristic mean that complicated feels smart, and slow feels rigorous. The tell for the most under-confident person in the room is whoever has the most complex explanation. As contributor Ellie Norman puts it, complexity is an "intellectual safety blanket", because a dense strategy is very hard to prove wrong.
The billing model loves a fog
Charge by the hour and you are paid to take longer. A crowd of account people and planners in the room helps justify the price. Agencies are also squeezed from both sides: if the work looks too simple, clients type it into an LLM, while the big consultancies make complexity look premium.
Stop whining, start solving
LinkedIn is full of people listing what's broken and short of people offering a fix. So the book is deliberately two halves: the diagnosis, then a process that has been refined over ten years. The process is simple, but that does not mean dumbed down. One useful test: explain the strategy to the smartest person you know, who doesn't work in marketing.
Brand strategy in three questions
How many layers do you need before your brand strategy looks like a wedding cake? There's a much simpler way to get to a narrative that a business can buy into. Here goes:
How can I stand out in my category? Run a "sea of same" audit of four or five brands, which usually shows identical words, pictures and statements. Once you know the category tropes, you can use them as a tailwind, or deliberately push against them.
What are people actually buying into? Revlon's founder said the factory makes cosmetics and the store sells hope. Emotional drivers trigger subconscious thinking, which Mick says governs 95% of decisions. Aim to capture that.
What is already undeniably true about you? The third element, and the authors' favourite bit, is the truth already sitting in the company's culture and DNA.
The answer is already in the building
If a CEO says he paid a lot of money to be told what he already knew, take it as a compliment. If the north star is genuinely new it will die, because ideas are easy and making them stick is hard. It has to feel true inside the business before it can work outside it. You can't see the label from inside the jar, which is why outsiders are valuable.
Brand is a business transformation platform
"Brand" has turned into a euphemism for TV ads, so the better framing is business transformation. The point is consistency. The deliverable is behaviours, not ads: naming, internal culture, thought leadership. Comms is only easy once the north star is defined.
Break two kinds of silos
Interview stakeholders separately, police-style, and listen without leading until it feels a bit like therapy. Then put the strategist and the creative on one team from brief to execution, which saves time, handovers and morale. Think of briefing as gardening rather than throwing seeds over a fence and hoping. The brief is just permission to start.
Trust beats process
The best partnerships run on wanting each other to win, and on treating an idea you don't understand as "a me problem" rather than "a you problem". Cognitive difference is the engine – see Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed, Lennon and McCartney, or Rihanna with Bernard Arnault. It matters more now that AI can't read the relational side of strategy, like how a CMO takes in information, or what is worrying them at 3 a.m.
Simplicity has to travel
Language that works in one market falls over in another. UK English is wordier than American English (Erin Meyer's The Culture Map explains why), and clients in Poland or China, or a revenue operations lead, can't follow IPA-style brand or advertising language. The moment people stop following, you have lost the argument. Make it easy to 'get'.
Creativity isn't a department
Apple built a $5 trillion brand on industrial design, not communication. The aim is creative businesses rather than creative departments, with people combining one big specialist skills (their Major) with a bunch of other complementary areas (their Minors). The World Economic Forum and UNICEF both treat creativity as an essential skill. Make sure your ability to think creatively, or to get clients to do so, doesn't go unnoticed or under-valued.
Related articles:
Brand vs comms strategy: 12 blunt questions answered by two honest strategists
10 uncomfortable truths about brand and comms strategy in regulated industries
Full transcript
Rob Estreitinho: How the hell has strategy become so complicated for its own good, and what can we do about it? That's the question Kevin Chesters and Mick Mahoney are trying to answer with their new book, Destrategise. My first question: why has brand strategy – and arguably more than brand strategy – become so damn complicated?
Mick Mahoney: There are a million reasons, but two main ones. You can apply them to communications, and then extrapolate to why all business has got so complicated. One is the basic frailties of humanity. We react in certain ways to certain things, and sometimes we're not even to blame for it. The other is the need for agencies to make money.
Everybody associates long words, complex jargon and over-complex explanations with intelligence and credibility. "Oh god, they must be so clever, I didn't even understand what they said." When I first hit advertising in the early nineties, the word of the day was "paradigm". Everyone said paradigm shift. I was 23 and had never heard the word. I looked it up and it's pretty straightforward, but everyone's guilty of it. Sometimes we do it as a defence mechanism: you say something because you want people to think you're smart and knowledgeable. That's called the seductive allure effect. I'll be honest, I didn't know that until Kevin told me.
In the corporate world everyone's elbowing their way up, and complexity is one of the tools they use. Ironically, it's typically used by under-confident people. If you want to spot the most under-confident person in the room, it's the one using the most complex explanations.
There's also complexity bias: we attach disproportionate value to things that are complicated. "That's so smart, that's so clever." And the effort heuristic: we convince ourselves that complexity means someone must have been up all night. Put those together and you think, if it's really complicated, everyone will think I'm clever and that I've worked hard, that there's so much rigour in it.
The absolute opposite is true. Complexity is so much easier than simplicity. We say in the book that if a client is shown a really complex strategy, they should thank the agency for their time and say they'll look forward to seeing it when it's finished, because clearly it isn't. We attribute a quote to Einstein, although our editor tells us he never said it. I always forget the exact wording.
Kevin Chesters: It just means that if you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough.
Mick Mahoney: Complexity is an admission that you don't really understand something. We got a great quote on this from Ellie Norman, one of the contributors. We had 30 world-class minds, from Rory Sutherland to Nils Leonard to Ellie, all validating the premise of the book. The issue is within the industry and everyone knows it. Ellie said complexity is a brilliant hiding place, an intellectual safety blanket: if you make a strategy incredibly dense and layered, no one can easily tell if it's wrong. I love that. As a creative, for years before I worked with Kevin, I'd say it's so complicated you can just blame me if it's not brilliant, because I'm not even sure it's any good.
The second reason is really basic. For the last decade at least, agencies have struggled to make money, and it comes down to valuing time over output. It's crazy; it always incentivises the wrong behaviours. When Kevin and I do strategy and creative projects, we say: that's what we charge, that's the value we bring to your business. If it takes longer, that's our problem, not yours. So we're incentivised to do something brilliantly simple, at speed. It doesn't take a genius to work out that's what's missing in the industry right now.
Rob Estreitinho: You're also de-risking it for the client. If there's a delay, you absorb the cost. There's an implicit trust and self-confidence in saying, "we think we need this many weeks, and if it takes longer, that's not your problem."
Mick Mahoney: Completely. If you're paying by the hour, I want you not to like the first iteration, and not really like the second. I want you to fall in love with the seventh or eighth, because I've been able to drag that out. The way we work, I'm incentivised for you to buy into the first iteration. That's the premise Kevin and I work with, and it's why we wrote the book: to say to everybody, it's all gone a bit wrong.
The problem is that if the industry makes it look simple, it's really hard to charge more for it, yet simple is what everybody wants. So agencies want to make it look like a big process that could only be tackled by an intellectual colossus. Clients, being weak and fallible human beings like the rest of us, fall for the effort heuristic and the seductive allure effect: "It's complex, it's taking ages, brilliant, I'm getting a great job." They're getting the complete reverse.
This isn't everybody, and present company excepted, but in corporate ad land, design land and brand strategy land, planners have run with that. They've become cosplay intellectuals. When Kevin and I first met, I said: mate, complexity doesn't impress me, it does the opposite. Keep it simple and we'll get on.
Rob Estreitinho: There's a preconception that you need an intellectual colossus, but also that you need a lot of people. No dig at account managers, but I've sat in debriefs with three account managers, one account director and two strategists and thought, why are all these people here?
Kevin Chesters: To justify the pricing model, as we discussed earlier. One of the great things about working in a pair is that clients don't get the B team, because we haven't got one. You're talking to two seasoned individuals with 60-plus years of experience between them, which is expensive, and we're very open about that. But I always say to clients: check your billing, and I'll prove it every time – we are cheaper than the worst agency you have, because there's no army.
The complexity bias exists for two reasons. One is accidental: human frailty. We're fearful, and we conflate complexity with quality and time with rigour. That second one is weird. If you gave me a jigsaw it would take me days, because I'm rubbish at jigsaws. That doesn't make me better at jigsaws; it makes me worse. The other reason is slightly more nefarious, and Rory was good on this in the book: the obvious answer is normally the right one, but it's very hard to build a financial model around it.
Karen Blacket, another great contributor who's done some big jobs in network agencies, says an agency has AI on the left and McKinsey on the right. On the left, if it looks too simple, clients these days think they can type it into Claude – other LLMs are available. On the right, they see that agencies make a small single-figure profit while Deloitte and PwC make a huge double-digit one, and everyone thinks those firms are very complicated, with their chevrons and brown paper around the room. So agencies think: if we make it look like that, we can charge more. I refuse to believe people are that malevolent; in most cases it's accidental. But there is a reason agencies want clients to think it's complex. It's financially beneficial.
Mick Mahoney: Can I say one thing at this point, because it's important to get out there early? The world's full of problem-spotters. There are a million people telling you what the problems are, and not many who will look for answers and expose their thinking to ridicule and challenge. I'd love to name names, but Kevin says I'm not allowed. They're the usual suspects all over LinkedIn with the top ten reasons everything's ruined. Honestly, shut up. Bring something. Everything has changed, and you need to be relevant to the times. We are not going to get more time or more money for work. We have to look at legacy behaviours and say: the entire world has changed, yet we're still running processes that are over half a century old.
We're supposed to be innovative and creative, and we're not. We think creativity is the output. No, creativity is everything, every moving part of what we do. Strategy is creativity. I refuse to accept it's an audit process or a critical thinking plan, and the planners who treat it that way are killing the business. So we wrote the book deliberately in two halves. The first says: here are the issues, here's why, here's what we can do to create the environment for better thinking. The second is a process Kevin and I have developed over a decade. It's not theory; we've used it on so many famous brands. We know it works, we know it's simple, we know it's undeniable, and we know the way we price for it works. I don't see why that can't be how an agency prices, because then everyone's incentivised the right way. But this is not a book complaining about the status quo.
Kevin Chesters: The world does not need two more old blokes whining and carping that everything's rubbish compared to the good old days. The good old days didn't exist. They were just old days. And we're not advocating chaos, or claiming to have cracked the genome. As we say at the start of the book, if you can answer three questions, you can write a brand strategy. It's like having fifteen quid and making a risotto: it won't make you Jamie Oliver, but you can buy his book and make one. We're not claiming this is the only way. The main thing is: stop moaning, stop pointing out the problem. It's too late to be pessimistic. You have to get in and solve some problems. This is one very simple way to write simpler brand strategy, and I want to hear the 500 other ways, as long as they're simple.
Having been CSO at three big agencies, I've watched planners present things that were either a philosophy lecture or their English composition homework, and it makes me ill. And to be clear, this isn't about dumbing things down. I hate it when people say, "could you explain it to your mum?" What we ask in boardrooms is: could you explain this strategy to the cleverest person you know who doesn't work anywhere near marketing – maybe a lawyer, maybe an astronaut? Someone who's never heard of Byron Sharp, who doesn't know the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, who'd say, "Sorry mate, what's a brand again?"
The world of communications has got itself into a big complex mess, partly of its own making. I'm always harder on this than Mick, maybe because of my planning background. I've watched people, out of underconfidence or colossal hubris, convince themselves their job is to write blogs.
Mick Mahoney: My favourite planner archetype is the cosplay intellectual – the scarf indoors, the fountain pen. There's no room for them in the industry.
Rob Estreitinho: I'd like to talk more about fear and the deeper insecurities of strategists. We all have them, and I don't think they ever go away, which is kind of good, because you shouldn't get too confident either. I also like that you two work together as two very different minds on the same problem.
Kevin Chesters: That's the key thing: diversity in all its forms – neuro, cognitive, gender, social. Putting different people together to get to better answers quicker.
Rob Estreitinho: I'd add, from my own bias as a non-native speaker, that there's a night-and-day difference in how people communicate when English isn't their mother tongue. We don't speak slowly with expensive language, because we don't have it. And look at it from the client's side: your client may be in Poland, and they don't get it either. We talk a lot about being the voice of the audience. Well, guess which audience you're disrespecting? The person in front of you who isn't from Cambridge. That's not a dig at Cambridge; it's a dig at anyone who thinks expensive language makes them impressive.
Mick Mahoney: Have you read The Culture Map by Erin Meyer? It explains why complexity in language depends on the country. The UK has been speaking English for a really long time, and we've developed something like 500,000 words, an unbelievable amount of complexity. America speaks English too, but it's a language built from 300 different mother tongues, so the conversation has always been straightforward and fairly didactic, so that everybody could understand it.
Kevin Chesters: Hence sidewalk versus pavement. Very simple, active language.
Rob Estreitinho: I love that. It might look like dumbing down, but it's really democratising – making things accessible to as many people as possible.
Mick Mahoney: Accessibility is a big thing for me. We work in an industry that's about connecting with as many people as possible. Art doesn't have to communicate with everybody, but communications does. Everybody needs to be able to access it, understand it and feel something. So why would the right starting point be something so complex that virtually nobody understands it? I hate briefs – that document with boxes to fill in. Who thought that was the right thing to give creative people to inspire them? It's like whispering coordinates through a wall and hoping they hear. Why not build an organic relationship and thought process from the moment the client tells you the issue to the moment you execute? That's how we work. No handover, no silo.
Kevin Chesters: Modern, brilliant agencies understand that, but 99% don't. There have always been incredibly fertile relationships between planners and creatives, at places like Mother, but they happened in spite of the process, not because of it. Sophie Devinchire, president of the Marketing Society, says in the book that silos are the ultimate speed bumps, and they really are. It's not that you don't need specific executional skills – of course you do, you don't want me doing your art direction. You need to know what you're good at and what other people are better at.
The other thing we've noticed over three years of working with clients outside an agency structure is that what clients want more than anything is simplicity. They're craving it, because everybody is being asked to do twice as much with the same money in two-thirds of the time. They haven't got time for complexity. And remember that in a client organisation, the agency and the client are from slightly different parts of Venus; everyone else is from Mars. They see the agency and the client as the same thing. So the client is making the case for brand in an organisation where people, unsurprisingly, think brand means adverts, because whenever brand is discussed the examples are advertising, written by advertising people, from effectiveness papers from an advertising trade body.
When Mick and I talk about brand, we talk about transformation, but the most important thing is how simple it has to be when it's explained. The finance director, in the five minutes of the board meeting this gets, has to understand that it's a transformational project for the company and, most importantly, what the f*** you're talking about, really quickly. It's clients who want the simplicity, not Mick and me, not agencies. And in 99% of cases consumers never see the inputs or outputs of a brand strategy, because it died in the room: too complicated, not cogent enough.
Rob Estreitinho: That's really important. Strategists hate the idea that their job is to sell a piece of thinking to the client. They think the more information they give, the more they convince, which is the polar opposite of how most brains work. And when you go independent you can't hide behind an account director. You either sell it or you don't.
Mick Mahoney: The key word there is "sell". Kevin and I don't attempt to sell anything. It wouldn't occur to me that we have to.
Rob Estreitinho: I don't mean persuade and force. I mean explaining why this matters, a softer version. Not always be closing, but always be clarifying. Some of my most clear-minded moments are when I'm explaining something to a creative director and they say, "I think what you mean is this," and I say, "I'm going to write that," because it's the same point in clearer language. At my proudest I have the egolessness to say, your version sounds better, let's go with that.
Mick Mahoney: Every time. And that's how we work together too: we want each other to win. There's so much water under the bridge, so much trust and respect. If Kevin says something, it wouldn't occur to me that he hadn't given it proper thought. If he says, "I think that's not right, we should change it," okay, let's change it. I don't think I've ever put my foot down. You have to check yourself and ask whether it's hubris. Of course we're both human; we're a great big bucket of mess like everyone else. But between us there's trust and there's wanting each other to win. I honestly want to help Kevin be the smartest Kevin, and he wants to help me be the smartest Mick. That's why we move so quickly.
Kevin Chesters: The best examples are often from outside your immediate sphere – the frog in the well not seeing the ocean. In chapter two of the book we studied diversity, different kinds of brains working together. The data is unarguable; as I always say, go woke, go profitable. Put people of different backgrounds in a room and you get better, quicker answers. We also looked at partnership science, the science of wanting each other to win.
We go off and do things our own way, and then we bring them together. Sometimes Mick will show me something and I won't understand it for a second, because that's how his brain arrived there. In an agency you're taught that you add value by spotting problems. Here, instead, I think: I don't understand that, but I know how good he is and what his motivations are, so the fact that I don't understand it is a me problem, not a you problem. So tell me why it's brilliant. Maybe once or twice in ten years I've said, "No, Mick, it's still s***."
You can look at Lennon and McCartney. I'm not saying we're them, but "We Can Work It Out" and "A Day in the Life" are songs written by two different people at different times in different ways, one from a negative perspective, the other optimistic, and they come together and work brilliantly. Or Rihanna with Bernard Arnault creating Fenty: a thirty-year-old Caribbean entrepreneur and an eighty-year-old French billionaire who totally understand what each other does, and together make a two-billion-dollar brand. Karen Blacket is brilliant on this in the book. Our industry thinks all the outputs have changed beyond recognition, so why would the inputs – the same processes, structures and silos – stay the same?
Mick Mahoney: Another book recommendation: Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed. It should be required reading for everyone in a C-suite role, let alone in communications. It's cast-iron proof that cognitive homogeneity is a race to the bottom – look at what happened to the FBI when al-Qaeda took it to the cleaners. Kevin and I might look like two white old blokes, so you might think there's not much cognitive diversity, but we could not be more different in how we look at the world, how we think, our backgrounds.
Rob Estreitinho: A few things rang true. A while ago there was a story about Sam Altman saying ChatGPT can create podcasts for you. For me the assumption there is that what matters is the transfer of information, rather than the relationship between a parent and child. There's an analogy: "I wrote you a piece of paper, Mick, my job's done" versus "we actually got there together, we bought into each other along the way." The second thing: when I speak to clients now, they pay far less attention to what I'd call the technical side of strategy and far more to the relational side, which AI can't do. It doesn't know how the CMO likes to process information, whether they're having a good or bad day, or what they're worried about that they WhatsApped you at 3 a.m.
Mick Mahoney: I feel like AI is forcing us to justify the benefit of human relationships.
Kevin Chesters: Which I think is a great thing.
Mick Mahoney: I don't want to operate in a world that isn't built around human connection, because Kevin and I are one plus one equals three, four, five. Me plus AI is just me with lots more information.
Mick Mahoney: You can write a brand strategy by answering three questions. It took us a while to get to that level of codification. For the first couple of years we used to say we don't have a process, we just sit in a room and argue. We were forced to turn it into a product and a process because we weren't in a big agency.
The first question is: how can I stand out in my category? You'd think that's pretty basic, and lots of really clever planners go, "that's beneath me." But when was the last time you took a new brief and looked at the whole category for the similarities, tropes and commonalities? Most categories have become commoditised. So we do what we call the sea of same. We look at the behaviours, communications, mission statements, landing pages, products and services of four or five brands in a category, and show that in 99% of cases they use identical words, pictures and mission statements. It's our favourite meeting. We present it back and say, "Did you know you're doing all the same things as everyone else?" And they literally hang their heads. They've been wasting money copying everyone else, because their agencies never looked and they never looked.
Kevin Chesters: To add to that: we're not saying "so do something completely different." I've read plenty of papers, with a lot of Byron Sharp in them, saying maybe we should just be the same. It's about identifying the tropes and drivers of a category. Retail is price and quality; insurance is saving money and peace of mind. Once you know them, you can use them as your tailwind, or change them and run into a headwind. But unless you know what they are, how can you have a sensible discussion about separating from them? I've got fed up hearing planners say, "maybe we just are the same." In 99% of cases people are too lazy to identify it, and I'm talking about clients as much as agencies.
Rob Estreitinho: I find it mildly shocking that people don't spend more time looking at category. When I came to London I had this vision that it's where planning was born, but it's amazing how in every market there's a portion of people who don't do the basics.
Kevin Chesters: It's not a portion, Rob, it's 99%. We did a project for a very large gym chain. What gyms want is for people who don't go to gyms to go to gyms, because people who go already go. But all the industry shows is gym people in gym kit doing gym things in a gym, saying "there are people here just like you" and "it's open 24/7 and it's free." You're explaining to a non-gym person why they should go to a gym, and you've lost them on the first word. I remember using Mick as an example: Mick hates cricket. I tried to get him to Twenty20 – it doesn't go on long, there's a bar, there's music – and he said, "Kevin, cricket's s***." That's where he is. Play the percentages, do the basics, and in 99% of cases you'll arrive at the three elements you need to write an undeniable sentence explaining why you exist and why anyone should care.
Mick Mahoney: Back to the three questions. The first, how can I stand out in the category, matters because most categories are undifferentiated and commoditised, so whatever you do isn't as effective as it could be. And here's the kicker: as human beings, we only notice the noticeably different. If everything's the same and you haven't got loads more media money than anyone else, you're making life difficult for yourself. It might be that everyone is shouting about product benefits, and if your whole business is built on that, you've got to keep having really good ones, because everyone else can copy them in a heartbeat these days.
The second question: what are people actually buying into? Charles Revson, founder of Revlon, said: "In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope." I'm not buying a lipstick because it lasts two hours longer. I'm buying it because it'll make me feel more attractive and hopefully make my day better. And Theodore Levitt said nobody wants to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. It's about taking the rational reason for buying and finding the emotional one, because then you trigger System One, which governs 95% of the decisions a human makes. Why would you not want to be in the 95%? Why force yourself into System Two, the 5% most of our brains rail against because it takes hard work and thought? I'm not going to engage my System Two brain to buy a lipstick.
Kevin Chesters: What astonishes me is that those of us who work in marketing don't live in the real world. When we mention System One, Byron Sharp or Charles Revson, everyone in the industry says, "I know all that, mate, Daniel Kahneman." But when I sit in a boardroom and quote Revson, in 99% of cases it's the first time anyone in that room has thought about it that way. These days we get invited in through the CMO window, but we end up talking to COOs and founders. And 99.9% of people in this country who own a brand or need a brand strategy couldn't afford one minute in an agency, let alone a month. What they can do is spend £16.99, buy a book and do it themselves. Most people in those rooms haven't heard of Byron Sharp or Ehrenberg-Bass, haven't read The Long and the Short of It, don't know who Les Binet is.
Rob Estreitinho: That takes me back to the value of simplicity. Put aside the commercial value: if you do international work, you've got to let your language travel. I've worked with native English speakers pitching to China, and I'm pretty convinced half the time the clients didn't know what we were saying. They weren't even disagreeing – they just didn't understand. Business cultures differ, and they don't use words like distinctiveness versus differentiation. If you can't explain it in the simplest possible terms, you start losing the argument. The other day a client in revenue operations asked us to explain how a brand health model works, and we had a moment of "oh s***, I can't use the IPA language, this guy lives in revenue operations." What a wonderful lesson in simplifying how the whole thing works.
Kevin Chesters: That's the epiphany Mick had a few years back. The word "brand" has become toxic: a euphemism for faffing around and wasting money, or at best for spending on television advertising. So when we talk about the case for brand, it's usually the case for above-the-line advertising, made by an advertising agency, and you don't ask a fishmonger what he recommends for dinner. Mick said years ago, and it's the heart of the book, that we're not really talking about brand at all. We're talking about business transformation platforms: the thing that touches every element of your business and delivers the C-word – not the one you're thinking of. Consistency. If you understand what you're about and why anyone should care, it touches every part of the business, and one of those parts is communications. But if it starts in communications, it never leaves.
Mick Mahoney: When we land the north star, one of the deliverables is showing how it will influence a series of behaviours in the business. Kevin and I have always said it's about behaviours, not ads. We haven't written ads for years. We set up the communication platform, the guidelines and the language, but we're also helping people understand the protocols for naming, the behaviours of internal culture, what it means for thought leadership – everything about how you show up consistently.
Consistency is absolutely everything. It makes you more profitable and more retentive of clients. We've based it on a bunch of studies, including a McKinsey one on the three Cs of customer satisfaction: consistency, consistency, consistency. If you've got a great, simple north star that everyone from the board down understands and can apply in their part of the business, that's consistency, and that's business transformation. We still have to call it brand strategy because that's how people will understand it. But I think the biggest mistake agencies make is continuing to focus just on communications.
Kevin Chesters: Comms is probably the easy bit, and it's the bit that comes after the horse has bolted. This is an admission from someone who worked 25 years in agencies: even when they talk about all the other parts of the business, what agencies really care about is the comms, because it's how they make their money.
Rob Estreitinho: I do a lot of comms strategy consulting, and comms is only easy if the north star is worked out. If it isn't, you get "our brand positioning is that we're customer first," or "our differentiator is that our sugared water has sugar."
Kevin Chesters: The third element is interesting too. Mick, do you want to cover it? It's his favourite bit.
Mick Mahoney: This is different from anything I've come across. Agencies are taught that whatever the client tells you, you reject it on principle: "we'll be the judge of that." But think about it this way. If I asked you for three words that describe you best, you'd have a view of yourself that might not be shared by me or by Kevin. It's the same with a business.
What we always say to clients is that, a hundred times out of a hundred over the last decade, there's already something amazing within your culture, your DNA, your products or your service. Something so brilliant and compelling that it will make you stand out in your category. That's the quarter-inch hole, not the drill. You can't see it any more because you're so close to it, so busy with the day-to-day, and someone else thinks this and someone else thinks that. That's why we talk about undeniability. It's true; there's no confection in it.
One of the greatest compliments we had was from the CEO of a big holiday company, at the end of a presentation of the north star. He stood up and said, "So let me get this straight. I've just paid you two a lot of money to tell me what I already know." And we said, "Yeah, you have." What's brilliant about that is that you know it, but you do nothing with it. It doesn't inform anything you do. All you do is sit within the category norms and commoditise yourself, while sitting on this wonderful thing that you've all walked past. Every single time we find it within the business, that's the moment everyone goes, "Oh, I get this now."
What the client is really saying is, "you're trying to help us get out of our own way, aren't you?" We simplify everything to give them a brilliant, simple north star that's absolutely true, that everyone in the fabric of the business already believes, that's going to be different and answer an emotional unmet need. Probably six times out of ten, the client says, "So that means our north star is this, doesn't it?" and you say, "Exactly."
Kevin Chesters: This is also what's important about breaking down silos, and not only within organisations, between creatives and strategists, but between client and agency. There's always a bit of abracadabra, a bit of "look how clever we are," lifting the big silver cloche. Our process is three separate meetings, which happen as quickly or as slowly as you want, and by the third meeting everyone's already anticipating what it is. Working for yourself, there's no dog in the fight in the agency sense, so we genuinely work in collaboration with the client. It starts with sitting down and asking questions in an unthreatening way, a bit like coppers trying to work out whether a gang has got its story straight.
Mick Mahoney: Kevin came up with this. When police interview suspects from a gang, they separate them straight away and put them in different rooms. We've borrowed that technique. We interview people separately.
Rob Estreitinho: And then there's being able to shut up and listen. I've seen so many stakeholder interviews where you're trying to lead the witness rather than letting them talk. I feel at my most successful when clients say, "Rob, I felt like I just did a therapy session with you." That means they felt honest enough to tell me whatever was on their mind, even a deep, dark secret that deeply annoys them, and that's probably a useful signal for the project.
Kevin Chesters: We often say this at the start of a process, particularly with founders, and it isn't a line: if Mick or I tell you anything new at the end of this process, we have 100% failed in our job. We're not a couple of truffle pigs. This is about understanding the fundamental part of what you make, do or sell, and it always emerges through the process, because if it's something new, it's going to die. It has to be so true that people say "that's it" rather than "I don't know what to do with this, it doesn't feel like me."
The final chapter of the book reveals the fundamental truth: anyone can have brilliant ideas, and most of them die. Ideas are easy; making them happen is hard. What this process gives you is something undeniable – out in the world when you manifest it in behaviours, but most importantly it feels undeniable inside the organisation, so it can drive itself through the business. Everyone writes great brand platforms and north stars. Tim Cook uses that language, Meta used that language. Then it dies, because it's presented as a new strapline or campaign, something that comes from marketing. If you present it as the heart of a business transformation, that works, but it's almost impossible for an agency to present it that way, because everyone in the room knows how they make money.
Mick Mahoney: That's honestly why we exist. In the acknowledgements we thank the big holding companies for overlooking this massive space that lets us operate. In the old days, big agencies had a stratum of grown-up, brilliant people who weren't tied to particular bits of business or driving revenue. They were there to give great advice to senior people. I remember that best from my time at BBH. We're in that space now, because we aren't flogging adverts at the end. There's no rate card for production. We can take it as far as you like, but the sweet spot is passing it on to your agency.
Rob Estreitinho: Let me finish on three things you made me think of. First, I'm a bit pessimistic about agency economics. You kind of have to start from scratch for that model to work, because otherwise you're pricing by deliverables and trying to break down seven and a half hours of Mick over three months.
Mick Mahoney: Our solution is to unhook the creative team, I think. We talk about it in the book. The creative team was put together back in the fifties or so, art and copy together, and everyone thought it was the end of days, and it turned out to be a very good idea. Then planners were added, but planners were researchers, there to find out what the client and the customer wanted, and suddenly it became a silo: we'll do the thinking and you'll do the executing. But planners and strategists should be bringing the insights – how does everyone feel, where does it come from, how does it sit in the world. Bring those two sets of brains together. Brief the creative and the planner as a team, and take it from the initial client brief all the way to execution. It saves time, saves money, saves handovers and kills silos.
Rob Estreitinho: It saves morale. The number of times you see the planner burnt out because their third brief was shot down, and the creative hates everyone because of the planner. Can we all just be adults and not be mean girls for a second?
Mick Mahoney: My youngest daughter is a planner, super smart, and she asks why she can't just work with the creatives. She wants to bring creative thinking, they want to bring strategy. Why not get rid of that false divide?
Kevin Chesters: Mick, you were the first person to say to me that most people don't understand strategy as a creative process. And I came to realise the difference between a brief and a briefing. One is a document, the other is a meeting, and briefing is akin to gardening. You wouldn't throw a handful of seeds over a fence, go away for a month and expect a garden. You'd make single, telling gestures through a process to arrive at the outcome you wanted. Briefing is planners and creatives, egoless, working together to get somewhere. It's why I'm suspicious of every effectiveness paper with a little box saying "What was the brief?" That was never the brief. It was the creative strategy you arrived at after eight to ten weeks of working together. The brief was the permission to start.
Mick Mahoney: It's in the book, in the story of how Kevin and I first got together. The first conversation we had, I said, "Kevin, just never give me a brief and we'll get on fine. Tell me what you think, and we'll start a conversation and take it all the way through together."
Kevin Chesters: That's almost impossible to systemise in an agency structure.
Mick Mahoney: Not unless you make strategists and creatives a team.
Kevin Chesters: When we interviewed people for the book – I spoke to neuroscientists and clients, Mick spent his time with some of the greatest creative minds – it was interesting that this is how the independent, brilliant, commercially successful agencies work. The clue with legacy agencies is in the name. It's like a website with legacy infrastructure and backends: sometimes you just have to throw the old one away and build on a new platform.
Mick Mahoney: I hope the book speaks to the coming generation. It doesn't have to be like it is right now. Don't leave the industry; challenge it. You're losing so much morale and momentum. They need to be let off the leash, to find new ways of doing things, with autonomy and collaboration. They're a different generation, with a differently wired brain because of technology.
Kevin Chesters: And the smart, intuitive, successful older people – Nils, Greg, Mick – aren't so soaked in ego or nostalgia that they think we should charge back to 1984. Not the novel, the year.
Mick Mahoney: As an industry we can no longer just be focused on making people's adverts. We have to go from creative departments to creative businesses, where everyone brings creativity to solving business problems and their own particular skills – insight, strategy, creative, production – all working towards creating creative behaviours for businesses to succeed. Whether that's adverts, naming, design, thought leadership, PR or product development. We get involved in product development. I don't know anything about it, but I know how you interpret a brand to behave a certain way through product. That creates consistency, and that's the business the next generation will want to work in. At the moment it's so narrow, so processed, so siloed that you have all these bright kids saying "this is crazy, we need to change this," and no one is giving them the space.
Kevin Chesters: The most telling thing about those posts saying there's no good creativity any more is that all they ever talk about is TV adverts of the eighties and nineties. Go and have a look on TikTok, at what creators are doing. We have never lived in a more exciting time for creativity or creators. Just open your eyes and look.
Mick Mahoney: And that's still one facet of it. Look at how product is more creative now, how behaviours and experiences are. That's where creativity is. Please stop saying creativity is adverts, because it isn't.
Kevin Chesters: Apple built a $5 trillion brand on industrial design. It didn't build it on communication.
Rob Estreitinho: One last thing, on undeniability. The other week I heard the best definition of authentic I've seen: something you can't help doing. You can't not do it. It's innate. And most of us don't know that until someone else points it out. That's why it's useful to go to therapy, or to have a coach, and why outside advice is useful. I'll spend an hour talking at you about everything that concerns me, and then Mick, you'll say, "You said something fifteen sentences ago that I think sums it up," and I'll say, "Did I? I don't even know what I said." That's the value: someone spots a pattern you can't see, because you can't see the label from inside the jar. If you're running a business, there's all this noise in your head, and someone says, "I think your thing is this," and you say, "I think that might be my thing." They're not telling you anything new. They're spotting the most important thing, and everything else is just noise.
Mick Mahoney: And distinctive.
Rob Estreitinho: When I worked at VCCP, someone asked the chairman whether he worried that the big holding companies were damaging the industry's reputation. He said no, it's good for his business.
Mick Mahoney: It's great for me. Happy days – stay as you are, everybody.
Kevin Chesters: The classic Napoleon line: never interrupt your opponent when he's making a mistake.
Mick Mahoney: It's a lovely position to be in. We get to turn projects down because we're too busy, or they're not interesting enough, or we don't like the people. There are so many people with a genuine need and so few in a position to answer it.
Rob Estreitinho: Any last words?
Mick Mahoney: One word: destrategise. It's not a real word – it is now. It's the definition, between Kevin and me, of what we mean. You've got to destrategise it: not dumb it down, just keep it simple, keep it honest, keep it undeniable.
Kevin Chesters: With everything the word "strategy" has come to mean. The book is available for pre-order wherever you get your books. It comes out on 19 November here and in March in the United States. I want to thank the contributors, starting with Amanda McKenzie, who works for the king, so she's quite busy, but wrote the foreword. People like Nils, Rory, Karen, Greg and Felix gave their time so generously. But I also want to call out people who don't work in the industry: Lee Campbell-Wan, a brilliant neuroscientist, and Charlie Hart, who runs a company called Awesome Minds about bringing more neurodiverse talent into all industries, particularly HR. So many of them asked, "why do you want to talk to me, I don't work in advertising?" And I said, "That's why I want to talk to you." They were all amazing.
Rob Estreitinho: Thank you, gentlemen. I think we need this book. It's always good to see people crystallising a feeling. I run a strategy collective of 300 people and we talk about this all the time. It's an annoyance: why is there this invisible barrier between me and the creative? Why can't I just go and sit with them?
Mick Mahoney: Turns out you can just go and sit with the creatives.
Kevin Chesters: You can just refuse.
Rob Estreitinho: Exactly. Why are you self-editing yourself out of that behaviour? Just do it.
Kevin Chesters: We interviewed Anthony Swede, who runs the advertising course at Falmouth, and he said the next generation just don't see the walls. They're not trying to break walls down. The walls aren't there for them. They'll walk straight through.
Rob Estreitinho: I love that. One more thing: people talk about new organising systems like smaller studios and the Hollywood model. One of the brilliant things about the Hollywood model is that everyone does a bit of everything. Ben Affleck writes, directs, acts and starts technology companies. If you want the Hollywood model, get your ego out. It's going to need a mesh of skills.
Kevin Chesters: I read a term for it: the slash generation. Everyone's a something slash something. But there's still room, and there always will be, for brilliant expert practitioners. It's a bit like US universities: everyone has a major and a minor. Have your major, have your minor, but never pretend your minor is your major. I get asked all the time whether I can do a talk on AI. I'd say go and talk to Zoe Scaman and nine other brilliant people who know this a thousand times better than me. It's like the thing we said in The Creative Nudge: everybody is creative, but not everybody is a creative. Let's remember that.
Mick Mahoney: That's the point to leave this on, Rob. In our first book, The Creative Nudge, we talked about how everyone is born creative. Creativity is innate, and you can train it up, like sport or music. You can decide to be really good at it, or you can say "I'm not creative." I hate to break it to you, but you are. That's why the World Economic Forum, rarely held up as cheerleaders for creativity, says it's the single most important business skill going forward, in a period of accelerated, unbelievable change. It lets you perceive new realities and new futures, stops you getting locked into legacy, breeds resilience and open-mindedness, and helps you cope with change. And UNICEF has declared creativity one of the twelve life skills essential for all children, to live happy, productive lives. So it starts to make you think differently. Creativity in our industry is defined as "I'm the person who does the adverts, we're the creative department." It's time for that to end.
That's why we think creativity will ultimately save brand strategy. Let's stop thinking about it as a complex intellectual battlefield and start thinking about it as a creative, emotional experience you go through as a team – no silos, no walls – and you get to much better places. And no big reveals.
Rob Estreitinho: And no big reveals. Destrategise. Brilliant. Thank you both for your time.
