Marketing that people love: exclusive extract from Turner Duckworth's new book

I love it what is it? book on a plain background
(Image credit: Phaidon)

I’ve spent most of the last twenty years trying to make brands work. Not brand building or ‘creating iconic brands’, just trying to make them work. And it’s hard. Through some wonderful successes and some abject failures, I’ve developed strong beliefs about how these odd things we call ‘brands’ work. 

One of the most central of these is that design is your biggest lever. It’s the most powerful thing you can use to make your brand work. Think about brands that have sustained amazing results over time – it’s really hard to think of one that has bad design. There are plenty of weak brands with good design, but the strong set, that iconic group we all want to be part of, they all have great design. So, why does this happen? I think there are three main reasons. 

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Jessica Spence

Jessica is President of North America for Beam Suntory, one of the world’s leading spirits companies, where she leads the company’s commercial operations in Canada and the United States. Jessica started her career in the advertising world at J. Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett, and she has twenty-five years of consumer products experience across both commercial and brand-building roles. She has worked across the world in the beer industry with SABMiller and then Carlsberg, where her last role as Chief Commercial Officer was to spearhead the turnaround of the Carlsberg brand as well as drive the premiumisation of the overall portfolio. Most recently, she served as Beam Suntory’s first President of Brands, where she has led iconic brands such as Maker’s Mark, Jim Beam, Courvoisier, Bowmore and Laphroaig. Jessica resides in New York with her husband and their two beloved cats.  

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