Thanks to a leading planner here @BBHNewYork, Kirsty Saddler, I’ve just finished reading Jeremy Bullmore’s Apples, Insights and Mad Inventors. If you are in the business of branding, if you enjoy forward-momentum reads that inspire you to take your everyday business to places of higher-thought…read this now.

Bullmore is a maverick in the world of planning and brand insight.  He began his career in the mid 1950’s and has stayed ahead of the game, even today.  Why? How?  Because he recognizes human truth.  He understands, and advocates for the recognition that, VALUE IS SUBJECTIVE.  Therefore, brands are very much in the hands of consumers.  Just a person speaking to you is judged not on the words coming out of their mouth, but by the way they are sitting, the gaze of their eyes, where they may have asked you to meet them, brands are those transcendent derivatives, the feelings you get from the language of our real-world collateral. 

Bullmore’s book reads as one connected argument of reason.  He establishes that despite our rational wants, brand value cannot be measured (creativity, the value of branding, insights) aren’t numbers based. Bullmore also reminds us that agencies need structure and process as much as they need madness and unlimited creative pursuit.  Just as we manage a brands, we too must manage ourselves.

He reminds us that just as you and I change from day-to-day, as living, breathing people up against daily experience, brands change too, as they are organic things reflecting by real-time and re-interpreted by consumers, competitors, context and worldly influences.  

Bullmore is one of the grand daddies of planning.  It’s probably because his insights are simply stated building blocks.  He is matter-of-fact yet inspiring.  His sound-bites are like thought springboards for deeper thinking. He speaks directly and indirectly at once. How he writes emulates how he thinks advertising should behave in a sense.  As he does, borrowing from Arthur Koestler who says, “Words in themselves are never completely explicit; they are merely stepping stones for thought.” Advertising, then, injected with creative imagination, speaks to what a consumer already may know and then invites them to decide, debate or allude to what they may not.

For a full list of brand truths, in simple bullet form, please see pages 64-66.