Raising the bar on marketing: Five lessons from the Festival of Marketing

Executive summary: More data, technology and marketing capability don’t automatically lead to better marketing. Drawing on five lessons from the Festival of Marketing, Farid Jeeawody explores how brands can drive growth by challenging conventions with purpose, building on existing behaviors, investing in distinctiveness, creating ideas people want to buy into and applying human judgment in an AI-enabled world.

Marketing has never had more data, technology or tools at its disposal. But when everyone has access to similar capabilities, how do brands stand apart and grow?

That question ran through this year’s Festival of Marketing, built around a clear challenge: raise the bar. Not by doing more marketing, but by thinking harder about what makes it effective.

Sir John Hegarty set the tone with his warning about marketing’s “sea of sameness”. He returned to some enduring fundamentals: moving beyond the traditional Unique Selling Proposition toward an Emotional Selling Proposition, bringing innovation and taste together, and turning things people need into things they actively want.

Throughout the day, one tension kept resurfacing: more capability doesn’t automatically create better marketing. What matters is how we use it. Five ideas stood out for how marketers can build distinctive brands, connect with people and drive growth.

Five lessons from the Festival of Marketing

1. Don’t be a challenger for the sake of it

The debate around challenger brands produced one of the more nuanced conversations of the day.

Daryl Fielding, who led the agency team behind Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, recalled that Dove didn’t set out to be a challenger. It started with a growth problem: research pointed to the need for greater relevance and penetration. Challenging category conventions became the answer, not the ambition: “We didn’t know we were going to be a challenger.”

Adam Morgan argued that genuine challenger thinking goes much deeper than provocative communications. It needs a commercial rationale, senior backing and commitment across the organization. It is not simply about looking or sounding different.

The takeaway: Being a challenger shouldn’t be the ambition in itself. Solving the right growth problem should be. Challenge the conventions that stand in the way of growth, rather than simply trying to be different.

2. Tap into the rituals people already have

Brands spend a lot of time thinking about how to create engagement. But one of the more interesting behavioral ideas from the day suggested starting somewhere else: what are people already doing?

Consumers naturally develop behaviors and rituals around products, brands and occasions. We heard how Guinness has tapped into existing rituals around drinking and football, finding ways to become part of behaviors and moments that already matter to people, rather than trying to create new ones.

The session also explored the generation effect: we are more likely to remember something when we have a hand in generating or completing it ourselves. The challenge is to involve people in ways that draw them in without making participation feel like work.

It suggests a useful change in the question marketers ask. Instead of “How do we get people to engage with our brand?”, ask “What are people already doing, and where could our brand naturally add something?”

The takeaway: Rather than always trying to create new rituals, there can be more power in recognizing and building on the ones people already value.

3. Brand is back in B2B. And distinctiveness matters

One of the clearest messages from the Festival was a renewed confidence in the role brand can play in B2B growth.

Marketing Week’s research found that emotional storytelling is seen as a key hallmark of B2B brand building, second only to strong positioning and differentiation. Respondents also saw bold creative as a way to drive awareness, consideration and trust.

Brian Macreadie, Head of Marketing at Addleshaw Goddard, brought the point to life with a simple observation: “If you don’t feel something, you won’t remember it.” He challenged B2B marketers to find what is genuinely interesting about their business and build creative ideas around it.

The bigger opportunity is to shape what people remember about you, not simply whether they remember you. For B2B brands, that means identifying what makes the business genuinely distinctive and giving people a reason to care.

The takeaway: Distinctiveness helps you get noticed and remembered. Emotional connection gives people a reason to care and, ultimately, choose you.

4. Great brands think like movements

One of Sir John Hegarty’s more provocative ideas was that great brands should think more like movements.

His argument was that marketing has become very good at finding and targeting people who are already likely to be interested. But growth also means reaching beyond those already in the market and creating desire among a wider audience.

Thinking like a movement means looking beyond the people already persuaded. It means communicating an idea widely, building momentum around it and inviting more people in. Hegarty pointed to Apple and Nike as brands that achieved something similar, creating ideas that traveled far beyond individual products and became part of culture.

His use of the word “broadcast” was important too: not simply as a media approach, but as an ambition for an idea to travel widely enough to become part of culture.

The takeaway: In an age of ever more precise targeting, the growth opportunity lies not only in finding the people most likely to buy, but in giving more people something worth buying into.

5. As AI democratizes capability, taste becomes an advantage

AI was inevitably everywhere. But Sir John Hegarty offered a more interesting challenge than another list of things the technology can do.

His argument was that AI is democratizing capability. Smaller businesses can increasingly access tools that once required far greater resources. But as access to similar technology widens, there is a risk that more of the output starts to look and feel the same.

That brings us back to something he raised at the beginning of the day: taste.

Technology can expand what marketers are capable of creating, but it cannot replace the judgment needed to decide what is distinctive, interesting or worth putting into the world. As capability becomes easier to access, the advantage shifts toward what is harder to standardize: taste, judgment and a clear point of view.

The takeaway: AI may democratize the tools. It doesn’t democratize good judgment.

So, how do we raise the bar?

For all the talk of new technology, the bigger message from the day felt reassuringly human. Better marketing doesn’t come from following the latest playbook or simply having more capability. It comes from understanding people better, building brands that stand for something, creating ideas people want to buy into and having the judgment to know what is worth doing differently, and when.

Raising the bar isn’t about doing more. It’s about making braver, better choices about what will drive growth.