What you need to know about the evolution of branding, with Bill Wallsgrove

Transcript:

Jenny: So today I'm delighted to have Bill Wallsgrove, who is a bit of a guru I'd say in the branding world. He has over 30 years experience helping companies with branding. And now he helps agencies established their brands. And that's particularly one of the reasons I wanted to invite him along today was to talk a little bit more about this. Bill has such an impressive background that I struggled to pick out some key points in his career to kind of highlight, but there are a couple of things. One, you were Creative Director for Coley Porter Bell and also Future Bands. Obviously, run your own branding consultancy for many, many years. And you have a lot of experience both in paint and branding beers. And some of the names are Heineken, Budweiser, Pils. You've also worked on Benetton, B&Q, and I'm sure hundreds of others. You also run workshops for agencies to establish their brand. And you're also a university lecturer, I don't know where you find the time to do that. Is if that wasn't enough, you also advise agencies. So you sit on the board of a couple of agencies, one of which is Studio Blup as non-exec. So Bill, welcome to the show. I'm really delighted to have someone with such experience here. So thank you for joining me.
Bill: Thank you. That's just a great introduction. And I feel like it's like if I was on stage, I'd say, Hello, London town!
Jenny: You can still say that. But I will always say, would you mind spending a couple of minutes first of all, just kind of filling in the gaps to your background and experience?
Bill: Yeah, well, it's interesting what you say, I'm not a university lecturer. I'm a visiting lecturer at several art colleges, universities, and one of the lectures I give is all about personal branding. And personal branding is really to help some third year students think about how they brand themselves to go out to the world, how they launch themselves, how they celebrate their differences and their unique qualities. And one of the slides I put up is saying, ‘where I never knew that I'd be where I am now 30 years ago’, because you know, here am I now a brand consultant, specialising in digital strategy for agencies. And talking about personal branding, talking about colour theory. These are not things I started out doing. When I kind of left school, I went to art college, to be a graphic designer. And that was a pretty difficult choice because I also was offered a place to do history, which is my other passion, at University. Well, I told my father, I said, Look, I'm not going to take the history place. I'm gonna go to art school he said, and I've used this adage before, he said, you know, go to art school, you'll never get a career out of that. Also it's, it's it's sex, drugs and rock and roll. I said, Dad, you just sold it to me.
Brilliant account management. So yeah, I went to art school and thought I wanted to go into advertising. In fact, I did, I spent, after I left art school, I went to the creative department at Ogilvy and Mather.
And I was there for about three or four months, I really didn't like advertising. I didn't like being in a creative department that had no contact with the clients. And I was talking to friends about it. And they said, Well, you ought to go work, maybe for more branding agency. And you know, you're not stuck in advertising. I then went to work for a very small agency before I joined Coley Porter Bell and really enjoyed it because with a small agency, you were both creating, and also presenting your work to clients. And I began to realise my passion was not just about the creative work itself, but also being passionate about explaining why the creative solutions, right from clients, I began to enjoy talking about why creativity, creativity mattered. And I went on to be creative director at Coley Porter Bell. And I was stopped one day by my managing director who said, and she was a very bright woman, she said, you know, Bill, I think you're wasted in the studio. And I thought I'd been told off, you know, you know, you're no good. And she actually didn't mean that as well. She said, you're much more valuable to us selling design to our clients, than you are actually being stuck on the drawing board as it was then and then the computer. And I began to think about so I went back and told my wife this and she said, Oh yeah, she's right. You know, you're passionate about your subjects and obviously, you know, she’d seen when I've been out with friends at dinner parties and describing the latest projects, I'm working on how passionate I was about. And so I kind of moved from being a creative to by default, being a sort of client manager, if you like and managing fairly large accounts at the time, which included things like Dulux Paint, Holsten Pils, which is where the beer and paint thing started. And several other brands like Nestle and Unilever and retail brands like Tesco and began to becom...