Run With Foxes
Make better marketing decisions
Paul Dervan
Thank you to my beautiful and wonderfully patient wife Marta. And also to my mum for putting up with talk of foxes and hedgehogs for the past year. To my brilliant twin boys, Alex and Max – my genuine hope is that you grow up to be foxes, like your grandad.
Contents
A hedgehog that believes in being a fox
“Only a desperate, insecure idiot would buy a Vespa these days.” (I own two)
10
I’m just not going to buy six large coffees a day
11
Good enough
12
Firstly, Paul, that’s not even legal
13
When we needed less efficiency
14
Thieves
15
The surest way to lose your budget
16
Brand marketers have a brand problem
17
So brand campaigns sell. Who knew, eh?
18
We need to eat today
19
A rather unfortunate truth
20
What we carry in our heads
21
What is brand salience, anyway?
22
Not just the pipes
23
My narrative fallacy
24
Perhaps we do buy from clowns
25
Spectacularly untargeted
26
I wish my son had cancer
27
Swing for the fences occasionally
28
There was fear in the room
29
So we made a TV ad in Japanese, for Ireland
30
We need to talk about monkeys
31
Paul, you know that’s not a test, right?
32
Must we grab their attention?
33
Sciency marketing
34
Teenagers don’t talk on the phone. They text. Right?
35
My hunch was wrong. Damn
36
No wins this quarter. Again
37
Bake failure into the process
38
All generalisations are false. Including this one
39
The first draft of anything is shit
40
Seek out people who don’t like your work
41
They are not rules
42
The memory-making business
43
I’ve killed a hell of a lot of people to get to this point
Publishing details
About the Author
Paul Dervan currently consults with marketing teams on their decision-making. Previously he was the Global Brand Director at Indeed, the world’s largest and fastest growing job site, with over 250 million visitors every month. There, he was tasked with