Marketing, sports & people insights
(SG  /  MY  /  TH  /  ID)

A few weeks ago, I ran a session with a Vistage group on building a brand moat. When we asked what stuck with them most, it wasn't meaning, ownership or traction, the other pillars of M.O.A.T. It was alignment. Most people think of brand as logos, colours and campaigns. But a brand is also an organisation's ability to make a promise and keep it. It's the least glamorous part of branding, and possibly the most important, because the gaps between promise and experience are what

I had the privilege of spending a whole afternoon in the balmy town of Gemas with a group of business owners last Thursday. The topic: building a moat for your business - your brand. In the room were business owners across a handful of very different industries, from resorts and fashion to tech, HR, energy, and FMCG distribution, all running companies with turnovers of RM200 million and above. By any measure, these are already very successful businesses. Yet as different as t

Scroll your LinkedIn feed for ninety seconds and count the ‘thought leadership’ posts that have a catchy one-line hook, some bullet points, and close with ‘Agree?’ or some equally glib call to action. You can’t always be sure which ones were written by AI, but now you ignore most of them anyway, having stopped believing a while ago that a human sat down, thought them through, and wrote them. Especially given how often they’re pumped out in some cases. So the only real questio

Having been cynical, even critical of the Gucci Alpine F1 deal, when I first read about Crystal Palace’s new front of shirt sponsor, Temporal, I rolled my eyes and thought WTF... When I learnt about CPFC’s stadium redevelopment and the IT infrastructure Temporal may provide to Palace, I was intrigued. Is this a tech contract in sponsorship clothing? Are Palace being really smart about leveraging one of their most valuable assets to reduce the OPEX of their IT infrastructure?

Marking your AI Replacement Moving into 2026, Cannes Lions made an interesting decision regarding AI. After the AI scandals at Cannes Lions in 2025, as it set the rules for 2026, it could have capped the percentage of synthetic contribution to any work, or required a minimum of human authorship. It didn't. Instead, it made disclosure of AI use mandatory, with provable claims, requiring a named CEO or CMO to sign off, and the penalties for non-disclosure draconian. It put no l

Last week, I had the privilege of serving as a jury member for the MSA Awards. Over thirty teams presented their briefs, insights, executions, and results back-to-back. By mid-afternoon, a thought began to nag at me. It lingered throughout my drive home. It wasn’t disappointment; it was a mix of hope and a question I couldn’t shake. The Talent in That Room Was the Real Story Let me say this plainly: the calibre of media thinking on display genuinely impressed me. These young

Gucci's business challenges are well documented: revenue freefall, eroding margin, over-expansion in Asia-Pacific, and creative instability that has steadily undermined its brand positioning. Will the much-heralded brand partnership with Alpine help address any of these? Should brand partnerships, or sports sponsorships address business challenges? Emphatically yes, but that's for another post. Conceptually, jumping on F1's cultural momentum makes some strategic sense. Drive

Most marketing plans I've reviewed in the past year share the same quiet flaw. They describe a Malaysian consumer who no longer exists, a homogenous, income-growing, aspirational middle-market buyer, neatly segmented by age and spending power. A familiar fiction that feels safe to plan against. The ground has shifted. And the brands that don't feel it yet will feel it soon, in margin pressure, in promotions that underperform, in products designed for a market that has quietly

You've built something real. Revenue is coming in, the team is running. But somewhere along the way, defending your margins got harder. Competitors undercut you. Customers negotiate more. Every promotion works — until it stops, and you need another one. That's not just a sales problem. That's a brand problem. What's the difference between a business that sells and a brand that gets chosen? A business that sells is transactional. It competes on price and availability. The mome