My Photo

How to hire HERD

  • Strategic Consulting
    Perhaps the most common way that clients want to engage me is in traditional account planning/strategic consulting. I am happy to work in place of or alongside your existing advisers.
  • How stuff spreads
    In conjunction with Dr Alex Bentley, Herd can offer a unique analytics service which will help you see how the tides that shape the behaviour you want to change are actually flowing. This gives strategy the best chance of working. We've looked at FMCG problems, Social Policy problems and Health Marketing.
  • Workshops
    I'm happy to work with you to design a bespoke experience to meet your objectives or to add spice to your plans by working within an existing format/team. Whether you're looking to refine your core strategy, develop new products or refire your existing marketing, HERD can help you tremendously
  • Keynote Speeches
    I regularly do keynote & other speeches for marketing and research organisations as well as clients. In the last few years, I've spoken in Chicago, Miami, Monmouth, London, Hong Kong, Bucharest, Hamburg, Prague, LA, New York, San Diego. Please contact me for details

Contact

  • Website:

Biography

I've worked for most of my working life in advertising and communications as an account planner - at agencies like St Luke's, BMP and latterly Ogilvy.

I was taught (at home, at school, at uni, at everywhere) to "think it through" i.e. not to accept what I was told but to challenge everything until a more compelling, better-evidenced and more workable descriptions of how things work emerges.

It gets up some people's nose, but that's par for the course. My only intent is to make things better by making our thinking about things better - a lot of the time our thinking is quite lazy. I don't have all the answers - never would pretend to - but by engaging folk in thinking about our assumptions has always helped my thinking (and I hope theirs) be better, clearer and more effective.

It's driven me to the top end of my profession - I've held some of the big jobs in account planning - and my books and articles have been widely read (and often given prizes) and it's got me to conferences in wild and wonderful places (from Argentina to Iceland, Miami to Malmo). And an interesting reputation ("London advertising scene's foremost contrarian", "Account Planning's Christopher Hitchens", "A treasure").

I've now written my third book or second-and-a-half: 1. Welcome to the Creative Age (Wiley's 2002) was all mine 2. Brand New Brand Thinking (Kogan Page 2002) was a collaboration with Merry Baskin. 3. Herd - How to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature is the latest (Wiley's Feb 2007).

I'm passionate about many things. And I've given up the day job to make more time for Herd and these other things.