Often the best ideas come while relaxing on an inflatable watermelon

I’ve always been a big fan of holidays, and over the years, people in teams I have worked with will have heard me repeat some advice which my first boss gave to me while I was working in Madrid.

“Quizás nunca hay un buen momento para unas vacaciones, pero tampoco hay mal momento.”

Or, if you’d prefer, maybe there’s never a good time for a holiday, but there’s never a bad time either.

Holidays are a chance to rest and reset. To reconnect with what matters, to let what needs to sink in sink in, and to let drift away what needs to drift away.

But the brain doesn’t stop ticking over, and there are always a few thoughts hanging around…

…and these are the three little anecdotes from before I went away this year which kept on resurfacing ​​as I floated on my inflatable watermelon.

1. Set context rather than targets, and the targets take care of themselves

In case you missed it, there was an election on 4 July in the UK, and a new Labour government swept into power with a huge landslide.

There are all sorts of stories within that headline, of leadership, of culture, of messaging, and of change.

The story which I keep coming back to, though, was the growth of the Liberal Democrats, who won more than six times as many seats in this election compared to 2019.

The Lib Dems were a client of mine after the 2019 election, when I managed their election review process. It was fascinating and brutal, and an important part of laying the groundwork for the hard work which has happened over the past five years.

Silver linings from that ‘Brexit election’ were few and far between for the Lib Dems, but the first positive articulated in the report was “the gift of time” and a chance to rebuild for the future.

What the marketing and advertising industries want from the Labour governmentAnd what a future. The actual seat numbers are one thing, but having spent a lot of time ‘under the bonnet’ I have real admiration for the machine which the party has put in place.

Results like this take years to set up, and the thing I keep reflecting on is how important it is to set directional challenges rather than specific targets.

The aim of the review was to go beyond the headlines, and uncover the cultural and structural areas which needed focus.

We wanted to set the context, and in doing so, give the organisation the perspective it needed to work out the way forward, and set targets for itself.

I take no credit for the actual result – that all lies within the party machine who did the heavy lifting – but by setting direction rather than targets, the targets took care of themselves, and the results exceeded expectations.

2. Big aspirations are grand, but most people have no idea who Mr Beast is

Mr Beast is YouTube’s top channel, with over 300 million subscribers.

His 800+ videos have amassed over 10 billion views. Several of his videos have exceeded 100 million views, with the most popular ones reaching over 300 million.

His restaurant chain, Mr Beast Burger, sold over a million burgers in three months, and his confectionary range, Feastibles, generated over $10m revenue within a few months of launch.

Mr Beast – AKA Jimmy Donaldson – donated $3m to Ukrainian refugees, and his philanthropic business, Beast Philanthropy, has donated more than 5.5 million pounds of food and delivered more than 4.5 million meals.

In short, he’s a reasonably big deal.

But in a discussion with a client, I was surprised with the blank faces I saw when I said “we should be a bit more Mr Beast”.

We’d just printed thousands of our own ‘bank notes’ for a promotion and I was referencing this video in which Mr Beast is running, only to be sequentially weighed down by more and more bags of bank notes. It’s a classically entertaining, watchable, short video.

While brands are huge commercial assets, and building them takes craft and dedication, it also takes time.

But not one of the CEO, marketing exec or finance team in the meeting knew who Mr Beast was.

And then I heard the exact same thing happening to Chris Evans, who was interviewing Daisy Cooper on Virgin Radio.

“Who’s Mr Beast?” she asked, and Chris Evans was similarly surprised. (Daisy Cooper is the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, and you might be forgiven for not knowing that!)

It was a great reminder that even huge global brands like Mr Beast are still just fledglings when it comes to levels of awareness needed be as well known as a Nike, an Apple or an IBM.

While brands are huge commercial assets, and building them takes craft and dedication, it also takes time.

Next time you think that you’ve gone viral or got it all sorted, it’s worth remembering that most people still have no idea who Mr Beast is.

3. If you know, you know, but if you don’t, you don’t

I’m in a bunch of WhatsApp groups. Some work, some play, some noisy and some muted.

One of them is a bunch of old school mates. It’s called ‘Alright, alright, alright’ after one of the members used that phrase instead of the customary ‘ladies and gentlemen’ when he was best man at a wedding.

All sorts of useless chat happens on that channel, but given that among others there’s a tech CEO, two writers, two lawyers and two consultants, there are also some occasional work-related moments.

A few weeks ago someone asked: “Do you always buy the exact same toothpaste? Same brand, same type… A mate of mine buys it in bulk so he’s always certain to have the same toothpaste and he thought I was really odd for not having brand loyalty to anything at all.”

Cue the marketer (me): “Brand loyalty doesn’t really exist. The concept of actually being ‘loyal’ to a toothpaste is just fundamentally weird… but people are creatures of habit and brands can get people to more or less firmly stick to certain habits.”

In what turned out to be my own marketing bubble, I thought this was a relatively benign statement, but it raised a digital eyebrow or two.

“Controversial statement from a marketer, JC! Title of your next blog?!”

If you’re a marketer who knows their Byron Sharp from their Byron Burger, then you’ll get what I meant.

There are some people who are loyal in that they are more regular customers of certain things than others, but that tends to just correlate with brand share (bigger brand, more loyal customers) and most businesses succeed based on how they perform with lighter and more irregular buyers.

Marketers ‘overestimate’ chances of achieving brand loyalty, study findsBut if you don’t know that, then it’s easy to get caught in the trap of running after loyalty instead of penetration, when actually the latter might well be a better commercial bet.

On the WhatsApp group we concluded that Mr I-Buy-Anything-Minty and Mr I-Buy-It-in-Bulk are probably both outliers in a category like toothpaste.

However my personal experience was a timely reminder that you only know what you know, and that some of the things we might see as foundational knowledge are eyebrow-raisers to the uninitiated.

It’s worth remembering that we only know what we know, and the importance of having patience to explain what you know to those that don’t.

And then I went back to my inflatable watermelon.

By the end of the holiday, even these lingering thoughts had been set aside in a note on my iPhone.

They’d been replaced with bigger priorities like waterslides, ice cream and spending time in the sun with the family.

But as a set of thoughts to come back to, I’ve found them good prompts for my reintegration into society:

• The balance of contextual aspiration and specific targets
• The perspective of how long it takes to grow a brand
• The patience of bringing others with you and sharing what you know

And of course alongside all of this, the importance of taking a break from it all every now and again.

Wherever you go this year, whether you’ve booked it yet or not, the advice I learnt some 20 years ago is as relevant as ever.

There might never be a good time for a holiday. But there’s a never a bad time either.

Johnny Corbett is an independent marketing specialist who has worked in marketing and commercial leadership roles for large corporate businesses, startups and agencies, in sectors including food and drink, technology, financial and professional services, politics and the public sector.