In 2020 of the top 200 bestselling business books, only 17 were written by women. That’s equal to the number of business bestsellers written by men named John or Jon. A statistic that is a compelling reminder of the importance of widening the lens and bursting the male-dominated bubble of thought leadership in the marketing industry.

The male bias in marketing thought leadership begins early. Writing in the Harvard Business Review Lesley Symons, Leadership Coach and Mentor, revealed research showing that only 11% of top business school case studies have a female protagonist.

The Women in Marketing Fresh Reads series, in partnership with Dentsu Creative, aims to challenge the male-dominated narrative of marketing thought leadership. Each month winners and supporters of the Women in Marketing Awards are reviewing and highlighting the most innovative creativity, culture, and marketing books, which also just happen to be primarily written by women. Books that will be welcome additions to the reading lists of progressive marketers.

This month Henry Windridge, Director of Media and Content EEMEA at Mastercard reviews The Brand Book by Daryl Fielding.

It’s the heavy eyelids that do it for me. Turning the page of another worthy career-focused book seems to bring more somnolence than any over-the-counter sleep remedy. Yet so many marketing guides fall into this category. Heavy prose, outdated examples and a preponderance to make you feel like you’re in the first year of university and not quite sure what’s going on with your life. After all, isn’t marketing supposed to be fun? I realise none of us want to be called the colouring-in department, but I’ve always thought that dismissive attitude comes from parts of the business who are slightly envious. Strategies, audiences, platforms, design, creative. I know which department I’d rather be part of, thank you very much.

Daryl Fielding’s approach in The Brand Book is much more a breath of minty fresh air, blasting her way through the foundational approaches for building a brand. Anyone who has seen Fielding speak will be glad to see she has lost none of her character in written form (I was fortunate to be inspired by Fielding at several Marketing Academy sessions). Friendly, no-nonsense and action-orientated, she weaves and glides as she outlines how to plan a brand’s future. She uses case studies from her own career, famous global examples, and a fictitious new restaurant brand that is used throughout the book to demonstrate her approaches in a practical and hands-on way.

Fielding is well known for her impactful marketing career; which has seen her span roles such as VP of Marketing at Kraft Foods Europe and Director of Brand Marketing at Vodafone. At Ogilvy as Managing Partner she led brand strategy and communications development for a number of global and national brands including Dove, Ford and Hellmans.

Her work at Ogilvy saw her work with the Unilever team that in 2004 reinvented purpose-led branding with Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. It was, and in some ways remains, an epoch-defining campaign that truly shifted how an entire industry would conduct its marketing in the future years. As Fielding notes, the team didn’t set out to invent a new form of marketing, but its resonance is unquestionable. Fielding unpacks the campaign through her four lever model to brand strategy, looking at the insights that were available, the cultural context at the time, the brand’s ‘right to win’ against other products and its differentiation against other brands. Thankfully, her effortless honesty also lets us know it was “much more of a muddle” to achieve this success than marketing history would have us believe.

It’s a clear career highlight and gets a lot of attention throughout, but although it may have been a muddle, it is clear there was also significant runway given within the organisation to achieve the result. Fielding states it took one year to finalise the strategy and another year to deliver the campaign. Similarly, that runway also included the opportunity for the agency to secretly film conversations about real beauty with the wives and daughters of the predominantly male leadership team, which was played as the finale to their strategy presentation.

In the acknowledgements, Fielding describes her client, the Global Brand Director of Dove, as someone who inspired her ‘for two decades with her Olympic vision’. It's clear that the campaign was one of those moments where, to summarise Fielding’s description, the teams knew what to do, could actually do it, and wanted to do it. When teams, vision, brand and fortuitous timing all come together to make a halcyon moment, it leaves a glow.

Reading The Brand Book, I felt like I was sitting next to a supremely intelligent brand director, receiving the kind of overview on branding I wished I’d had at the start of my career. Fielding speaks from the point of view of a brand director, not a teacher, and therefore the advice can occasionally feel more relevant to senior leaders. That said, The Brand Book is fundamentally a useful, entertaining and punchy read that revives your belief in the power of brand.

To buy a copy of The Brand Book by Daryl Fielding please click here.