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How brands brought sunshine in 2025

There was so much that was wrong and chaotic about the world in 2025, but there were also moments that brought delight to everyone. And whatever your feelings about globalisation and cynical marketing, there is something very powerful about a brand that creates an authentic human connection and, in doing so, plays a small role in buffering us from the troubles of everyday life. When we look back at the general helter-skelter of 2025, these are the life-rafts of consumerist cheese that I will cling to.

We all want some K-Pop magic, image by Joseph Costa

Who can begrudge the ongoing juggernaut of K-Pop which reached new heights with a film that struck a chord with people of all ages. K-Pop has been lauded for articulating the fears of teens and tweenagers – loneliness, the pressures of social media, and friendships – and K-Pop Demon Hunters, whose soundtrack has dominated the charts for several weeks with hits including Golden, What it Sounds Like and Takedown, brought a ray of sunshine into all our lives. Talking of K-Pop, I loved this series which, in an unashamedly cheesy way, set out to find members of a multinational K-Pop group. Now making waves as Katseye.

Toilet Paper: the Who Gives A Cr*p brand has been around for a while, rising from the ashes of post-sustainable consumerism after the pandemic. This year, with their eye-catching patterns and commitment to giving 50% of their profits to water and sanitation projects, this loo roll has put a bit of joy and purpose into the most mundane of daily tasks, becoming a common find in family homes across South London (despite being sadly inappropriate for school craft projects).

Image by Jonathan Borba

Is the high street making a comeback? After years of grill-fronted shops, rubbish swirling through empty multi-story carparks and tattered To Let signs, the high street is being rejuvenated by the faux-independent coffee shop: Blank Street, Black Sheep Coffee, Buns from Home and Crosstown. These are brands that have been in the UK for a while but have been turbo-boosted by global investors and are providing a more acceptable (better coffee and less care worn) alternative to Costa and Starbucks. All sporting an androgynous Skandi-Manhatten vibe, there is something deliciously bland that you can’t quite put your finger on but, at the same time, they have nothing of the motorway service station about them. Expect one or more in a high street near you.

Beautiful Croydon picture by Kristin Snippe

Can they make up for the baffling high street rebrand of WH Smith, though? Possibly not. Could the fading stationer’s name change to TG Jones be the best-worst PR campaign ever? Quite possibly, judging by the hundreds of column inches the unusual move has produced. It’s almost as if they want to create an anti-brand, but there is a skill in turning a terrible story into an unlikely money-spinner. WH Smith is making chunky if controversial steps in the captive airport market and something tells me this story isn’t quite over yet.

Talking of high streets, I hear Croydon is finally in line for a long due glow-up. Not only has its erstwhile suitor, Westfields, finally started the planning process to redo the very forlorn Whitgift Centre, but Croydon is apparently a hotspot for filming and was recently used as the location for the forthcoming blockbuster Heads of State. The ‘Cronx’s gritty 1960s centre combined with proliferation of green spaces apparently make it the ideal dupe for everything from Istanbul to Gotham City and therefore of course the UK’s answer to Hollywood.

Other things that have united us this year: Wicked, a hot bed of at times hilarious brand tie ups (from Cambridge Satchell Company to Hovis) and a wonderful example of adoring female friendship between its co-stars Cynthia Eviro and Arianna Grande. And, staying in the world of celebrity, Justin Trudeau and global pop superstar Katy Perry, who went official on X during their visit to the Japanese PM and his wife, in a way that summed up the sheer joyful randomness of this romance .

Poor Louvre: image by Michael Fousert

There have been hundreds of brand fails and PR disasters of course. The Louvre’s not had a great one and Ben and Jerry’s very public spat with Magnum lacks a certain amount of dignity. But the point is that, for all their baggage and corporate clutter, brands can still be very powerful, bring positivity and strike a chord with the cultural zeitgeist, if they manage to get it right. I can’t wait to see who does it best in 2026.
December 2025

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2024 in comms: who and what got us talking in a year of change?

How did 2024 change the way you think about comms? What can Keir Starmer learn from Taylor Swift, how have divisive rebrands become a thing (it wasn’t just Jaguar who took the plunge this year), and what did Nokia and Mango do to navigate the tech/ anti-tech dichotomy? Here’s what I learnt about the value of good PR and managing your brand in a year of change:

Credit: Isaac Smith

Keir Starmer struggled a little with his new identity as Prime Minister, even mistakenly referring to outgoing Tory leader Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister at the dispatch box.. But as things remain difficult at home, the PM is beginning to see that his greatest opportunity is to become a statesman. And image is everything. There’s nothing as effective as appearing alongside established premiers to underline your global leader credentials. See him grow into the role in 2025 with more international jet setting.

Leading with diplomacy and dignity comes naturally to Taylor Swift who manages to find opportunities for altruism whilst conquering all before her. She balances the two identities of savvy business women with purveyor of all things fun and good in order to have the broadest appeal of any entertainer on the planet. Impressive, given that she is not afraid to stray into the political or call someone out if required. Her ability to navigate tricky waters is unrivalled. Who else will manage to copy the Taylor playbook in 2025?

Credit: Stephen Mease

This year we learnt that a good rebrand must cause a sensation. There will always be people who hate a sweeping change (especially one that plays into the fear of Millennials and Gen X that relevancy is slipping away from them) but controversy should be welcomed as it yields dozens of column inches and weeks of discussion on LinkedIn. Rebrands are necessary in a changing world as Jaguar and the Royal Ballet and Opera (formally Royal Opera House) showed us this year, abandoning their heritage and modernising their look and feel to keep up with markets. As their new looks become established and accepted, watch out for more brands taking the plunge in 2025.

The tech/ anti-tech dichotomy continues as big companies compete in the AI arms race but struggle to placate concerned parents taking smart phones away from their children. Whilst humanity struggles with the hows and wherefores, some brands are making the most of it, including Mango who revealed their first AI ads and Puma who introduced their AI ambassador.. On the other hand, 11 year olds took dumb phones to school (which Nokia is very happy about) and CDs finally made a comeback. I even hear HMV is reappearing on our High streets. Nevertheless, there is still a thirst for someone to step in to lay down some guidelines. All eyes are on Australia who introduced a social media ban for under 16s. Look out for campaigners and governments wrestling with this in 2025.

December 2024

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Don’t shoot the messenger!

Finally a podcast that gives PRs a voice

I never fail to get a feeling of joy on Tuesdays when I listen to the weekly instalment of When It Hits the Fan. A podcast fronted by two titans of media and PR: David Yelland, former editor of the Sun, and Simon Lewis, a Chief of Comms to the late Queen and Prime Minister Gordon Brown amongst many other incredible roles. Here is a podcast that speaks directly to me. A delicious treat as my train rushes through South London on cold dark mornings.

As a care-worn PR of twenty long years, I am used to the idea that PR has no voice of its own. We are vessels of other people’s information, our job is to come up with the most resonant and evocative way to present it… But it’s far more complicated than that. Diplomacy, people management and navigating internal (and external) politics are the true skills you need to bring to the job. It’s part of the thrill, of course, which keeps us in the game, but you can’t really speak about these things. All that stuff needs to be kept firmly under the bonnet.

Until David and Simon (yes, I’m going to use their first names) entered my life, I’d never come across people talking openly about the good, the bad and the ugly of all PRs do. And it is fascinating: why people say things when they say it, how they pull levers of power to achieve their goals, the unintended consequences when they mess up..the sheer randomness of why things happen, even in No 10, at national newspapers…when the best people in the business are making the decisions. Recent episodes have covered the political role of Elon Musk and X; the battle for the Chancellor of Oxford – and why that’s a big deal; the most disastrous PR failures and how to come back from them; why Jaguar know what they’re doing.. and the power and mastery of ‘bikeshed PR’. And of course the ins and outs of the Murdoch dynasty, a mind-boggling story unfolding right now. Their experience and insights are fascinating and endlessly entertaining. It is a delight to learn from their wisdom, and I feel a strong sense of recognition too.

When It Hits the Fan avoids the pitfall that some comms commentary falls into. It’s so easy to come across as too virtuous, or navel gazing, or with a forced earnestness that gives the impression you’re trying to justify being a PR. (By the way, I’m sure I’m guilty of this all the time.) David and Simon manage to bring their massively fascinating experience to the conversation in a brilliantly entertaining way, along with insight into the big personalities at the heart of comms and the press, and the reality that it’s not all a basket of roses.

If you’ve not discovered it yet, give it a listen.

December 2024

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What can we gain from the blame game?

The pros and cons of blame in PR, politics and business

It wasn’t the result the Democrats were expecting, but there was no denying on Wednesday morning the Republicans were sweeping to a very comfortable majority in the US election. It wasn’t long before various Democratic sources including Nancy Pelosi were attributing the Democrats’ loss to Biden being both ‘selfish’ and ‘stupid’ for not handing over the reins earlier.

It is true that three months is hardly enough time for a person to establish themselves as a contender in a race that their opponent has been fighting for four years. And that Biden should have known that he was not a credible candidate under the glare of pre-election scrutiny. All the same, it seems hard to blame him completely for not making the decision sooner. It was a leap for the Democrats to make. Despite her rapturous welcome when she was eventually endorsed, Harris had polled low during Biden’s presidential term, and the party had sometimes blamed her for those policies that had failed to gain traction. The truth of what actually happened – a complicated mess, a society that is fearful of the outside world, the lack of enthusiasm for a female candidate, Trump being a strong leader, despite his shortcomings, and, yes, culpability by some individuals for sure – is messy. It is difficult for the Democratic party to confront. So, in the cold light of day, blaming Biden is easier, and perhaps cathartic for them.

The Democrats are hardly alone in playing the blame game. Blame has been slung around in all quarters these last few weeks. Like the mud slung at the King of Spain when he went to visit the victims of the Valencia floods, one of those tragedies where blame and anger, as Henry Mance writing in the FT points out, is a normal and important process of grief, but can also prevent us from learning from awful events and how to handle them.

Rachel Reeves played the blame game with panache and political style during her first Budget speech at the House of Commons dispatch box the other week. It is typical of an incoming government to blame their predecessors for the state of the nation as they found it, and there are a lot of things the Tories are to blame for, for sure. Here, Reeves used the blame game to temper what was, according to many commentators, the most painful Budget in years. She did it in the anticipation that many of the measures would be hard for the public to swallow.

So, blame is all around and, in many senses, it is a natural part of life. Not only is it part of our fight or flight reflexes according to Dr Bernard Golden, writing in Psychology Today, to preserve our sense of self-esteem, but it is also how the media dissect and analyse world events (and sell papers, if you’re being cynical). Dr Golden says that blame has become a type of global thinking. And surely this is partly down to the globalisation of information, ways of thinking and perspectives spreading quickly from person to person and country to country in a matter of days and hours after something has happened. But he also argues that blaming others can be personally disempowering, denying yourself agency and the ability to grow. I would argue that, equally, the public inclination to apportion blame prevents society from truly examining itself, having open and difficult conversations in order to iron out collective mistakes.

But just as we shouldn’t always blame others, we need to have the strength, when necessary, to accept blame ourselves. If an organisation is going through a crisis, the executive team at the centre of the storm is often tempted to explain why they are not to blame or to deflect blame onto someone else. Sometimes this has ruinous consequences. Boeing were criticised by the National Transportation Safety Board for failing to disclose who carried out work on a door that blew off mid-flight. The omission led to an escalating scandal and ultimately the resignation of the company’s CEO and Chair. Actually, crises are dealt with most successfully when an organisation can acknowledge culpability, face up promptly and proactively to internal faults, and have the courage and strength of will to address them. The incoming Starbucks CEO played into this tactic when he acknowledged that the business had moved too far away from coffee and pledged to steer it back to its roots, a move that has been described as bringing clarity and decisiveness and which boosted shares by 24%.

November 2024

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Fame, and why we need it

Why has being famous always been so attractive?

This summer, the split of influencers Molly-Mae Hague and Tommy Fury made headlines worldwide. They were one of the very few couples from the TV show Love Island whose relationship survived more than a couple of months. Fans cited their solidness, normality and commitment to living their lives in front of the camera as among the reasons why they are so adored. They are both young, beautiful and charismatic; but they are also famous just for being. Coverage of the couple’s break up has been prolific: Sky News issued a breaking news alert, outlets from from Vogue to the BBC gave their take, the tabloids speculated on what went wrong. More evidence, if we need it, that the sun of the super-influencer is still in the ascendancy. The individual, the leader, the trend setter, the personification of a zeitgeist. As sure as children come to school careers day dressed as the influencers they want to be; social media remains king and these people are the symbol of our times.

But the need to be recognised, not just by our loved ones, our colleagues and our peers, but by humanity as a whole, is timeless. Centuries before Andy Warhol said that everyone would have their fifteen minutes of fame, Ancient Greek poets told the stories of Gods who died for fame and glory. As Dr Angie Hobbs, a Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at Warwick University, tells us, the poet Homer has Achilles say ‘‘I’m returning to fight, partly to avenge Patroclus, but also because I want glory.’’ Fame has been around forever.

When I was young in the global but not quite hyper connected nineties, I was a typical example of the type of teenager who wanted to be famous: insecure, very aware of social hierarchies, and still trying to find my own identity. I was looking for a way of validating who I was and my existence on this earth as a person. (Of course I never equated my desire for fame with who I actually am, which is quite a private person. I love nothing more than shutting the door to the rest of the world.) In 2013, American academics (Greenwood, Long and Dal Cin) found a correlation between those who wanted to fit in socially and people who wanted to be famous. They also found a link between those who wanted to be famous and people with narcissistic tendencies – who wanted to stand out.

Fame was a hot ticket in the nineties and it’s even hotter now. Social media allows a person to control their fame and their image more than ever before. Social media success, and therefore fame, is predicated on creating and fine tuning a very particular type of identity. But, rather than this helping a person define themself, it can end up forcing them to be someone they’re not. Instagram is a curated version of a person’s life, and expectations of the people who consume it are aspirational at heart. You have to keep on producing the type of content that people want to see, whether that is happening in your life or not. It is hard not to feel sorry for Katie Price, who used her fame and her image cleverly to create a multi-faceted multi-million pound business; but whose credibility has been undone, in part, by the need to perpetually produce the product that drives the fame itself.

It is easy, as consumers, to judge people who fall from grace – and we judge harshly. That is part of the darker side of fame. But, at the same time, we cannot completely condemn something that has always played a part in culture and society. Famous people are role models, and they can have a very positive impact on individuals and society. Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol have had a profound impact as individuals shaping cultural narratives for years after their deaths. They provided a benchmark in which social norms, fashions, aspirations and morals are still reflected. Perhaps it is difficult to imagine today’s most famous people having this kind of long term, era-defining cultural influence, but they are still able to shape thousands of lives and thousands of young people aspire to be like them. And people need to be able to aspire. Fame has endured because it plays an important role in society and culture. In that way, our society isn’t so unlike that of the Ancient Greeks, and it doesn’t look like changing any time soon.

August 2024