HeyJaredBehind The Brand
A weekly breakdown of how brands actually grow, told by the people who built them. Written by an award-winning strategist who's spent years in the room where these decisions get made. No thought leadership. No hot takes. Just the truth.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 20
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
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- Jul 31, 2026
Latest issues
The Dark Arts of Influence (opens the original)
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Last Thursday, I won Marketing Influencer of the Year. Which is slightly ridiculous because I’ve never really thought of myself as an influencer. I don’t flog protein powder. I’ve never filmed myself getting out of a Lamborghini. And, so far at least, I haven’t launched a £10,000 online course promising to help you earn seven figures from your laptop while living in Bali.Winning the award did get me thinking about how dramatically this word has changed however. Influence is moving away from cele
Why brand strategy is bigger than brand (opens the original)
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I’m starting to think brand strategists have been wasting their time. I say that as someone who has spent over 20 years being one.We’ve spent decades obsessing over positioning, propositions, brand onions and the perfect sentence to put at the top of a creative brief. Then, after months of agonising, we turn all that thinking into a 60-second advert and wonder why the CEO still thinks brand is the colouring-in department.But what if brand strategy has a much bigger job?It’s a question we’re incr
Most challenger brands aren’t challenging anything (opens the original)
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I’ve got a bit of a problem with the phrase “challenger brand”.Everyone seems to be one these days. Challenger banks. Challenger beers. Challenger toilet roll. I’m half expecting Andrex to announce it’s challenging the conventions of wiping your arse. But calling yourself a challenger brand is easy. Actually behaving like one is considerably harder. It’s something we think about a lot at Defiant: challenger brands rarely win by behaving like smaller versions of the market leader. They need to fi
Yahoo is trying something most brands are too scared to do. (opens the original)
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I have a confession. I thought Yahoo had disappeared. Not literally. I knew the company still existed. But like many people of my generation, Yahoo occupied a strange corner of my brain somewhere alongside MSN Messenger, dial-up internet and asking Jeeves things.Then I started noticing it again. Cardi B. Weird memes. A keyboard covered in grass. A ring designed to stop you scrolling. Jokes about ancient email addresses. Suddenly a 31-year-old technology company seemed to be having more fun than
How Grand Theft Auto reinvented the marketing playbook (opens the original)
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Grand Theft Auto V made $1 billion in three days. Impressive. But I think there’s a far more ridiculous number hiding in the GTA story. More than twelve years after GTA V launched, Grand Theft Auto products were still generating roughly $825 million a year for parent company Take-Two. GTA V has now sold more than 230 million copies. The wider franchise has shifted more than 470 million. And in 2020 alone, seven years after the game launched, people watched 70 billion GTA V videos on YouTube.Mean
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