Sharpening Your Brand Strategy: What Madfest 2025 Reinforced for Me

Six clear takeaways from top brand leaders — and how I’ve evolved my approach to positioning as a result.

Madfest 2025 brought together the world’s top marketing minds — and the message was clear: emotional connection, brand consistency, and deep consumer insight are the foundations of modern brand growth. Over three days, I heard from brand leaders at IKEA, Heineken, PG Tips, Crocs, and more. Their stories confirmed (and challenged) the Ten Principles for Sharper Brand Positioning I use in my work — and helped me refine my approach.

In this article, I share six key takeaways that will help you sharpen your brand strategy, build stronger positioning, and drive meaningful commercial impact.

I’ve captured these six key takeaways below, but the common themes that kept popping up across multiple sessions are:

• Ask Why? Until it hurts! Be obsessed with getting closer to your customers and understanding their needs on a much deeper level.  Almost every impressive brand leader appointed this as their special sauce when presenting their breakthrough work that delivered exceptional results. 

• As Jimmy Carr succinctly said: “No remembers your jokes, they remember how you make them feel.  Same with advertising.” Again, the top brand leaders and marketing science confirmed connecting with consumers with “showmanship” on a more emotional level - activating against human truths, distinctive assets and personality - will always trump functional “salesmanship” approaches.

• Consistency and fundamentals matter.  Attention and attribution occur when you are consistent with your brand assets and don’t lose sight of the mandatory points of parity that consumers use to make decisions.  The fundamentals should not suffer in the pursuit of innovation and change.

• The success stories and learnings from making timeless brands, timely and global brands, locally relevant. As we strive to achieve more with less, these are conversations we will need to continue having. 

I entered the conference with a goal: to test and pressure-test my Ten Principles for Sharper Brand Positioning. 

And here’s what I learned.

Key takeaway 1:

Ask WHY until it hurts. This statement hit home, and the UK's top brand leaders absolutely confirmed Principle 3 for me.

Principle 3: Dig deep to find your consumer’s latent motivations and tensions that, when addressed, will change their behaviour, in a way that grows your brand.

Many brands touted this as their special sauce when presenting their breakthrough work, which delivered exceptional results. They encouraged us to be obsessed with achieving a deep understanding of our consumer. 

Heineken attributed the success of their 0.0% to the insight “If you don’t want to drink, you don’t want to get tempted to drink, so you stop socialising. This insight inspired the 'Don’t Bale on Your Mates' campaign. 

Wild & Bloom uncovered the tension that comes with gifting: the heavy mental load of not only remembering to buy gifts for those special occasions but also looking thoughtful while seeking convenient options.

As Charlotte Langley, Wild & Bloom’s CMO, said,

“A gift can’t be so easy that it looks and feels like no effort was made”. This insight led to their highly successful loyalty program and high repeat rate, as they reduced the burden of gifting by offering options such as event reminders, easy personalisation options, and novel ideas like letterbox flowers.

Key takeaway 2:

Another of my favourite brand positioning principles that got a lot of airtime was this one

Principle 4: Functional benefits are easily copied. Build stronger brands by leveraging motivating human truths, distinctive assets and personality. 

As Comedian Jimmy Carr so succinctly put it, during the closing keynote with Rory Sutherland

“No remembers your jokes, they remember how you make them feel.  Same with advertising”

Orlando Wood from System 1 also backed this up with data in his talk about Showmanship vs Salesmanship. As he summarised,

“If you want to grow, put on a show.”

Orlando presented data that shows ‘showmanship’ marketing is more likely to appeal to a broader audience than the narrower, primed category buyers that ‘salesmanship’ marketing targets.  Showmanship appeals to the emotions, fosters stronger engagement, and builds both the top and bottom of the funnel simultaneously. While salesmanship assumes people are interested and nudges them with functional messaging and RTBs, thereby only impacting the bottom of the funnel.

Fever-Tree initially established its brand on product differentiation – premium ingredients and taste, specialised carbonation, and glass packaging backed by a compelling insight: 3/4 of your drink is a mixer, so mix with the best. However, CMO Camille Beaufils credits the brand's long-term, ownable success to establishing its premium positioning through exclusive off-premise distribution, top-tier culinary ambassadors, and ingredient storytelling.

Even one of the world’s most functional and practical brands, IKEA, is building stronger emotional connections by leveraging its ‘democracy’ brand equity to create a sense of home for all. Belén Frau showed us examples from Paris Fashion Week and Milan Design Week pop-ups, where Ikea helped bring inclusion and a presence for young, upcoming designers to their Oxford Street housewarming parties to launch the new London City store, giving young Londoners (often in shared houses) a welcoming sense of home.

Key Takeaway 3:

One of my brand positioning principles that got pushed at the conference was this one

Principle 6: In the pursuit of differentiation, don't forget the points of parity you must tick to be considered in the first place. There is no point in being different if you miss the fundamental table stakes.

Again and again, brands emphasised the importance of staying true to the fundamentals and maintaining category parity.

Perhaps the loudest was Tesco, where CMO Murray Bisschop said, “As the Tesco brand evolves, disrupts and innovates in an ever-changing world, there are three core pillars that will always stay true – price, quality and customer service.  We will never serve up innovation and change at the expense of the fundamentals”

However, the other fundamental principle that came out loud and clear was CONSISTENCY.

In the pursuit of relevance and innovation, maintaining consistency is crucial. Again, it was a quote from Murray that brought this home:

“We move it forward, we don’t move it on. We aim to keep a consistent thread through everything we do”

This sentiment was backed up by his counterpart, Sharry Cramond, Marks and Spencer CMO, who said:

“Attention and attribution are stronger when you are consistent with your brand assets”

Sharry attributed the exceptional, long-term brand health growth to the consistent use of the "This is not just food, this is M&S food" platform.

Key Takeaway 4:

A topic that garnered a lot of attention was making timeless brands, timely.

One of my favourite use cases was PG Tips.

By applying the learnings from several marketing science white papers, the team established that encouraging optimism increases consumer spending and that nostalgia is a great way to unlock this optimism, as familiarity brings comfort. Raiding the brand archives for relevant history and DBAs was highly successful when they bought back the beloved PG Tips Monkey, in a way that is relevant today.

Gotta love this campaign and its play on today’s reality TV obsession.

Key Takeaway 5:

Another key conversation was about creating globally consistent, locally relevant content.  This is a challenge I frequently face with clients, as global brands strive to achieve more with less and seek the efficiency benefits of a global brand platform.

As we have heard numerous times, the balance between consistency and relevance is a fine line, but a critical one to achieve.  The consistent recommendation from brands doing it well is:

1. Identify the relevant yet universal human truth and emotional brand benefit that transcends cultures and countries.  We heard from Chris Willingham, the new CMO at Brompton Bikes — a 50-year-old, functional commuter brand in the UK, but an aspirational lifestyle brand in emerging markets such as Asia and the US.  A seasoned global marketer, Chris sought a single, recognisable truth on which to build a globally consistent brand.  And he found one. The joy and freedom of riding a bike.  An alternate mode of transport that helps you navigate your city with fresh eyes and gets you to places you couldn’t ordinarily get to.

   
   

2. Then localise your marketing around embedded behaviours or events to connect with culture and local consumers.  For example, Fever Tree have achieved global scale by expanding their mixers beyond gin tonics to deliver premium tastes to locally relevant drinks, e.g. Tequila in America or Spritz in Europe.

Key Takeaway 6:

Challenger Brands are one of my favourite clients to work with, so I naturally gravitated to a few relevant sessions.  And I left with the embedded imagery of a puffer fish and a cow!

I thought Eric Fulwiler from Rival summed up the successful Challenger Brand well.

“Strong Challenger brands are brands that build a different understanding of customers' needs and solve them differently from incumbent brands. They then build systems and processes that allow you to innovate consistently so they don’t lose their edge”

Eric then went on to discuss the five rules of Challenger brands: Differentiation, Relevance, Talkability, Arbitrage, and Iteration. The three tips that stood out to me:

1. Differentiation – Successful challenger brands stand out in a way that people prefer.  Differentiation doesn’t work if people don’t care about your POD and don’t prefer you as a result

2. Talkability – you can’t spend your way to awareness vs incumbents, so you need to find a lever to get people talking.  You have to earn attention, rather than buy it

3. Arbitrage – Eric talked about the concept of the Puffa Fish brand and how you find the channels & communications that help challenger brands appear bigger than they actually are.

Rory Sutherland also dropped this gem during one of his many talks.

“Where, when and how you start your challenger brand is so important”

By restricting availability and demand to make it more desirable, you instigate the “contagious effect”. This contagious effect is more commonly referred to, in the behavioural science world, as Herd Mentality, which is the human tendency to follow the crowd and use social proof or trends to influence decisions.

Agility is also a critical factor for challenger brands to not only reach scale but hold it.  Yann le Bozac, the CMO for Crocs, attributed their agility to their ability to sustain the viral hype created by a single Post Malone tweet in 2017, which is now worth over $4 billion and remains relevant with the fickle Gen Z audience.  They achieved this by constantly listening to and responding to the requests of their avid fan base, leveraging the agility of personalisation and constant collaborations, including LTOs and events.

Madfest 2025 delivered some insightful takeaways and case studies, allowing me to pressure test and evolve my Ten Principles for Sharper Brand Positioning:

1. Make a choice about who you target and what you stand for. If you don’t stand for something, you’ll end up standing for nothing.

2. Don't be a self-centered brand. Focus on solving your consumers’ needs and problems with your brand solutions.

3. Ask Why till it hurts. Dig deep to find your consumer’s latent motivations and tensions that, when addressed, will change their behaviour in a way that grows your brand.

4. Define your competitors as your consumers would.  Those who solve the same needs and problems for them and therefore sit in the same consideration set. 

5. Differentiate using emotion and brand codes. Functional benefits are easily copied. Build stronger brands by leveraging motivating human truths, distinctive assets and personality. 

6. Don’t forget the category mandatories. In the pursuit of differentiation, don't forget the points of parity you must tick to be considered in the first place. There is no point in being different if you miss the fundamental table stakes.

7. Be credible. You must be able to deliver what you promise. Ensure that what you ‘say’ you can do is backed up with proof points that ‘show’ you can do it.

8. Be consistent but agile. Build brand guardrails across all Ps to ensure consistency over time, while facilitating fast and informed decision-making in an unpredictable world.

9. Everyone owns the brand. It's every function’s role to deliver the brand strategy, not just marketing.  Take them on the journey so they understand what you are trying to achieve.

10. Complacency kills. Sharpen, don’t saw. Sharpen your strategy regularly to remain relevant as the world changes rapidly. Find the golden thread and seek to move things forward rather than completely moving them on.

If you’d like to learn more about these 10 principles and how I can help you sharpen your brand positioning using them, please check out my website or reach out via email: anne@viamarca.com.au

I have helped over 50 brands in 20 categories sharpen their brand positioning using my proprietary toolkit and workshops.  When you are ready, I’d love to help you with yours