“It’s about understanding what people actually want to engage with. 99% of people aren’t interested in your brand for most of their waking lives.”
Our guest on this episode of The Persuasion Game podcast is Chris Willingham, Chief Marketing Office at Brompton Bicycles.
Chris has had a remarkable career, previously working on accounts including Playstation, Sony Electronics, and Cadbury.
Now at the iconic Brompton, he is leading the company through a brand refresh, aimed at talking to a younger, more diverse, and more global audience.
And it’s doing it by harnessing the love of the brand that exists among its current customer base.
Chris says the ‘Life Unfolded’ campaign marks a shift from talking about the impressive engineering of the bikes and focussing instead on the customer benefits – something that resonates in most markets around the world.
He talks about the power of emotions, being authentic, and his dream of manufacturing the first genuine Back to the Future style hoverboards.
Brompton – Life Unfolded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqRybgafMBc
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This is an 18Sixty production for The Forge.
CHAPTERS:
(00:00) Introduction
(04:24) The Brompton Brand: A Global Perspective
(07:54) Engaging the Brompton Community
(12:15) Balancing Functional and Emotional Benefits
(21:58) Urban Mobility and Future Innovations
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Episode transcript:
Chris: 99% of people aren’t interested in your brand for most of their thinking and waking lives. You’ve got to find something that is going to insert you into what is already a very busy brain.
Adam: Welcome to The Persuasion Game, The Forge’s podcast about growing brands and persuading consumers in the modern age. Good afternoon, Laura. How are you?
Laura: I’m fine. I have, however, had the most horrendous commute, so I feel like the conversation we’re going to have today is extremely timely, isn’t it?
Adam: It is indeed.
We’re going to be speaking to Chris Willingham, the Global Marketing Director at Brompton. Chris is going to be talking to us all about their brand new brand refresh “Life Unfolded”, which is a way of bringing together their global audience of Brompton riders if we are from London to Japan to Korea to China. And how they brought the different needs and use cases of a Brompton together under one brand platform in a way that harnesses and builds on the communities that they’ve built all over the world.
Laura: Yeah, it’s a really interesting take on a challenger mindset, isn’t it? And I think what we’re going to enjoy hearing is how to marry functional and emotional benefits, how to look beyond just sort of pure advertising in its oldest form. And he’s got some really interesting perspectives and I’m hoping he’ll give us a discount at the end.
Adam: Let’s meet Chris!
And just before we hear from our guest, a quick ask from us. We’d love it if you can tell one person about this podcast in the office or on a call today, or leave us a five star review in a rating wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, here’s the interview.
Laura: Chris, welcome to The Persuasion Game. So happy to have you here.
Chris: Very happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Laura: So you are now the lead at Brompton marketing, but before that you were agency side. Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Chris: I’ve been agency side for a long time, so I started at Saatchi’s back in the nineties, so I’m old. And then I went to an agency called Fallon, which is probably not as well known now, but for a period of time between about 2005 and 2008, it was possibly the hottest agency around. And so I was fortunate enough to be given the leadership role on Sony Electronics. So we did Sony Balls, which was quite a famous…
Laura: Oh, I remember.
Chris: …campaign and Sony Paint, which was similar.
And also Cadbury Gorilla, which is still remembered as being one of the best or most popular ads 20 years later. So that was a really golden period. That was a whole lot of fun.
Laura: Incredible. And then you moved on to a role in Asia, which is where we didn’t overlap, but could have done.
Chris: Yeah, no, that was a very purposeful move to explore the world and my wife and I just decided it was now or never. We’d just had our first child and he was very portable. And then I got headhunted to go to Portland, Oregon by Wieden and Kennedy, who are a wonderful agency, still one of the best around and they have the Nike account globally, so my role was Global Director on Nike for three years, which was just phenomenal.
And then I jumped the fence from the agency world into the client world and I took on the role of CMO at R.M Williams, which is a boot brand in Australia.
Laura: Fantastic. And then back here to Brompton.
Chris: Yeah, so family brought me back and it was time for the kids to go into high school. So perfect timing to come back and Brompton was the thing that popped up.
I mean it was kind of a dream really because what I found over my many years in the business is that when you work with brands that you genuinely have an affinity with, that experience is so much more rewarding. I mean, I, it’s transformed my life and I would say that wouldn’t I? But as somebody who has to travel quite a long distance to Greenfield where the factory is, I ride, and then a little bit of a train journey ride again, and then another bit of train and it’s so much fun.
Adam: Yeah. I think it really is a best of both, isn’t it? You know, public transport, you can be dry and get there quickly. Cycling, you get the kind of wind in your face and you feel absolutely exhilarated. Combine the two and you’re kinda absolutely winning.
And I think I saw some of that in the materials that were shared with us about the insights around the new campaign that you’ve put together. I guess that’s a big part of the job since coming into Brompton. Was it the Life Unfolded campaign? Do you want to share a little bit about how that’s come together?
Chris: What I should probably do is just take a step back and just give you a view of the brand that I encountered when I walked in the door. And it’s fascinating because in London, we think of Brompton as a commuter bike. Primarily it’s a way to beat the traffic and it’s a shortcut. Whereas in Asia where the majority of our business is these days, it’s very much a sort of leisure accessory.
So people tend not to ride the bike during the week. They tend to do it at weekends in groups. The community in Asia around Brompton blew my mind. I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of people who come together to ride Bromptons across China, Japan, Korea. And they do it because they, well, they, they wanna be part of a community, but also because it’s a great thing to do at weekends.
It’s a collective joy that they have going out on these rides together. Sometimes we organise them, but most often we don’t. They self-organise. So you’ve got these two very distinct use cases and it’s quite, it was quite hard initially to think of how we could unite the brand under one sort of global, long-term positioning.
And what we got to eventually was some thinking that really came out of a lot of conversations with people inside the business, but also a lot of customers on both sides of the world. The key really was to transform from an engineering company, which is, you know, engineers love the products they create. They spend their lives creating these things, and they really want to talk about them in communications. I’ve found this with Sony as well. But that’s not always what people want to hear.
What people want to hear is how is this product going to enhance my life in some small way? You know, it’s that thing from being product centric to customer centric, from being feature led to benefit led, and that was the journey we went on for the first time really.
We switched the balance and focussed much more on the customer benefit. And this really was revealed by talking to people who’ve had the bike for years and who love it and who use it on a daily basis and the way they speak about the joy it brings them, but the freedom it brings them is really contagious and you need to find a way to express that.
And that’s probably the most compelling way to bring new people into the brand, when they can actually understand why others find it so valuable and so life enhancing.
So we eventually got to Life Unfolded, which was a switch really, because the bike is very compact, and that’s a big selling point. The magic really happens when you unfold the bike. And the company had been focussed for 50 years on the folded version as being the big selling point. So the switch was really to look at the unfolded bike and the joy that that brings. The smile appears on the face when you make the last click and everything just falls into place and then off you go.
And so that really was where we got to. Life Unfolded, represents not just that product truth, but also a human truth about when you are in your unfolded state, you are kind of the most open, the most true to yourself, the most free, and that really resonated when we tested it, both in China and in Europe.
So it really landed well.
Laura: I’ve got a couple of questions here, because this is so interesting. I mean, the first is that you were finding these fans who were organically creating these communities. How did you pick up on those signals and sort of delve in from a research perspective?
Chris: Quite carefully because it is quite a delicate relationship. You as a brand, you mustn’t tread too heavily, particularly when something’s been created by people kind of organically. But we do have connections into these communities and therefore through those connectors, we asked for people to come forward and give us their point of view.
And they came in droves. I mean they weren’t short of opinions and it’s only then that you, I as a new person, I really realised the importance of this product in people’s lives. I mean, it’s above and beyond 95% of inanimate objects in terms of its importance and how people personalise it and how people speak to it.
Most Bromptons have a name. Yeah. That’s when it really landed. Like, this is so powerful. If we can tap into this strength of feeling for our products and share that across a much wider audience, it’s gonna be infectious.
Laura: The other thing I was really interested to hear you say was everyone’s thought about it as the folded bike, but actually it’s when it’s unfolded that you get to this interesting space.
We hear so much in the marketing world about DBAs and like what makes you distinctive? And often it has been that the bike has folded. Did you have to create a bit of a mindset shift, like get people to buy into, look, we can sell it another way in order to unlock engagement with this campaign
Chris: A little bit, but mostly I think the business was ready for it. Will Butler Adams, who’s our CEO, the conversation with him was a big unlock because he has championed this purpose that Brompton has, which is to create urban freedom for happier lives. That’s a very powerful statement. And when I first saw that I was blown away by it. Like this is a brand that’s thinking way bigger than just the product.
But they hadn’t managed to find a way to take that from inside the business and express it in a way that was going to be meaningful to people in the real world. So that’s really what Life Unfolded is. It’s capturing that joy and the freedom that is represented within that purpose statement and making a promise about how it’s going to change a life. Change many lives, hopefully.
Adam: Beyond the communications side of it then, how is it permeating into like proposition or innovation and other products or new groups that you can build things for?
How has it helped you unlock a different way of thinking about mobility?
Chris: Well, I think it’s helped the teams internally to just stop and think at the very beginning of the product development process about the customer and to have conversations, even if those conversations are more informative because customers don’t always know what they want. But to immerse themselves in the world of the potential consumer before they actually start work on the product development program, which is a very good start.
But then we’ve got some amazing stuff in the pipeline, which I can’t unfortunately talk about in public at the moment, which this proposition is going to help shape as we bring those products to market. And they are technically incredible. And I think in previous times the focus would’ve been very much on that technical excellence and the leap that has been made in engineering. But you know, whilst that is important to a small number of people. What ultimately is going to win and what everyone in the business is now really behind is the broader benefit and how it’s gonna make people feel as much as anything else.
So yeah, starting to sort of swing the pendulum away from that very ingrained and quite insular engineering mindset into one that is much broader and much more understanding of the wider world of the customer.
Laura: I think that’s really interesting what you’re saying, Chris, about laddering back to a benefit and from that conversation we are having upfront, that was the genius of the Sony ads as well, wasn’t it?
Actually, you were showing this sort of joy unleashed, but also you were very clearly showing the capability of a Sony TV to capture colour experience. How do you try and embed that thinking with people where you get to a more benefit orientated perspective rather than just the functional thinking.
Chris: I think it’s just an understanding of what people actually want to engage with and you know, you don’t need me to probably tell you that 99% of people aren’t interested in your brand for most of their thinking and waking lives.
You’ve got to find something that is going to insert you into what is already a very busy brain thinking about all these other important things going on in a person’s life. What I’ve learned over the course of time, and I started work at Saatchi in the nineties when persuasion was very much the way of communicating.
It was very much brand down and it’s, you know, we are going to tell you about something and we’re going to keep telling you about it until it sort of wedges its way into your head. And we’re just going to blitz the TV stations with this message.
But then what we discovered at Fallon was increasingly the level of engagement was just falling through the floor and there had to be a better way, and that was almost to sort of leap over persuasion and just get to something that’s more in the realm of branded entertainment really. But something that is genuinely going to cut through and be of interest to people, or at least be entertaining and not beating people over the head with a message.
People are pretty smart. I mean, the takeout from that Sony ad was Sony brings great colour into my life. That was what we wanted people to think. And the thing about the Cadbury gorilla, which was a bit more difficult perhaps for people to decode, but many of them got it. Even if they couldn’t articulate it. It was all about joy. The whole premise was to make the comms as entertaining and as joyful as eating the chocolate. Even if they couldn’t articulate it, that’s what they felt.
And it’s how do you make people feel something is ultimately, you know, most advertising taxes you in a very logical way and people don’t like to think, but if you can tap into an emotion. And again, this is not new news. That connection tends to be a lot more powerful and that’s what I hope we’re going to be able to do with Brompton and Life Unfolded.
Adam: Yeah, I mean, I saw the show reel of the Brompton bike Life Unfolded the 30 second piece you had and as an ex-cyclist, it was pure joy.
I said, I turned to Laura, I was like, Laura, I need to buy a Brompton. I honestly have to go and get one of these bites. But what was so brilliant about it was that it challenged my initial perception about what the Brompton brand was about. Like it really looked like a diverse, global, more international audience.
And that tension you mentioned at the beginning between the kind of two audiences, I really saw the other side of it. And it sort of brought that unbridled joy and I think it really did deliver on what you were trying to do there.
Chris: Well, thank you. I think it’s really interesting to think about London, the perception of a Brompton rider in London, which tends to be older, white male.
Laura: My dad.
Chris: Well, yeah.
Laura: Proudly so!
Chris: And yeah I qualify in that sector now. But there are a lot of people outside of that. Particularly in the East where it’s much more female and much younger. Again, we’ve got to marry those two things together. I hope we can bring some of that fun and community based love for the brand over to Europe that exists in China.
But also we need to bring a bit of what is very powerful here. So, the more functional stuff around durability, a Brompton will last you for a lifetime. Reliability, quality, craftsmanship. We need to bring a bit more of that over to China because otherwise that fun that is what people say in China when we ask them about the attribute that they most associate with Brompton. It needs to be underpinned with something much more substantial and long lasting. Otherwise, you know, there’s a danger, it’ll be a fad.
Laura: And, I’m fascinated again that you mentioned you work for Nike. Nike have always been absolutely brilliant at fostering community events and really use that to kind of underpin a premium.
How do you see that working in your 10 year plan, this idea of building community, building sort of shared experiences, how will that help you maintain a premium?
Chris: It’s going to be even more important as we enter the realm of agentic AI. And yet another sort of human touch point is mostly removed as agents talk to agents.
And so for me, real life, we are an in real life brand. I mean, we are very proudly ridden on the streets and on pathways. That means I think we have a duty to bring people together and give them an experience that is really worthwhile and very representative of the brand. So we do things called the Brompton World Championships every year, we do it in London. We do it in Shanghai. And others have popped up all over the world. Ones that we part organise or just leave to the local people. And those are Brompton races. People are encouraged to dress up. They’re not taken very seriously. But it’s a great opportunity for people to come together for a day or two and just spend time with each other. This isn’t new news. This has been going on for hundreds of years. People come together around a shared interest.
The other thing that we are very focussed on is a bit like Nike and their run clubs, is creating interesting sort of rides for our communities and giving them places to go, which are going to be very Brompton friendly. So perhaps where they can get a free coffee or a free bottle of water or whatever it might be. So in China we’ve got this program called Brompton Plus, which is exactly what that is. You know, it is Brompton plus a load of local neighbourhood bars, restaurants, cafes that you can create rides to connect up with.
So that sort of thing works really well.
Laura: That is fascinating because we do a lot of work with things like demand spaces, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. I think what you are saying is actually, if you can think about a way to augment the experience, like discrete experiences, even if that doesn’t feel like sort of completely your heartland, you can create a perception of value because the experience of riding the bike is amplified by being a member of Brompton.
You know, you can go and you can have this better experience when you are riding the bike.
Chris: So true. I mean, yeah. I don’t think I could express it any better than you just have.
Adam: Have you seen the demographics of your London audience start to shift at all? Like towards the kind of younger, more community focussed groups?
Chris: Definitely from a demographic perspective, we are bringing a younger cohort in to play now. It’s great to see it, but I think we are still very keen to get more women riding Bromptons. There is a safety issue that women are very aware of, particularly in big cities.
So we are lobbying local councils, across the world actually, for better and safer cycling infrastructure. And London’s on board. I mean, Sadiq Khan is a Brompton rider, and Paris similarly is really focused on bringing a cycling first approach to navigating cities so you can see it happening.
And that’s what I would love to see over the next five years or so is just more women coming to our brand, but just coming to cycling more broadly.
Laura: I know some of my friends who’ve had some really bad accidents and I think it’s so interesting that you are really looking at that holistic picture, working with government and infrastructure and kind of really thinking about what are some of those barriers to joining rather than just trying to push on the emotive cues.
It’s kudos for sure.
Chris: Ah, thank you. I mean, Lime bikes have actually been a big benefit in many ways. They’ve got people who ordinarily wouldn’t ride bikes onto bikes and we applaud that. It’s good for everyone. I think it’s certainly good for cities.
Laura: That’s interesting! I would’ve thought you were a bit challenged by Lime bikes.
Chris: We are.
Laura: What’s your perspective?
Chris: I mean, I think we are more open to it than not. I mean, yes, of course we probably are seeing some sales that maybe would’ve come through that aren’t coming through. But I think over the course of time, I think getting people into cycling, we will ultimately gain from that.
You know, our brand is strong. People will start to think about owning their own bikes, particularly when they realise how much it costs to ride Lime bikes on a regular basis in London.
Adam: I was interested about the same thing. There’s so many mobility options available, and I guess in somewhere like China or Japan, like even more so. You know, electric scooters, driverless cars, the world is your oyster now if you want to get from A to B.
Have you had to think quite carefully about like exactly where you fit into that kind of picture and the types of consumers or the types of people that would make for good customers, can you tell us a little bit about how you’ve gone about that
Chris: Urban mobility. It’s a catchphrase and it’s spawning new businesses and new products all the time. China is amazing. I don’t know if you’ve been to China recently, but it has changed so fundamentally since I first went there 10 years ago. Now everything is own brand electric cars, pretty much. You don’t see many Teslas.
It’s done wonders for the air quality in those cities. Their transport systems work so much better than most in the West. And so I think where we are getting to is, yes, we can compete in that space, but we are the folded bicycle sliver of the overall bike categories only 2%, we’re a big fish in that 2% but ultimately we’re pretty small. So we are starting to think about how we expand into other forms of bike, but also we’re thinking beyond bicycles as well, because who knows where we’ll be in 10 or 15 years time. I mean, they’re trialling flying taxis in the US So, you’ve got to start thinking 10 years ahead. To bring a Brompton to market from scratch can take between five and seven years.
Laura: Are you saying I might get my Marty McFly hoverboard?
Chris: I tell you what, we would love to be the first hoverboard manufacturer. Wouldn’t that be the most amazing thing?
Laura: You would make every millennial’s dream come true if you did that. No pressure.
Chris: We have a similar love of that movie I think. Honestly, I’ve talked about it in meetings. That would be the ultimate dream to bring a hoverboard to market.
Laura: Amazing. Chris, I wonder if I can just ask you a little bit about purpose, because I was really struck by the way you described your purpose, which is very clearly linked to your product, but you’ve also talked about duty.
And you know, kind of role that you have to play in a sort of very purposeful fashion. That kind of language doesn’t feel super fashionable at the moment. In fact, some people have actively sort of walked away from it for a variety of reasons. What’s your perspective on what a purpose today can unlock for a brand?
Chris: I mean, yeah, it is very divisive these days, isn’t it? But I mean, you have to be, I mean this is again a cliche, but you have to be authentic. It has to be tied to your product and what your product can actually achieve, even if that has a degree of ambition sort of ladled on top.
And there were a lot of instances of brands who would claim to be purpose driven. But when you scratched the surface, you saw there was a lot of smoke and mirrors and a lot of it wasn’t genuine and you’ve got to be in it for the long term.
When Andrew, who invented Brompton back in 1975, Andrew Richie, ultimately he was doing it for himself, to help himself navigate what was then a very congested and polluted London. But he quickly saw the potential for it to unlock the city for everyone.
And from that DNA I think we’ve always had this belief that we only really win if we can help change things in a way that is of scale. And we’ve been lobbying government for decades to improve the bike infrastructure and bike safety in cities, particularly in the UK, but now we’re taking that to other cities around the world.
When you are doing that and you’ve been at it for years and people can see that you are really genuine about it and that you are bringing others into that conversation as well to help make things better. I think it’s got quite a lot of power. I think it speaks quite highly of who you are as a brand and the values that you hold dear.
And it attracts the sort of people that we want to work at Brompton as well. People who genuinely want to make a difference in the world. People who have passion and have ambition, who want to channel it towards greater good. It’s really important that we get that sort of person in the door and because they’re the future and they can help evolve and take this to the next level.
Adam: Fantastic. Yeah.
Laura: That’s lovely. Thank you so much Chris. We really enjoyed this.
Adam: Yeah really really good. Such an interesting conversation. Thank you.
Chris: Oh, bless you. Thank you. It’s been great talking to you. Really enjoyed it as well. Thank you.
Laura: Pleasure. Thank you so much.
Adam: So Laura, what did you think?
Laura: I thought that was great. What was really striking to me was the way that Brompton are looking at the opportunity is not about them. It’s about cycling and about how to unlock cycling for people in the belief that they will benefit disproportionately.
Adam: It’s a real category leader approach, isn’t it?
Laura: It is. It is. Which is amazing considering they probably aren’t actually, they are the sort of interesting niche, expensive challenger. But they’re thinking about how to improve the occasions for people, how to make the roads safer, how to educate new users, you know, a really holistic look at all of the different sort of joys and pain points that you could address within that world of cycling and then kind of bringing it back to the brand, which to me just felt like a very generous way of looking at things.
Adam: Yeah, and I think it goes even one step further. I think that they are using the Life Unfolded platform to think about what products are we going to create and what does this allow us to do in terms of a proposition and what should we be doing in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years? I mean, the fact that he’s already talked about a Marty McFly hoverboard…
Laura: I consider that a verbal contract, by the way.
Adam: Yeah. But I just think it goes to show how much bigger Life Unfolded is than just a brand platform.
It really is almost a company strategy platform that allows them to kind of reach much further into the future.
Laura: Yes, and I really liked what he was saying about purpose there. You know, purpose is much maligned, purpose is sort of has a lot of high fashion and now it’s sort of slightly in the doldrums.
But I think what was really interesting was he was saying there is something we can do for people and also we have a right to talk about it. And that was a kind of really interesting lens of is it valuable? And is it something we can own? Which I just felt was like a sweet spot and that was probably what gave them so much momentum behind the idea.
Adam: Yeah, I think it just goes to show, doesn’t it, that if you actually have a purpose already, like they have demonstrated over time, you can then articulate it rather than just thinking, oh, what are we going to say about ourselves? And then trying to kind of backpedal into how it works for your business.
Laura: No pun intended.
Well, what a great conversation. See you next time.
Adam: See you next time, Laura!
