In a world where AI tools evolve faster than most teams can keep up, the pressure to innovate can feel relentless. At The Subthread’s Future Makers event three marketing leaders, Sarah Booth, Patrick Horan, and Katie McPhee, made it clear that innovation isn’t about changing course over the next shiny thing. It’s about creating a culture where experimentation, learning, and yes, a little play, can thrive.
Last week, The Subthread brought together these leaders from Skyscanner, Ancient + Brave and Veed at a pub in Soho to chat brand strategy. During the session they talked about how a business can allow for failure, what tenants make a successful brand and how to avoid the hype cycle.
Sarah, global marketing director for the wellness brand Ancient + Brave, is a big believer in organized fun. An approach to brand strategy that she learnt from her time in the Asos brand team.
“Fun's not gonna happen unless you schedule it,” she tells the audience. “Being a leader you've actually got to say, ‘I am expecting us to be creative and thoughtful and playful in some actually awkwardly scheduled moments’.”
In these scheduled “creative playgrounds”, as she calls them, she advises leaders to craft smart questions that help teams think outside the box and get excited about what they are experimenting with. People need a clear set of “walls” within which creativity can be achieved, Sarah says.
“People need a clear set of ‘walls’ within which creativity can be achieved”
At Veed as VP of product marketing, Katie encourages her colleagues to test and play with the new products and features not only for “employee advocacy” but to get teams into that play mindset. Katie’s approach is to frame every new project as a test or an experiment. She starts each project setting out what the business wants to achieve and what it thinks is going to happen with a caveat – “It's a test and not all tests work”.
In tech startup land there is a culture of failing fast, Katie says, but in marketing rarely are people “given the opportunity to fail fast.” Next month Veed is hosting its first hackathon for marketers to give them a taste of testing and potentially failing.
