Since launching his consultancy business in 2005 Simon Clarkson has contributed strategy to top brands including AOL, BBC Worldwide, BMW, Chivas Regal, Coca-Cola, Diageo, EMAP, Formula One, Lenovo, Manchester United, NIKE, Nokia, South Africa Tourism, Southern Comfort, Walkman, Williams F1, Abu Dhabi and Davis Cup.

Simon is a classically-trained board-level marketer with over eighteen years' client side experience, including board and marketing director BBC Haymarket Exhibitions, marketing director Radio Times, marketing manager Jordans Cereals and product manager Stella Artois.

Now a top-level consultant in brand strategy and management, Simon trained and spent ten years in FMCG before moving to BBC Worldwide to manage a number of media brands, giving him a privileged perspective amongst marketers. The diversity of his brand and sector experience has always set him apart and makes him a particularly strong problem-solver.

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Changing times for brand-marketing

Brands are widely accepted as pivotal to achieving greater margins, improved shareholder value, and a more robust business - all thanks to their power as reassuring signposts in a chaotic and confusing world. But if the business case for brands is largely unchanging, the opposite must be said of the environment in which they exist – presenting tremendous challenges for those that develop and manage them.

Over-crowding is the most obvious reason why it is harder than ever to establish and maintain a new brand. Structurally meanwhile, the ongoing concentration of retailers is altering the economics of markets forever. The well-documented fragmentation of conventional media has made it trickier and more expensive to communicate with audiences, and this at least would be a simpler problem to deal with were it not for the revolution in attitudes to media, and the empowerment of consumers that continues to be driven by technology. Meanwhile the very function of marketing within organisations, once the sacrosanct 'hub' in many sectors, is facing unprecedented scrutiny and pressure.

The need for broad-based, media-neutral input is on the increase. Simon's dedication to making brands work and the diversity of his experience, founded on a classical background, allow him to bring rapid insight from tangential arenas and highlight a practical way forward for his clients, from the already-large to the success stories of tomorrow.

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