On 30 April, 100 senior marketers will gather at The Little Ship Club for a morning with Škoda UK’s Kirsten Stagg and a panel of leaders from ASDA, J.P. Morgan, Purplebricks, Club Med and Penguin Random House, tackling the question every brand owner is quietly asking: how do you build something people actually choose?
Bland is expensive. In a market where every category is crowded and every product promises roughly the same things, “good enough” has quietly become invisible. Distinctiveness is no longer a brand flourish, it’s commercial survival. And on 30 April, Little Grey Cells Club is dedicating a morning to it.
Ban The Bland: How Distinctiveness Decides Commercial Fate takes place at The Little Ship Club on Upper Thames Street, London, from 08:30 to 11:30. One hundred senior marketers. No sales. No performances. Just the kind of frank, peer-level conversation that produces something genuinely useful.
Guest curator Kirsten Stagg, Marketing Director at Škoda UK and one of Creative Salon’s Top 50 Creative Marketers in the UK, brings a track record that makes the abstract concrete. Her Crufts partnership – built on the simple insight that dog lovers already loved Škoda – lifted brand consideration from 49% to 77% among stand visitors. Her ‘Familying’ campaign spoke to real SUV drivers rather than aspirational ones. The results followed. At Ban The Bland she will share what creative conviction actually looks like when you’re working inside a large organisation, a conservative category, and a budget under scrutiny.
She will be joined on the panel by Pippa Prain (ASDA), Richard Sherwell (J.P. Morgan Asset Management), Anoushka Grover (Purplebricks), Richard De Villa (Club Med) and Hannah Bourne (Penguin Random House): five very different categories, one shared challenge.
The morning combines a fireside conversation with roundtable discussions, giving attendees space to test thinking and work through live problems with peers who have faced them too.
Free to attend. Places are limited and screened for seniority.
Register here
