Ban The Bland

How Distinctiveness Decides Commercial Fate With Sharry Cramond (Marks and Spencer)
April 23 @ 8:30 am - 11:30 am
To be confirmed

Why “Good Enough” Is the Real Risk...

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100 CMOs/Marketing directors convene to discuss the value of distinctive marketing

TheAGENDA

Ban The Bland
How Distinctiveness Decides Commercial Fate With Sharry Cramond (Marks and Spencer)

Bland is expensive.

In a market where every category is crowded, every message aspires to be louder, and every product promises the similar things, “good” has become invisible. Distinctiveness is no longer a brand flourish. It’s commercial survival.

On 23 April 2026, Little Grey Cells Club brings together 100 senior-level marketers for a morning designed to tackle one of the hardest questions in modern marketing: how do you build a brand that people can actually pick out, remember, and choose?

The End Of Bland: How Distinctiveness Decides Commercial Fate runs from 08:30–11:30 in Central London. Expect sharp thinking, real-world lessons, and the kind of frank conversation you only get when the room is closed, the incentives are clean, and the audience is made up of peers.

Our guest curator is Sharry Cramond, one of the most credible operators in British retail, and the senior leader behind brand and loyalty marketing at Marks & Spencer. Sharry has spent her career building brands under pressure, where the numbers are unforgiving and the customer has infinite choice. She’ll share what distinctiveness really looks like when it’s tied to growth, not theory. Her marketing mantra with her team is “Ban the Generic”.

Sharry will be joined by panellists Pippa Prain (ASDA), Richard Cherwell (J.P. Morgan Asset Management), Anoushka Grover (Purplebricks), Richard De Villa (Club Med) and Hannah Bourne (Penguin Random House) bringing very different perspectives on what it takes to stand apart when your category is shaped by trust, complexity, and constant scrutiny.

The morning blends fireside conversation with roundtables, giving you space to test ideas, share challenges, and workshop live problems with people who’ve been there. No performances. No posturing. Just candid, lived experience and practical troubleshooting.

As always, this is Little Grey Cells Club: a sales-free environment, built for honest exchange. We elevate marketing through collective insight, and this session is built for marketers who want to leave with business clarity and not clichés.

Location

8:30 am

Guest arrival

HH:MM am/pm

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8:40 am
Breakfast is served
9:15 am
Chair's opening remarks: Tim Healey
9:20 am
Fireside chat:
Sharry Cramond (Marketing Director, Marks & Spencer) and Tim Healey (Founder, Little Grey Cells Club)
9:40 am
Ken Cheng
9:45 am
Panel discussion:
Pippa Prain (Marketing Director, ASDA), Anoushka Grover (CMO, Purplebricks), Richard Sherwell (Marketing Director, JP Morgan Asset Management), Richard De Villa (Marketing Director, Club Med), Hannah Bourne (Marketing Director, Penguin Random house)
10:20 am
Round table discussions:
Table topic 1: How to stay distinctive
Table topic 2: How to avoid the generic
Table topic 3: Being heard in a world of loud noise
Table topic 4: How generic marketing will damage your brand
Table topic 5: Getting your team onside
11:00 am
Report back from tables
11:10 am
Time for Networking
11:25 am
Closing remarks

11:30 am

Event concludes

Guest Speaker

Sharry Crammond
Marketing Director Masterbrand
Marks & Spencer

Sharry Cramond is one of the UK’s most accomplished marketers, with a career built inside some of the world’s most demanding consumer businesses and a track record of leading brand and loyalty growth at scale. She is currently Director of Loyalty, Fashion, Home & Beauty Marketing and Masterbrand at Marks & Spencer, where she leads the Sparks loyalty programme across the business, alongside enterprise-wide brand responsibilities.

Sharry began her career in FMCG as a Brand Manager at Kraft, before joining Tesco, where she spent more than a decade in senior commercial and marketing leadership roles. During her time at Tesco she was part of the teams that helped create and launch two of its most significant growth platforms, Tesco Bank and Tesco Mobile, combining customer insight with sharp execution to build new propositions in highly competitive markets.

She then relocated to Melbourne to lead brand communications for Coles during a period of major business reinvention. The Coles transformation is widely recognised as one of the most impressive retail turnarounds of its era, and Sharry’s work sat at the heart of reshaping how the brand showed up for customers in a fast-moving, price-sensitive category.

After four years in Australia, Sharry returned to Tesco as Group Marketing Director, before moving to the United States to become Chief Marketing Officer at Southeastern Grocers, one of the country’s largest grocery retailers. There, she led marketing through a complex retail landscape, balancing brand building with performance, pricing perception, and customer loyalty across multiple banners and regions.

In 2018, Sharry joined M&S as Marketing Director for Food & Hospitality and has been central to the brand’s modern resurgence, helping to sharpen its voice, accelerate its customer relevance, and strengthen its distinctive positioning in a fiercely contested sector. In recent years her remit has expanded further, including leadership of Sparks, one of the UK’s biggest loyalty programmes with more than 20 million members.

Beyond boardroom marketing, Sharry is also a published author. Her book Win Your Lottery explores the psychology of achievement and the power of mindset, with a particular interest in how people from lower socio-economic backgrounds can build confidence, capability and momentum.

A rare blend of commercial realism and human insight, Sharry brings a global perspective on modern retail marketing: how to win attention, earn loyalty, and drive growth when expectations are high and margins are tight.

Our Guest Panel

Hear from the Sharpest Minds in Marketing

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April Breakfast Briefing
The End Of Bland. Free to attend.
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Tickets

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April Breakfast Briefing
The End Of Bland. Free to attend.
£ 0.00
98 available

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Seniority Screening

Little Grey Cells is a ‘brain trust’. We are unashamedly elite (in the sense of ‘invite only’, for the most senior marketers in the UK) – but not elitist (in the sense of not stuffy, snobby or formal). Our attendees are exclusively of the same level of decision-making marketing responsibility as our advisory board. As a result we screen all registrations to ensure that marketers who attend our events meet this criteria. Thanks for your understanding.

Register to Attend

Enter your details to secure your place as one of our 120 guests.
Placeholder text 98 remaining.

Tickets

The numbers below include tickets for this event already in your cart. Clicking "Get Tickets" will allow you to edit any existing attendee information as well as change ticket quantities.
April Breakfast Briefing
The End Of Bland. Free to attend.
£ 0.00
98 available

Seniority Screening

Little Grey Cells is a ‘brain trust’. We are unashamedly elite (in the sense of ‘invite only’, for the most senior marketers in the UK) – but not elitist (in the sense of not stuffy, snobby or formal). Our attendees are exclusively of the same level of decision-making marketing responsibility as our advisory board. As a result we screen all registrations to ensure that marketers who attend our events meet this criteria. Thanks for your understanding.

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