In this episode, Jack Ferguson hosts Leigh Anne Cappello, former VP of Marketing for Play-Doh and one of the leaders during its 50th anniversary period, to discuss how scent, memory, and brand DNA combined to create one of the most recognisable brands.

From the Play-Doh perfume release to prescience calendars to the penetration of the brand's scent, this episode is an exploration of what it takes for a brand to stick.

In this episode Leigh Anne discusses:

• Why the Play-Doh perfume product was created
• The considerations that went into Play-Dohs 50th Anniversary
• The numbers behind Play Doh’s distinctive smell penetration
• A product that didn’t have the desired commercial impact because Brand DNA wasn't considered
• How marketers can use prescience calendars for stronger cultural relevance
• Moments of failure are often the strongest opportunities to build lasting customer relationships.
• Design Thinking and its benefits to marketers
• How Play Doh started off as an accidental innovation
• How to utilise Brand DNA and Brand Essence to improve commercial outcomes
• How large organisations can create safe spaces for real innovation (without betting the company)
• Why prototyping, learning in public, and “getting it wrong” often leads to better brand outcomes
• Her unique business model and why she operates that way

Links to Leigh Anne and Jack:

- Leigh Anne's Blog

- Leigh Anne's LinkedIn Profile

- Jack's LinkedIn Profile

- Jack's Website

Links to The Push:

- LinkedIn Page

- Website

- YouTube Page

- Instagram Page

- TikTok Page

Referenced in this Episode:

- Brand Sense by Martin Lindstrom

- Watts Wacker

- Georgina Melone

- Gary Serby

This episode explores disproportionate leverage and how it shows up when immersion is treated as critical brand building work, not a nice-to-have.

Rather than chasing deliverables or premature answers, your hosts examine immersion as a diagnostic imperative, the strength required to defend it, and the consequences of bypassing it.

This episode is co-hosted by Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson and Brand Identity Designer Tutai Marongere.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• Why Tutai deliberately told a client the work would take “as long as it takes”
  
  
• How Tutai did three months of immersion without producing a single output, but then created an output that ended all debate instantly
  
  
• How Jack sees immersion as a way of articulating the unsaid
  
  
• How Tutai believes dreaming about a brand became his signal that the work was finally ready to be done
  
  
• How Tutai sketched a concept on a fogged-up shower screen as the result of immersion, not inspiration
  
  
• How Jack uses recorded customer interviews to reveal truths that transcripts and summaries consistently miss
  
  
• Why both Tutai and Jack believe that “when you know, you know” is a real diagnostic threshold, not a creative cliché
  
  
• Why both Tutai and Jack believe the brand work that lasts is always found in the details

Helpful Links:

- Find Jack on LinkedIn here

- Find Tutai on LinkedIn here

- Visit Jack’s personal website here

- Follow The Push on LinkedIn here

- Follow The Push on YouTube here

- Follow The Push on TikTok here

- Follow The Push on Instagram here

- Visit The Push website here

Christmas is often thought of as a seasonal moment.

In reality, it’s one of the strongest examples of brand heritage and cultural embedding ever built.

This episode analyses Christmas as a brand system. It examines how it formed, how it survived bans, wars, secularisation, and media fragmentation, and why its relevance continues to compound without central ownership, governance, or constant persuasion.

For senior marketers, this offers an opportunity to examine endurance at the system level and understand how meaning persists when channels change, attention fragments, and authority disappears.

This episode breaks down the ritualistic architecture underneath Christmas. It explores the structures that organise behaviour, repetition, and memory over time. More importantly, it shows why brands do not need to invent architecture of this magnitude themselves. They can identify, attach to, and strengthen existing cultural architectures to gain leverage, relevance, and resilience without relying on perpetual novelty or escalating spend.

This episode was hosted by Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson.

In this episode, Jack discusses:

• A clearer way to think about brand heritage as a system, not a story or origin myth
• How Coca-Cola strengthened Christmas’ ritualistic architecture for sustained commercial advantage
• How changing rituals in the West create new points of cultural leverage for brands
• The language and structure that recognises and explains cultural embedding
• Ritualistic architecture and how it creates repetition, memory, and defence over time
• How brands can attach to existing cultural systems rather than manufacturing meaning from scratch
• Identifying where your brand could embed, even without scale, ownership, or permission

Helpful Links:

- Find Jack on LinkedIn here

- Follow The Push on LinkedIn here

- Follow The Push on YouTube here

- Follow The Push on TikTok here

- Follow The Push on Instagram here

- Visit The Push website here

- Visit Jack’s personal website here

References:

https://www.marketingweek.com/mcdonalds-bigger-than-jesus-christ/

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/consumer/explore/brand/Coca_Cola

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Saturnalia

Sol Invictus

Kalends of January

Feast of Fools

Feast of the Ass

Washington Irving

Charles Dickens

Coca-Cola AI Christmas Ad

Haddon Sundblom

The Party Barrel Origin Story fo

Most brands try to eliminate waste.

This episode explains how this approach is limiting.

We break down Positive Wastage, how it shows up in practice, and why it repeatedly drives brand growth, marketing outcomes, and long-term relationships, even when not intentionally planned for.

Your co-hosts are:

- Brand Strategist - Jack Ferguson.

- Brand Identity Designer - Tutai Marongere.

In this episode:

• Jack shares how positive wastage shows up when you build things without forcing outcomes including meetups that weren’t profitable, and being truly social on social media.
• Tutai shares how attending a rain-soaked business event trying to sell logos led to a complete reframe on his entire business creating far greater value than the original goal.
• Jack shares how brand growth often comes from indirect exposure rather than being directly engaged with, using examples like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater soundtracks, Play-Doh’s smell, and default system sounds to explain how salience is driven.
• Tutai shares how a two-minute human interaction on his first day at a job turned into years of client work and ultimately introduced him to Jack.
• Jack and Tutai discuss how being overly outcome-focused kills upside, and how openness and participation creates brand growth that cannot be planned but can be allowed for.

Helpful Links:

- Find Jack on LinkedIn here

- Find Tutai on LinkedIn here

- Visit Jack’s personal website here

- Follow The Push on LinkedIn here

- Find The Push on YouTube here

- Follow The Push on TikTok here

- Follow The Push on Instagram here

- Visit The Push website here

Building your own personal brand as a marketer matters more than ever. It helps you stay respected, protect your career options, and operate with more authority in workplaces that often default to tactics over strategy.

In this episode, brand strategist Jack Ferguson breaks down how to build a personal profile that strengthens your positioning in the job market.

Jack shares:

• The meeting where he’d finally had enough: The moment his internal positioning collapsed and why it pushed him to build his own brand as a marketer.

• How marketing differs from finance, ops and accounting: Closed systems vs open systems, and why marketers navigate entropy, culture shifts and demand cycles instead of neat levers.

• How to shut down “does this tactic work?” questions: Reframes that stop you accepting a frame that undermines your expertise.

• How to position yourself within a company: Building internal buy-in, establishing standards, and preventing others from treating you like an order-taker.

• How to job-proof your career: How to grow your profile and make your personal brand a market signal.

• How the informal job market works: Why 70–80% of roles never hit Seek or LinkedIn, why senior roles are usually filled long before they’re advertised, and what this means for you.

• Why great marketers don’t apply for jobs: How to build yourself into someone who gets the tap on the shoulder.

Helpful Links:

- Find Jack on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackfergusonmymm

- Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thepush

- Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok

- Follow The Push on Instagram here: Instagram

- Visit The Push website here: For Senior Marketers...By Senior Marketers | The Push

- Visit Jack’s personal website here: Brand Strategist + Marketing Consultant — Jack Ferguson

In this episode, host Jack Ferguson breaks down the real drivers of revenue growth by going back to first principles. No tactics worship, just the underlying forces that move product.

He talks about:

- How 28 retail launches helped him isolate the true impact of tactics

- You can grow revenue and still lose market share, and why many brands mistake this for promotional success.

- The danger of trying to compensate for weak demand with better creative or more advertising.

- What marketers should obsess over first, and why understanding category growth is upstream of every promotional conversation.

About Your Host:

Jack Ferguson is an evidence-based brand strategist with 15 years experience in marketing across 25 industries.

Helpful Links:

• Find Jack on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackfergusonmymm/
• Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thepush
• Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok
• Follow The Push on Instagram here: Instagram
• Visit The Push website here: For Senior Marketers...By Senior Marketers | The Push
• Visit Jack’s personal website here: Brand Strategist + Marketing Consultant — Jack Ferguson

Two marketers who never planned to be marketers break down exactly how they fell into the industry. One came through science. One came through life coaching. Both arrived here by accident.

Jack Ferguson and Ben Reeves are this episode's co-hosts.

Listen in to hear:

• How and why Jack lost money on his very first client
  
  
• How a podcaster launched Ben’s marketing career
  
  
• How different Jack found the automatic respect given to marketer's vs those with a scientific background
  
  
• The story behind Ben’s first client and why that business never scaled
  
  
• The moment Jack realised he was a marketer before he understood what it was
  
  
• How Ben ended up in marketing despite having no career plan to do so
  
  
• The challenges Jack faced shifting from scientific, evidence-based thinking to an opinion driven industry
  
  
• Why Ben walked away from hospitality to try life coaching before becoming a marketer
  
  
• How scientific thinking still shapes Jack’s brand strategy work today
  
  
• How a decade across agencies, tech and brand has shaped Ben’s entire marketing worldview

This episode pulls back the curtain on how Ben and Jack both got started in marketing.

About your co-hosts:

Jack Ferguson is an evidence-based brand strategist

Ben Reeves is an experienced ecommerce strategist

Helpful Links:

Find Jack on LinkedIn here: Jack Ferguson | LinkedIn

Find Ben on LinkedIn here: Ben Reeves | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thepush

Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok

Follow The Push on Instagram here: Instagram

Visit The Push website here: https://bethepush.com/

Visit Jack’s personal website here: https://jackferguson.co/

Visit Ben’s website here: https://benreeves.co/

Every marketer has questioned whether this career’s really for them; especially after getting blamed, burning out, or being abandoned when times get tough.

Chanel Clark joins Jack Ferguson and shares stories of being pushed out, made redundant on day one of lockdown, and writing $8 ad copy to survive, before turning it all into The Marketing Club, a 12,000+ strong community that’s kept countless marketers in the game.

In this episode:

- Jack talks about why marketing becomes the easiest function to blame, and how to stay credible when the business turns on you.

- Chanel talks about the moment she was told she didn’t belong, and how that early rejection became the fuel for everything that followed.

- Chanel talks about the humbling months writing $8 ads and risky cold emails that led to her next big break.

- Chanel talks about rebuilding confidence after getting pushed out of roles despite strong performance.

- Jack talks about how “it’s marketing’s fault” becomes corporate code for “we don’t understand our business.”

- Jack and Chanel talk about belonging, rejection, and why the marketers who stay are the ones who’ll reshape the profession.

If you’ve ever thought “maybe marketing isn’t for me,” this one will hit home.

Co-Hosted by

Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson

And

Founder of The Marketing Club and Independent Consultant Chanel Clark

Helpful Links:

Find Jack on LinkedIn here: Jack Ferguson | LinkedIn

Find Chanel on LinkedIn here: Chanel Clark | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thepush

Follow The Push on YouTube here: The Push - YouTube

Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok

Follow The Push on Instagram here: Instagram

Visit The Push website here: https://bethepush.com/

Visit Jack’s personal website here: https://jackferguson.co/

Visit Chanel’s website here: Chanel Clark - Marketing Consultant

Visit The Marketing Club’s website here: The Marketing Club

Follow The Marketing Club on Instagram: Instagram

Follow The Marketing Club on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-marketing-club-au-nz