A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King

Introduction

By Jeremy Bullmore

 

 

It’s impossible to accept that one’s grandparents were ever young. Rationally, we know they must have been, but all personal experience suggests otherwise. I’d certainly never attempt to persuade my own grandchildren that I was once a frisky teenager: they’d look at me very strangely.

In this book, a number of respected and current marketing practitioners have written excellent commentaries on selections of Stephen King’s most perceptive articles. He’s consistently described as prescient, intellectually rigorous and possessed of great clarity of thought and expression: a theoretician whose theories were all intensely practical, a giant in the world of marketing and advertising. All absolutely true. As the co-inventor of account planning as a distinct discipline, his benign influence has touched tens of thousands of people he’d never met. He was widely held in awe, no more so than in India, where they think more intelligently about advertising than just about anywhere else in the world. An invitation to hear him speak to the Delhi Advertising Club in 1992 reads in part, “ . . . advertising has many gurus, many professors, many geniuses and many mavericks. But only one King.”

When you read his collected articles in this book, you’ll agree that every tribute has been well earned. He’s all the things they claim for him. The only thing that’s missing – and inevitably so – is more than a glimpse of the man himself. Just as we find it impossible to believe ...