Winning awards in the time of Covid

Last night, it really did come home. And not just England reaching the final of Euro 2020(1) by seeing off Denmark in extra time. 481 days after taking my last train – back from a great ‘lunch and learn’ with an agency in central London on Friday 13 March 2020 – I boarded the largely-empty, […]

Welcome to the world, “How To Be Insightful”

How to be insightful by Sam Knowles

Today, Tuesday 26 May 2020, marks the official publication date of my new book – How To Be Insightful: Unlocking the Superpower that Drives Innovation. As the world blinks and thinks about recreating and re-establishing itself in the wake of the first global pandemic of the age of globalisation, we have never needed more urgently the […]

5 brilliant reasons why #ThisGirlCan

On Saturday, my gorgeous, gutsy, sassy wife took her Lewes Ladies veterans football team to Southampton to play in the first round of the FA People’s Cup. They played six, won four, drew one, lost one. Runners up on the day, and through to the next round in March. I couldn’t be more proud. Lewes […]

Timeout: the key to killer ideas

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I was impressed to read last week of a bold initiative from ad agency Wieden + Kennedy. The agency – or at least the London office of W+K – has banned email in the evenings and weekends, and meetings can only be booked between 10am and 4pm. They’re doing this because – in the words […]

Why storytelling matters to business more than ever

The maxim ‘content is king’ has been so overused by the marketing and communications community since it was coined 20 years back that it has attained cliché status. Everyone parrots it, it’s accepted as a truism, and as such it doesn’t trigger urgency or action in those who say or hear it. Like a children’s playground […]

How to motivate behaviour change

A version of this blog first appeared in the pages of B2B Marketing, posted online here. This is the first in a regular, quarterly series linking psychology and marketing, flying under the banner of I’m Still Thinking. Thanks for the platform, which I’m sharing with two other marketing psychs. Details to follow. — Marketing communications […]

How your words shape what people think about you

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Words are powerful things, and it’s in your gift to use them to shape what others think about you. More than that. It’s your responsibility to do so. This is true of companies, of brands and of organisations, every bit as much as it’s true of people. Because what are these institutions if not collectives […]

Why good writing matters

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Founder & MD of Insight Agents, Sam Knowles, pens a personal paean to Steve Pinker, Harvard psychology professor, one of the most accessible serious scientists to have crossed over into the mainstream without compromising his academic integrity. In the process, readers lucky enough still to take their summer vacation get a top tip for holiday […]

Which party deserves my vote?

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It’s the afternoon after the night before. Paxman attacked Cameron on policy, Miliband on personality (that “Are you alright, Ed?” jibe on camera was beneath Paxo, though Ed’s riposte “Yeah, are you, Jeremy?” gave it the contempt it deserved). And Kay Burley? The Twitterverse has said enough about her partiality. But are we any clearer […]

Strive for conscious competence in every sentence you craft

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Fresh threat of Newspeak as General Election verbiage piles up   Simple, clear words are attractive. The obfuscatory lexicon is to be avoided at all costs. Which sentence do you prefer? My trade is that of the corporate storyteller, helping companies and brands to find their why; to express what it is that makes them […]