Jellyfish brand strategist Tom Roach on how KFC and Weetabix threw away their most famous lines, and the awkward job of digging them back out again.
“It’s probably the most brilliant piece of slogan writing or copywriting in ad slogans, if not in history, certainly in the last century, and we weren’t using it.”
That is Tom Roach talking about Finger Lickin’ Good, a line his own team had allowed KFC to stop using in the UK. Tom is VP of brand strategy at Jellyfish and he spent roughly two decades before that at AMV BBDO, Leo Burnett, BBH and adam&eveDDB. He is one of the sharpest thinkers on brand in the business, which makes the confession considerably more useful than it would be coming from someone with less to lose.
Two of Britain’s best-known lines were quietly put in a drawer
Tom’s mistake is a habit rather than a single bad decision, and it happened twice on two enormous brands.
The first of them was KFC. The Colonel had been dropped, Finger Lickin’ Good had been dropped, and the specific red, white and black combination that made the brand instantly recognisable had drifted. In its place sat a formula for making commercials. Tom describes it as roughly five seconds of insight, five seconds of a family moment, twenty seconds of product demonstration and then a bit of branding at the end. He is admirably blunt about the result.
“We’d got into some really bad habits with the advertising at the time. We’d got into a rut and in fact we ended up losing the business because of this rut that we got into.”
They commissioned research with a company called Decode, which measures brand assets, and found that the things they had stopped using were the strongest things they had. By then the pitch was lost, so a rival agency got to enjoy the rediscovery. That is a fairly expensive way to learn a lesson.
Weetabix went the same way. The line “Have you had your Weetabix?” had sat unused in the UK for around seven years, and research showed it was still the most salient slogan in the category. Bringing it back was the easy half. Persuading everybody internally took considerable effort.
“The agency team were very sceptical because they felt it was backward-looking to go back to something like that, that it was somehow not going to show the agency in its best light.”
Tom ended up as the intermediary between client and agency, and the line did come back. BBH relaunched it in March 2017 with a Jack and the Beanstalk commercial for the brand’s eighty-fifth anniversary, and the new work was better branded and performed considerably better. BBH’s own case study for this kind of thing was called Rembrandt in the Attic, which is a much nicer way of saying you already own the answer and have forgotten where you put it.
What is a distinctive brand asset?
A distinctive brand asset is any recognisable piece of branding that makes your brand unmistakably you before anyone reads a word, and it can be a sound, a colour, a font, a photographic style, a character or a line.
Tom is deliberately broader on this than System1, who tend to talk about fluent devices and appear, as he puts it, quite obsessed with animals and characters.
“They can be sonic things, they can be visual things, they can be ideas, they can be photographic styles, they can be a piece of music or a voice.”
His argument is that the richer your set of assets, and the longer you have spent building them, the more you have to play with. Mark Ritson talks about codes and playing with codes. McDonald’s are the kings of this, mucking about with the arches endlessly while remaining completely recognisable. Coca-Cola have barely changed the bottle in a century, yet have a Father Christmas, polar bears, red trucks and a piece of music they can rotate at will.
The criticism Tom hears most is that this approach produces branded wallpaper, and he accepts that some brands do overdo it. What worries him more is the opposite failure, which is the internal brand police who make consistency an excuse for never doing anything interesting. He wants consistency and freshness, and he is fairly clear that most brands manage neither.
Worth noting how random the good ones often are. Octopus Energy took its name and its logo from the Octopus group it grew out of. Jellyfish got its name from people flicking through a dictionary looking for a word that travelled globally without translation. Tom’s own view is that these are essentially empty vessels you pour meaning into over time, which is either liberating or deeply annoying depending on how much you charged for your last naming project.
Watch the full episode
Watch the full episode with Tom Roach on YouTube, or find every conversation at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk. Tom writes about effectiveness and modern marketing at thetomroach.com and as a columnist for Marketing Week.
B2B sameness is a decision somebody actually made
A good chunk of this show’s audience works in B2B, so I asked Tom how a B2B brand gets distinctive in 2026. Will and I have joked before that every B2B brand is blue, and that tech companies simply copy one another until the whole category looks like a single company with forty logos.
“It’s a mystery to me why B2B always think they’re different from B2C.”
His diagnosis is that B2B marketers talk themselves into sameness. The purchase is more complicated, the committee is more rational, the cycle takes months, and therefore emotion supposedly takes a back seat. The result is a category where nothing is memorable and everyone congratulates themselves on being serious.
The counter-example he reaches for is Salesforce, who borrowed characters straight out of consumer marketing and made a CRM category look like a cartoon. Tom can imagine the meeting where that was first presented, and suspects it either sailed through or caused an enormous fight. He also points out, fairly, that plenty of people at Salesforce still could not tell you exactly what Salesforce does.
The smaller example is better. Tom worked with Grace Kites in the early days of her econometrics business, in a category presenting itself as heavy, sciency, blue and green. They deliberately built the opposite, and called it Magic Numbers.
“You just take all the comms or websites or ads or whatever you want from a category and you stick them on one slide and it becomes very clear what the sea of sameness is in that category, and you kind of do the opposite.”
That is roughly what BBH built an entire agency philosophy on. Levi’s launched black jeans in 1982, BBH ran a poster of one black sheep walking against the flock, and Barbara Noakes wrote “When the world zigs, zag” underneath it. No product shot at all. Levi’s later gave the agency a life-size black sheep, and the whole firm has been calling itself black sheep ever since. The principle underneath is the von Restorff effect, which is the reliable finding that if you put socks in a list of animals, people remember socks.
The funnel was never a model of how brands work
Tom wrote a piece for Marketing Week that ran under the headline calling the sales funnel the cockroach of marketing concepts, and it has aged well.
“These things are really sales aids. They’re ways of helping salespeople structure a conversation, structure their communication.”
His history holds up. AIDA arrived as a structure for door-to-door and telephone selling, and the funnel diagram is usually traced to a 1924 book on bond salesmanship. It then sat quietly for eighty years until Google and Meta needed a simple way to sell a complicated array of ad inventory, at which point it became the standard shape of every media agency PowerPoint deck in existence.
Tom’s objection has nothing to do with its age. It describes forcing people down a chute, when most people in most categories are considering nothing at all until the moment they land in the market. He has published a modified version, and he still does not really believe in it.
“Even then I don’t really believe in the funnel even though I fixed it a little bit.”
I find that admirably honest, and it is the sort of thing you almost never hear from someone who has written the fix.
Nostalgia is doing more damage than AI
We spent a while on AI, because everyone does now. Tom is more balanced than most, worried about junior jobs, unimpressed by the snake oil, but genuinely enthusiastic that this is the first technology revolution in marketing that creative people can pick up and make things with. At Jellyfish his creative department are now asked weekly to go and make something themselves, rather than wait on production partners. The gap between the idea and the execution is closing, and roles are becoming hybrid in a way he clearly enjoys.
On the flood of slop, he goes straight to Sturgeon’s law.
“Ninety-five per cent of everything has always been crap. Let’s try and make the five per cent.”
The volume of the ninety-five per cent will rise. The proportion probably will not. That principle was being taught to him as a graduate roughly twenty-five years ago, by Peter Souter, then the creative director at AMV BBDO.
Which brings him to the thing he really objects to.
“Whenever anybody sounds like they’ve got a nostalgic era in mind, I just would caution against that, because the trouble is we tend to remember the good stuff and forget the really bad stuff.”
We both reference the golden age of British advertising constantly. Hamlet cigars, Flat Eric, John Webster’s Honey Monster and Cresta bear and Hofmeister bear at BMP DDB. All brilliant, all remembered, and all surrounded at the time by a mountain of rubbish that nobody bothered to keep. Tom says his own children watch something that looks like a TV commercial and ask him, “That’s just awful, Dad. Did you make that?” He has to apologise on behalf of the entire industry, which I think is the single funniest detail in the whole conversation.
So the real lesson has very little to do with AI. Before you brief a rebrand, go and check what your audience already remembers, because there is a reasonable chance you are about to pay a great deal of money to replace something you already own.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where senior marketers talk honestly about the campaigns, decisions and hires that went wrong. We publish a new conversation every week.
Somebody is currently building a business case to bin your most famous asset. Go and stop them this week.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
