The (sometimes) painful birth of innovation

In this piece Mark Mangan, CEO of Flavorpill, follows on from Richard’s and his Virgin colleagues’ posts on Business Stripped Bare, and shares his experience in branding and innovation.
A few months back, as Wall Street began to implode, online advertising was getting hit along with everyone else, and soon our company was in near crisis [...]

Virgin’s recipe for business success

I’m Jayne-Anne Gadhia, Executive Chairman of the Virgin Money group of companies, and would like to jump in here following Richard’s last post on what Virgin does.
There are many ingredients that go into Virgin’s recipe for business success. In fact Richard’s new book, Business Stripped Bare, discusses some of these key factors - people, brand, [...]

What Virgin does…

I’m not good at theory. Almost everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned by doing. However, Muhammad’s opinions excite me. They confirm a lot of the gut feelings I’ve developed about business over the years. And topping my list of gut feelings is this: business has to give people enriching, rewarding lives, or it’s simply not worth [...]

Still learning with Virgin

In response to Richard’s post on Learning From Mistakes, I’m really glad that Richard believes that blame and recriminations are pointless, otherwise I think I would have been bollocked several times over!!!
People often ask me what’s it like to do my job, be in charge of the world’s most exciting brand, and my usual reply [...]

The Virgin Money brand in the US

In Business Stripped Bare, Richard tells us about the strength of the Virgin brand in the UK and how Virgin Money’s negotiations to rescue and rebrand Northern Rock made headline news for weeks. But in the US, it’s not immediately obvious to most Americans that Virgin is a brand that should be in the [...]

The innocent brand

I’m Adam - a co-founder of innocent drinks and I wanted to join in Richard’s discussion about branding.
People say the most important thing with innocent is the brand. But you’ve got to start from the very beginning. In fact the most important thing is the product - it’s our smoothies. It’s the fact that they’re [...]

The Virgin brand

To add to Richard’s post and Catherine’s post about the strength of good branding - I agree that, very simply, branding is a promise to a customer about goods or services. A good brand needs to say what is it, how will it work, what the cost is and what its value is. Conveying [...]

Marketing the brand

I’m Catherine Salway and I’m Global Brand Director for the Virgin Group. Branding is my life’s work and it’s quite difficult to capture what it is in just a few words but I wanted to add to what Richard has written in his post Brand - Flying the Flag.
The brand is a promise to the [...]

Brand – flying the flag

I come from a line of lawyers. My father was a barrister in the English legal system. I was probably the first in a number of generations not to go into law, but I understood the value and importance of protecting a good name. We have nailed Virgin’s colours to the masts of many businesses, [...]

My name is Nathan and I’m an Obamaniac

So I still haven’t read Business Stripped Bare yet. We are getting some copies in next week for the team here at Virgin Mobile Canada. As the pack is addressed to me I’ll make sure I grab one hot off the press or the boat or wherever it has come from. I’ve heard that a [...]