I'm going to say something that might ruffle a few feathers.
The brand education industry, for all its rigour, its landmark research, its frameworks and its premium price tags — has a gap it doesn't like to talk about. It's producing marketers and in-house designers who understand brand theory — but when it comes to the decisions that drive execution, it falls apart.
Brands across Australia have brought creative capability inside, and I understand why. I’ve been witness to the ebbs and flows of this over 3 decades. In-house, external, in-house again, that didn’t work - we are going external again, you get the cycle. But most have hired execution without strategy. Designers without frameworks. Output without methodology. The work gets busier. The brand gets blurrier. Marketing teams continue to be under-resourced and without the practical tools to impact the branded decisions they make.
I've watched it happen up close for over a decade.
I've worked with some of the world's largest brand owners across sectors spanning healthcare, pharmaceuticals, wine, food and tech. From Uber to Arnott’s, I've sat inside every type of marketing team, run their rebrand programs, evolved their positioning, rebuilt their portfolios, and stood in boardrooms defending design decisions where the commercial stakes were real. I know what brand capability looks like when it works. And I know what it looks like when it doesn't.
Right now, in most organisations, it isn't getting better. Marketers are more stretched than ever. In-house design teams often lack the leadership and methods to execute well.
Here's what I keep seeing. The brand education that exists, and there's genuinely excellent content out there, stops at the wrong point. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's work is rigorous and important and should be required reading for every marketing and design team. Ritson gives you the strategic what — positioning, segmentation, planning, architecture. I have enormous respect for both.
But then what?
Nobody teaches the how.
How to write a design brief that produces something distinctive instead of mediocre compromise. How to manage a visual identity system that actually scales across a portfolio and through-the-line eco-system. How to be the custodian with enough confidence to not be railroaded by agency partners who want to create something new because it’s more fun and less restrictive. Don’t even get me started on this type of practice, it’s several bottles of wine and a lot of menopausal rage built up over decades of over explaining to less experiences strategists and creatives who are only now just catching up on what has now become mainstream academic theory. You’re welcome.
How do marketers and in-house designers make the brand decisions at shelf when the retailer is pushing back and the theory isn't in the room with them? How to use behavioural science not as a concept you can reference in a presentation, but as an actual tool in the work, in the decision, in the moment, under pressure.
There's a reason I've spent nearly 30 years distilling this into Edison's own proprietary framework, BrandOrbit™. Brands don't operate in isolation — they operate within ecosystems. You can't create change if you don't understand the system your brand is moving inside.
So that gap isn't a small oversight. It's a structural failure in how our industry builds capability. And the rise of in-house agencies has made it impossible to ignore and has been slowly amplifying the problem.
And then they have their agency village. They come in, want to interpret the brand with their own perspective but without the context of the full eco system. In our work, The Edison Agency leaves behind a brand system and a playbook as well as countless PDF’s with all the theory and thinking but there’s nothing next. Six months later, the drift begins. Not because the work wasn’t wrong. Because the capability to hold it wasn't built alongside it. The confidence to give agency partners enough rope to not stifle creativity, but enough strategic brand DBA (distinctive brand asset) rigour to make choices that improve cut through, resonance and create integrated brand threads that have both meaning and recognition functionalities.
I've had enough of that cycle.
After nearly 30 years I've decided the most useful thing I can do, for the industry, and honestly for the brands I care about, is stop keeping our methodology inside the agency walls. Honestly, I spend a large chunk of my time helping marketers to navigate the complexity of what they have learnt about brand DBA theory and contextualising it with case study examples, practice and research theory.
That's why I'm taking our own in-house Training and Development model, Edison Uni externally.
A practitioner-led education program built on the same frameworks we use every day with the brands on that client list. Not borrowed academia. Not theory from someone who stopped doing the work a decade ago. The actual how. Taught by people in the middle of it right now.
Ehrenberg Bass tells you why. Ritson tells you what. We'll teach you how.
I have been sharing this over morning coffees, and after-work tapas and vino for the good part of the last year (gratitude to all those who have been my guinea pig and sounding board). It seems to have legs but if you lead an in-house brand or marketing team and this resonates, I'd genuinely like to talk. Not to sell you a course. To understand if what we're building actually solves the problem you're living with.
Because I genuinely believe that good brand thinking shouldn't live only inside agencies.
It's time to share it, for the sake of future brand thinkers, makers and managers. To make the work better, sharpen understanding, and stop going around in circles with jargon everyone uses but nobody unpacks. Less veneer. More depth. Please.
— Amber Bonney, Founder & CEO, The Edison Agency
