IPA’s Excellence Diploma in Brands -Application Essay

I’ve recently been accepted onto the IPA’s Excellence Diploma in Brands and decided to document the process here for anyone considering the course in the future.

Dubbed the “MBA of Brands” by graduates, the qualification matches 20 candidates with world-class thinkers and cutting-edge marketers for an intensive course that combines classic brand and advertising thinking with business, innovation and technology.

Candidates are matched with a mentor and challenged across imaginative coursework, writing assignments, participating in high-intensity sprint pitches, and delivering public presentations.

Within the application process, candidates were asked to answer the following question within a word count of 500 words.

"If the only constant is change, and the only certainty is that the pace of change is going to increase - what do you think brands and agencies can do in order to innovate and flex to better suit our new business reality?"

During the application process, I was reading Richard P. Rumelt’s highly regarded ‘Good Strategy vs Bad Strategy’ and wanted to try and incorporate his strategy framework of Diagnosis, Guiding Policy, and Coherent Actions, while also drawing on themes from Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’ and the concept of thinking in decades, a process utilised by many great visionaries on their paths to extraordinary achievement.

Here's what I landed on…

“They said that change was accelerating in 1900,” Chris McKenna from Said Business School in Oxford reminds us. “They said it in 1920. In 1940, in 1960, in 1980, and in 2000. So the presumption is that the people who said it before were wrong, but we’re right now.”

In 2025, exponential change might seem certain, as Ai advances, the climate crisis inches towards irreversibility and algorithms continue to shape our world views, however, Chris McKenna alongside Nitin Nohria, the Dean at Harvard Business School, and Professor of Business History Geoffrey G Jones, also at Harvard Business School, suggest the world is not changing as rapidly as people think.

They suggest that change takes place in a series of S curves consisting of periods of flux and volatility followed by paused periods of consolidation, with McKenna claiming “the real work happens in the pauses”. (World Economic Forum, 2018)

Regardless of the rate of change or its suggested S-curve nature, for organisations to prosper, they must focus on the concept of change strategically.

By dissecting change into specific areas such as political, economic, sociological, technological, legal and environmental, we can begin to view how change can lead to innovation and adaptation and utilise change for beneficial outcomes. Frameworks such as P.E.S.T.L.E. analysis should be used by organisations to review the external macro-environmental factors influencing them.

Leading organisations must also create guiding policies for how they analyse and adapt to change, asking regularly whether their proposed responses to an ever-changing world are aligned with their brand, market positioning, and stakeholder ideologies. By doing this, organisations can mitigate risk when adapting to change and increase the likelihood that adaptation and innovation are well received.

We’ve seen many brands misjudge their responses to change, resulting in backlash that could have been avoided by asking these simple questions.

From a brand and advertising perspective, Apple’s ‘Crush’ campaign and Bud Light’s Dylan-Mulvaney collaboration act as recent examples, both addressing change, but failing to do so in a way that was aligned with their brand and audience expectations, resulting in backlash and costly damage to brand reputation.

In the world of business, Blockbuster was a monumental failure in responding to technological advancements and shifts in consumer preferences. While most see the rise of streaming services as the reason for its demise, I’d suggest that the root of the problem was a short-sighted goal that restricted the brand's ability to adapt.

Had Blockbuster established its brand with the goal of getting great movies into the homes of customers worldwide, not only would streaming have presented itself as a path of least resistance towards their goal, but its organisational culture would have likely deterred board members from pushing back against the adoption of this new technology.

Leading organisations should set goals that require thinking in decades, accommodating for positioning relevant to what’s working now, while also acknowledging the fundamental need to be adaptive in an ever-changing future.