Making Your Marque

James Espey has put together a highly entertaining and practical guide to ‘making your marque’ in business. He is particularly well qualified to offer advice on this subject, having made his own mark as a top executive in a string of drinks companies, marketing brands such as Smirnoff, Baileys and Chivas Regal.

James made his mark on my own career when I worked with him in the mid-1980s. At that time he was the archetypal bold marketing leader. He led from the front and, like Henry V before the battle, he could be mixing with the troops late at night in the bar before the big sales conference and still be up on the platform at 8.30am, energetically pointing us toward the enemy guns.

He was an early exemplar of the now popular ‘fail fast and fail early’ principle. We all learned from his mistakes, like the mint chocolate liqueur Greensleeves, and we all took credit for his successes – like Malibu.

An older and wiser James now offers ‘100 tips to build your personal brand and succeed in business’, and I can thoroughly recommend them to marketers at all stages of their career, from their first job through to ‘going plural’. In characteristically pithy style, James offers great soundbites on managing cash, marketing intrinsics and extrinsics, firing and being fired, and how to be a good non-exec.

He also offers a great list of quotations that will enhance any speech or presentation. The book is interspersed with vignettes from his career, including a particularly good description of the surprising origins of the brand Malibu. This story alone makes the book well worth buying for anyone in the drinks industry. My one regret is that James is not able to tell us more true stories of some of the characters that he met along the way, such as his dealings with Ernest Saunders, and there are times when I feel that the older Espey is now extremely sensible, but perhaps less fun than the young, swashbuckling leader I knew. But to get at the true stories that lie behind the advice in this book, we need to invite James to address one of our meetings live and off the record.

I look forward to seeing you there. And if you haven’t bought one already, James will certainly sell you his book.

This review was taken from the June 2014 issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.

We are hosting a legendary lunch with James on Friday 15 August in Edinburgh. To find out more visit our Events Gallery.