Six questions. Six bite-sized answers. In this week’s interview, Financial Times’ Consumer Marketing Director shares how performance doesn’t create demand; therefore, brands must build demand before they can harvest it.

Graham MacFadyen: “Know your audience. Everything flows from knowing who you are here for and being rigorously honest about how well you are delivering what they come to you for.”

What myth would you like to bust about marketing?

That we're only interested in the fourth P - that modern marketing is just promoting something someone else has already decided customers want. We've countered that at the FT by pulling specialist pricing expertise into marketing strategy and planning. It's turned previously binary questions, like volume vs value growth, into something much more cake-and-eat-it.

Other than your own - which brand do you most admire and why?

A brand that's smart-without-condescending, serious-but-witty, profit-with-values - that's a hard combination to pull off. The Obama brand circa 2009/10 is maybe the closest anyone's got.

In order to lead a great team, what one thing should any aspiring leader not ignore?

That people do a great job on tasks that they love. Don't get me wrong, we all have to knuckle-down to things we don't love doing it's a fact of life, professionally and personally. But getting people doing more of the things they love and having a diverse, balanced team that love solving different problems always leads to higher quality outcomes in my experience.

FT For the why marketing campaign, Penn Station, New York, January 2026.

Where does your best thinking happen - and why?

Running in the woods with the dogs. Especially when it's almost-raining and you feel like you're in a dank, muffled isolation tank. Sometimes I get to the end and don't recall anything about the route (or where I lost the dogs) if a problem is particularly thorny.

In marketing, what have you changed your mind about?

That performance marketing is a cheat-code for growth. It isn't - it's brilliant at harvesting demand that’s already been created, but it doesn’t manufacture demand itself. Mistake the two and you starve the thing that was actually driving growth.

Which marketing rule still holds, no matter what?

Know your audience. Everything flows from knowing who you are here for and being rigorously honest about how well you are delivering what they come to you for.

A strategic marketing leader with a track record of fixing things: negative subscriber growth at the FT in 2007; digital audience decline at the British Library in 2011; and putting trust at the heart of FT marketing today.

Tim Healey listens, learns, and synthesises real-world best practices from hundreds of marketing professionals and presents them in these weekly interviews for MAD//Fest. Tim’s Little Grey Cells Club is a trusted, no-sales, peer-driven network where senior-level marketing directors unite to confront challenges, and drive leadership forward.