My advice to owners of fashion brands is that you have to give digital a seat at the board table. A lot of brands treat digital strategy as something on the side.
In a world where authenticity increasingly is in focus, consumers are seeking more than brands who focuses on revenue - consumers want to support brands with a purpose - one that justifies an emotional engagement.
When I arrived in Ford, a decision was made to sell many marquee brands. This was because 85 per cent of the sales were from Ford and Lincoln brands. We were clear that for the company's strong future, we needed to focus on the Ford brands.
I do endorse brands: brands that I believe in individually, brands that I use, brands that I am proud to sell. But I wouldn't do that for my films because that's something I do separately. What I do with my films is something I am extremely passionate about.
I do think that in a digital future, consumers will increasingly turn to brands that they trust. Trust, security, and service are even more important in a digital world.
Building a more compassionate society is going to be a bilateral exercise between individuals and the brands that represent their aspirations, their values and their truths. People make brands. If people are compassionate, brands will be compassionate in return.
Most brands that are called luxury brands today are not true luxury brands. The globalization of fashion and luxury means you now find the same luxury brands in every city. The stores look the same, the products are the same. It is still a very good quality product but it is now readily available to everyone. It's a kind of mass luxury.
Brands are in your face 24/7; I'm sure you've consumed a couple brands today. So it's fun working with them. People recognize brands, and people are starting to recognize my brand.
I think that the strategy around FYI is really a corporate strategy, and that's that every one of our brands that we invest in have to matter and that we need to commit to building brands and investing in those brands, or we need to get out of that business.
I only support cruelty-free brands, and I hope that more brands stop testing on animals because it's just completely unnecessary and barbaric.
I know some brands second-guess working with me because I'm a boy that likes makeup. I think brands shouldn't just appreciate boys that wear makeup, but they should embrace it. And I feel like some brands forget they need personality. I have plenty of it.
It seems like not a lot of the world's issues can be solved by big government. But they can be solved by brands, and brands putting their best foot forward need advertising.
We should tell more young designers not to worry about what they're going to do with their design careers. They should start their own brands. Designers should create their own beautiful brands that can change the world.
I don't think so, in that Virgin is already a global brand. Brands like Amazon have had to spend hundreds of millions of pounds you know, building their brands, whereas Virgin is already well-known around the world.
25 percent of search results for the world's top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. 34 percent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
There are brands out there, plus-size brands, that all they want to do is sell their clothes and be done.