David Kelly

I just had a week away from it all. It gave me some time to catch up on a bit of reading – the highlight of it was an impulse buy in the airport: “A Book About Innocent“.  If you’re interested in starting a business, or seeing how a successful brand is built, I’d highly recommend it.

The book is the story of how innocent drinks started up, built their brand and expanded their markets & range (now selling about 500,000 bottles a day). If that sounds a bit dull, the book is really well written in a conversational tone (keeping in line with the innocent brand image), and is both funny and entertaining.

I’ve always admired innocent’s brand image – there is always some humour behind their packaging, and the company is socially responsible – they donate a percentage of profits to charity, and use sustainable methods throughout their supply chain. Seeing how they came to that point in the book was really interesting. They have a great attention to detail (ever look at the bottom of one of their bottles or read the labels?), an interesting approach to market research and a great appreciation of how to listen to their customers. Some of it also gave me some good ideas for my own work – for example – they discuss how they got around having no marketing budget to promote themselves starting out.

There’s a video below that gives an overview of the company (and covers some of the stuff that’s in the book):

Well worth a read (their drinks are pretty nice too!).