Marketing Society Global ChangeMakers Conference 2025: Challenge as an Opportunity
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We were thrilled to be a headline sponsor at this year’s ChangeMaker’s Conference exploring the theme of ‘Challange as Opportunity’.
The UK conference welcomed speakers from the former Chief of Staff to the UK Prime Minister, Lord Gavin Barwell and ITV’s CEO Dame Carolyn McCall, to Who Gives a Crap’s CMO, Emily Kraftman, the new F1 World and Driver’s Champions CEO, Zak Brown of McLaren Racing and Sir Lenny Henry and Richard Curtis from Comic Relief.
The 15 sessions saw these pioneers, pace-settters and purpose-driven leaders remind us that, at its best, marketing connects commercial realism with the real lives of people.
Five key insights from the day
1. Marketing Must Mean Business: The gap between marketing departments and the rest of the leadership team is widening. CEOs want marketers who understand commercial realities, bring customer insights with intelligent action, and sit at the top table driving growth conversations.
2. Challenge is a Choice, Not a Circumstance: The best leaders don't just embrace challenge, they create it. They push their teams to experiment boldly, turn insights into action, and recognise that letting go of what worked five years ago is how you stay ahead.
3. Human Connection is Your Competitive Advantage: In a world where technology evolves faster than ever, and Gen AI transforms every aspect of work, challenge forces us to keep our human skills at the forefront.
4. Community is Currency: Whether building brands, driving change, or tackling social issues, the power lies in community. Success comes from genuine connection, shared purpose, and making people feel they belong to something meaningful.
5. Joy is Not Optional, It's Essential: In fragmented, challenging times, joy isn't frivolous. Joy breaks down barriers, creates positive emotions, brings people together, and gives us the fuel to do great things.
Other highlights
From identifying marketers as Zeitgeist navigators to the power of shared mindsets, the sessions explored challenges as such as navigating geopolitical chaos and challenging leadership and masculinity, and opportunities from the power of music to AI as a creative collaborator not a job killer.
Our top 10 favourite picks of the rest of the day’s insights:
- CEOs Want Intelligent Insight: Real-world insight that drives decisions, not just data.
- Marketers Must Bridge Silos: Marketing can help everyone understand the tangible benefits of a healthy brand.
- Make Your Purpose Your Marketing Budget: Track how impact messaging performs against product messaging. If purpose drives better engagement, acquisition, and loyalty, treat it as a core marketing channel worthy of significant investment.
- Incremental Gains Every Day: Nothing is perfect, but you're always striving for perfection. Even after McLaren wins a race, the focus is on what could have been done better. This creates a culture where "mistakes are okay, just don't make the same one twice."
- Platforms Beat Campaigns: Moving beyond annual campaign thinking to creating year-round platforms. Like Comic relief’s "Laugh" - a social platform powered by joy that transformed Comic Relief's reach and impact.
- Fix What You Know First: Don't try to solve everything at once or dive into areas outside your expertise. Start with your strengths, build momentum and trust there, then expand to other challenges.
- Treat Every Internal Role as Marketing: Customer service is marketing. Product development is marketing. The warehouse is marketing. Everyone who touches your brand shapes how customers experience it - invest in making them passionate advocates.
- It's an "And" Conversation, Not "Or": Don't choose between tech and human connection - you need both. "Everybody thought AI would take over. What everybody missed is you need tech AND emotional resonance, emotional intelligence."
- Presence Matters: Showing up imperfectly is better than not showing up.
- Lead with Resilience and Risk Management: In a disruptive world, you need good risk management for foreseeable challenges and resilience for the unforeseeable.
As the Marketing Society put it, “Challenge is not something to fear or merely survive - it's the catalyst for growth, innovation, and meaningful impact.”
