Sir Chris Powell was knighted in 2011 for services to advertising. He was a founder of an advertising agency that grew to be the second largest in the UK and regarded as the most influential. From 1985 until 1997 he advised the Labour Party on election strategy.
David Cowan worked alongside Chris as Director of Strategy, pioneering a way of integrating quantitative and qualitative consumer data into the advertising strategy and development process; later generalised to develop strategies for organic business growth.
Both Chris Powell and David Cowan were core members of the team that built the agency (Boase Massimi Pollitt ) up and launched it on the London Stock Exchange.
We thought we might make a contribution by putting our experience of more than 40 years each to some use to help push back against populism. Voters are a special sort of consumer and the ways of thinking and techniques used to understand motivations and how to change behaviour amongst voters is very similar to the techniques used in the commercial sector. Indeed, most of the techniques were invented there.