There's a moment in every branding project, usually somewhere between the third workshop and the first decent espresso of the afternoon, when the real story surfaces. Not the one in the brief. Not the one the board signed off on. The one that's been hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to pay attention. Finding that story is what I've spent the better part of 30 years doing.
But here's the thing most agencies won't tell you: you can't find a story you haven't lived. You can study culture from the outside, repackage it as insight, put it in a deck with a proprietary framework and a trademark symbol. The work will be hollow, and the market will eventually notice. The brands that last are built by people who have participated in the culture they're building for. Not observed it from a trend report.
That conviction runs through everything I do. Underneath it sits something more fundamental: a fascination with people. Their humanness, their behaviours, the curious gap between what they say they want and what they actually reach for. It's the curiosity that made me realise Campari's bitterness isn't a problem to solve; it's the entire brand. Nobody loves it on first taste, and that difficulty is a form of desire. The aperitivo doesn't work because of the drink. It works because of the ritual: the 5 pm pause, the theatre of the pour, the permission to slow down. Remove the friction, and you remove the magic. The interesting question is never how to make something easier to love. It's why the difficulty makes it more lovable.
I've always believed that if you understand people deeply enough, the brand strategy isn't something you invent. It's something you uncover.
I'm Leigh Banks, co-founder and branding director of Spinach Branding, a London consultancy I run alongside Adam Thomas, formerly creative director of the iconic, much-missed Class magazine and, to this day, the person most likely to spot a typeface misuse at 40 paces. We set up Spinach with a straightforward belief: that brands built on cultural insight and honest storytelling will always outperform those assembled from mood boards and good intentions. Three decades on, the belief holds.
We've worked with Campari on advertising rooted in the alchemy of the aperitivo, not the sanitised version every drinks brand defaults to. We built the placemaking identity for Barking Riverside, one of Europe's most ambitious urban developments, where the conventional brief would have been to brand a housing project. The real problem was more interesting: how do you create the conditions for belonging in a place that doesn't exist yet? The answer wasn't a logo. It was a placemaking philosophy that shaped everything from signage and wayfinding to the cultural character of the streets themselves. Knight Frank, Gordon Ramsay Restaurants, The Berkeley Group, Chotto Matte, Cowshed, Maze Row. The roster spans hospitality, wine and spirits, food and drink, property and luxury lifestyle. Sectors where brand experience isn't a line item but the entire proposition. If your customer can taste it, stay in it, live in it or drink it, we're in our element. Not because we've studied these industries, but because we've worked inside them.
Much of what I do sits in a room most branding agencies never enter: the merger table, the brand architecture review, the workshop where a leadership team has to decide which brands carry real equity and which are inherited baggage nobody has questioned. This is where brand strategy becomes a structural intervention, the kind that saves a business millions by avoiding the costly rebrand everyone assumed was inevitable, simply because someone asked the right question early enough. I consult personally with founders and leadership teams because this work doesn't survive delegation. The decisions are too consequential, the politics too nuanced, and the difference between the right architecture and the wrong one is usually the difference between a portfolio that compounds value and one that quietly cannibalises itself.
Why the route matters
My path into branding is unusual, and I think that's the point. I've always been drawn to the entrepreneurial side of this industry. Not just the thinking but the building. That restlessness shaped a route no careers adviser would have recommended, but one I wouldn't trade for a conventional alternative.
Before any of the consulting, there was a Marriott Hotels graduate placement scheme. Time working in Michelin-starred kitchens, neighbourhood bistros, trattorias and large-scale events companies. I didn't study hospitality brands. I prepped the mise en place, worked the pass, understood service culture from the inside. You learn things on a kitchen floor that no positioning framework will teach you: how people behave under pressure, what separates good service from performance, and why the things that look effortless are the ones that took the most discipline to build.
That instinct for following the next thing that felt alive took me to Central Saint Martins to study Photography, which taught me more about seeing than any strategy document ever has. It drove me to build businesses, take risks and learn from sectors most branding people never set foot in. The formal credentials came along the way. An MBA in Brand Management, Fellowship of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Digital Marketing at London Business School, a BA in Hospitality Business Management and a Diploma in Culinary Arts, the only one where I earned the right to use the word "craft."
It's a CV that resists categorisation, which is why it works. The photography sharpens the brand strategy. The culinary training feeds the sensory vocabulary. The hospitality years built the cultural instinct. And building businesses from scratch taught me more about commercial rigour than any textbook. The current orthodoxy rewards specialists: strategy people, creative people, digital people, each in their lane. My career is an argument against that. The most interesting solutions come from the collision of disciplines, not the isolation of them.
On the page
Somewhere along the way, the consulting work developed a publishing habit. Together with my wife, Nargess Banks, I co-wrote The Life Negroni and The Life Champagne, both published by Spinach Publishing, drawing on the editorial expertise that Adam, Nargess and I have built between us. Add La Vita Campari and you have three books exploring the culture, craft and characters behind drinks that have shaped how the world socialises.
These aren't brand exercises with a publishing deal attached. The Life Negroni became a collector's item, and more importantly, it proved a methodology. Most agencies pitch for clients. We built a cultural artefact independently, one that people wanted to own and be part of, and the clients came to us. Campari hired Spinach not because of a credentials deck but because we'd already demonstrated we could create something with cultural weight. Build the world first. The commercial opportunities follow.
I also serve as Editorial Director of VOICES, a wine culture magazine we created for Maze Row Wine Merchant. It takes its subject seriously without ever taking itself too seriously, which is how I feel about most things worth doing.
Other ventures
Spinach wasn't the first thing I built, and it won't be the last. I founded Banksthomas, a digital marketing agency, and Moderno, an events marketing business. I also partnered in the launch of Peracto Solutions, a Microsoft Business Solutions consultancy that became Crimsonwing Plc before being acquired by KPMG. A long way from Negronis, but it gave me a front-row education in corporate governance, organisational politics, structure, systems and process. How large businesses actually function beneath the brand. The kind of knowledge that never appears on a mood board but changes everything about how you advise a client.
Each venture sharpened the same instinct: that building a brand and building a business are, when done properly, the same discipline.
Recognition, speaking, judging
Our work has picked up multiple awards for business strategy and cultural marketing, including recognition for the Barking Riverside placemaking strategy, Campari advertising and Knight Frank. I mention them not because awards define the work, but because occasionally they confirm you weren't imagining things. I speak regularly on branding and marketing, mentor emerging talent and judge industry awards. The conversations in the corridor are usually more useful than the ones on stage.
Why this site exists
Too much of what passes for branding thinking today is performed expertise. Beautiful decks, proprietary terminology, purpose statements that move nothing commercially. The industry rewards polish over substance, and I think it's worth pushing back against that.
This is where the longer thoughts live. The ones about branding, culture, ideas and the kind of strategic thinking that doesn't compress neatly into a LinkedIn carousel. The most powerful brands are built where cultural participation meets commercial rigour, and the meaning should be inherent in what a brand does. Not bolted on as a manifesto.
For brand expertise, speaking engagements or a conversation that goes somewhere interesting: leigh@spinachbranding.com5 pm
Bring It On is an independent publication launched in April 2026 by Leigh Banks. If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Your subscription makes this site possible, and allows Bring It On to continue to exist. Thank you!
Access all areas
By signing up, you'll get access to the full archive of everything that's been published before and everything that's still to come. Your very own private library.
Fresh content, delivered
Stay up to date with new content sent straight to your inbox! No more worrying about whether you missed something because of a pesky algorithm or news feed.
Meet people like you
Join a community of other subscribers who share the same interests.
Start your own thing
Enjoying the experience? Get started for free and set up your very own subscription business using Ghost, the same platform that powers this website.