From Sky to Solo: Believe in Better and Everything After

What does 20 years in marketing actually look like — honestly? Steven Doherty has worked at Sky, Discovery, Standard Life and abrdn. He launched "Believe in Better" — a positioning line still running 18 years later. He helped land a three-year Andy Murray sponsorship deal. He delivered a multi-million pound global rebrand from a one-page CEO slide in under six months. On paper, it looks like a career that went exactly to plan. In this episode, we go past the paper version. Steven talks about what it actually felt like to navigate a major public rebrand from the inside, why he took a career break after more than a decade in FTSE 100 financial services, and what the transition from leading large teams to running your own independent consultancy really looks like, the adjustment nobody warned him about. We also get into the stuff he knows deeply, brand measurement, the agency vs in-house debate, where AI sits in brand strategy right now, and why the industry still hasn't cracked marketing effectiveness. This is the version that didn't make the CV. Still loading. Just like the rest of us.