BRANDING | The Master Goes Back to His Roots

My photo of Paul Walton on one of his frequent visits
to New York. He resides in Oxford.

June 3, 2018 – Paul Walton has an international following as a branding expert. He matriculated at Brasenose, Oxford in 1974, 12 years after I went up at Trinity. (In a tribute to Trinity, he named one of the craft beers at his Shotover Brewery after the college.) He read History, and then went into advertising, and did well at it.

He understands the thread of Identity Display (ID), from the ancient symbols on the battlefield by which friends and foes identified one another, to the exotic heraldic emblems by which jousting knights played at warfare before their fans, a kind of voluntary Gladiators tournament.

The closest modern equivalent to jousting, other than reenacted jousting tournaments themselves in places like Canada and New Zealand (don't watch this YouTube clip if you are squeamish), would be one-on-one contact sports like boxing. But the knights had a regional following the way football teams do so the collective spirit around the lists might be more akin to an international football game.

Paul has recently gone back to his roots to write a book last year about the school he attended, St Mary's in Wales. It is called Marians on the Mawddach, Marians being the name for students at his school, and the Mawddach being the nearby river, oops, estuary. The History faculty at Oxford recently posted an interview with Paul here:
https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/the-uselessness-of-history-historian-engineer-brand-man. A worthy tribute to a scholarly gentleman who hit some home runs in the branding business.