Light breaking across the Torridon hills in the Scottish Highlands. Photograph by John Paul Photography.
About

Most people, brands and businesses are capable of more than they currently believe.

The gap between what something is and what it could become is usually bigger than the people inside it can see, and closing it starts with seeing that gap clearly, earning trust in what has been found, and building the confidence and capability to deliver results.

That's the work I've built 25 years around, across sport, tourism, PR, account management and senior executive leadership, most of it spent leading brand, commercial, digital, people and strategy at executive level.

Ian Chapman. Photograph by John Paul Photography.
Early career

My early career was in sport and digital media during the dot-com era, building something from very little in a fast-moving, uncertain environment with no precedent to follow.

Tourism

Tourism ran alongside all of it, building visitor experience and hospitality, delivering major events, co-founding a multi-stakeholder initiative to bring golf, whisky and heritage brands together for international visitors, and later formalising the Malt Whisky Trail with its own governance, brand and marketing strategy, bringing competing tourism and whisky interests under one roof.

Gordon & MacPhail

Twenty-one years at Gordon & MacPhail, promoted three times, from Marketing Controller to the company's first ever Marketing Director, trusted along the way by five successive managing directors across two generations of family ownership. The remit spanned brand, commercial, digital, people and strategy, and included leading the company's biggest brand transformation in 130 years.

The thread

All of it built on the same instinct: create something that's never existed before, then help the people around you see what they're capable of.

The approach

My approach is the same in every engagement. Listen first, without agenda. Learn from what that reveals. Then help the people I work with see what is possible and lead them toward it in a way that builds commitment they actually own.

Based in Elgin, Moray · Keeper of the Quaich · Liveryman, Worshipful Company of Distillers
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