16 A MODEL BRAND, A MODEL
BRAND MANAGER

Model, Actress, Presenter, Businesswoman and Pin-up she may be but Kelly Brook is much more than just a pretty face, she is a brand manager par excellence; and the brand she manages is the Kelly Brook brand.

Interviewed for The Sunday Times magazine she explains, “Ultimately,I’m not Kelly Brook, I’m Kelly Parsons.” Parsons was the surname she was born with but which she dropped at 16 as her glamour modelling career started to take off. “Kelly Brook is this thing I’ve created, it is me, but it’s not me.

“I sat down one day and wrote down everything I thought I would love in my fantasy life. If I wasn’t Kelly Parsons, who had to pay the mortgage and get the train, if I was Kelly Brook all the time, what would that life be? Where would I live? What car would I drive? Where would I go on holiday? What make-up would I like? I wrote lists and lists.

“Then you give it to these branding people and they create this whole world. Once you’ve got that model and you understand what this brand is, what type of girls are going to like the brand, what the demographic is, you can start thinking what products feed into that.”

So what was on those lists? “Polka dots, gingham, Marilyn Monroe, flowers…Being natural – I didn’t do eyelashes or anything like that. I’m naturally booby, I’ve got naturally big hair.”

Like most good brand managers she paysattention to detail, constantly demands the quality she wants and is rightly passionate about her brand.

“You know that English mentality of ‘Oh, that’ll do’? That frustrates the hell out of me. I can get really upset about things that haven’t been named correctly or colours that weren’t what I wanted. I can be a spoilt brat, really. I get so passionate about stuff. Maybe sometimes the people here [at New Look, the fashion retailer she has been working with since 2012]

think, ‘Oh, God, she’s a nightmare’, but that’s because I care.”

And the moral is that every brand needs a passionate brand manager. Are the people working on your brand really committed to it?