with Giles Gordon
Giles Gordon spent his career across Mars, L’Oréal, and Dyson before becoming CMO of Creed, one of the world’s most successful luxury fragrance houses. He led the brand through the period that culminated in its acquisition by Kering. Director of MacGregor Black’s Consumer Goods Practice, Emily Robson, spoke with him about working with founders, the discipline of saying no, and why brand desirability is the metric boards still get wrong.
Most executives, when asked what shaped them most, reach for their biggest title or their most visible win. Giles reaches for his mid-twenties, and a lesson about pricing.
“If you’re not thinking like a CEO as CMO, you’re only doing half the job.”
L’Oréal, Giles says, was the making of him, but not for the reason most people would assume. The brand obsession is visible from the outside. What isn’t is what the organisation actually teaches.
“I wasn’t taught or encouraged to be a marketer. I was honestly taught to operate like a managing director. Yes, I was responsible for all the brand and marketing aspects, but really I was as responsible for pricing, for distribution, for logistics, for forecasting, for the P&L. And that stuck with me the whole way through.“
He’s often described as a commercial marketer. He takes it as a compliment rather than a qualifier.
“As a CMO, if you’re not thinking like a CEO in your role as CMO, you’re only doing half the job.”
It’s a frame he’s carried into every role since and one that explains, perhaps better than anything else, why he’s stayed in post longer than most people who hold his title.
“Restraint and patience is a strategy in itself.”
The move from FMCG into luxury is usually described as a cultural shift. For Giles, it was a temperamental one. Mars gave him rigour and data fluency. Dyson gave him pace. What Creed demanded was something harder to develop: the ability to deliberately slow down.
“You learn that restraint and patience is a strategy in itself. And that’s very, very difficult, in fact.“
Giles joined Creed in 2020 to find what he describes as “a very beautiful jewel that just needed to be polished and unlocked”. The instinct to move fast, honed across years in FMCG and then the rapid-growth environment of Dyson’s beauty business, had to be redirected, not abandoned.
“It was very much about pace at Creed, but also knowing what areas you need to be more restrained on, more patient on. And the places where, frankly, I needed to say no to far more opportunities than I’ve ever had to in any other role.”
In luxury, he adds, data still matters, but it has a ceiling.
“When push comes to shove, it’s about instinct. And that’s something I’ve really enjoyed, having that different point of view. I can do both, which is great.”
“It can be quite a lonely place, being a CMO.”
Say no often enough in a room full of people with quarterly targets, and you’ll understand what Giles means when he describes the CMO seat as a lonely one.
“You are that person who’s really there to guarantee the long-term future of the brand. A lot of people around that table are thinking about the next quarter. So yes, you have to have really strong conviction about what’s right and what’s wrong.”
He’s clear that conviction alone isn’t enough; it has to be backed by credibility. He started his career in sales, and that grounding has never left him.
“I am as interested in the daily sales as I am in the long-term brand plan, but I know that the two together play a really, really strong role.”
The relationship that has protected him most in those rooms, he says, isn’t the one most people would expect.
“I’ve always found that having a really strong partnership with the CFO is a really important relationship.”
Across his career, the CFO has often been the person at the table who backed his case, but that didn’t happen by accident.
“I’ve always taken quite a lot of time, formally and informally, to bring my CFO into the good, the bad and the ugly of what’s going on with the brand.”
It gives him the credibility to say no to a distribution opportunity, a brand association, or a celebrity endorsement and have someone else at the table who understands the reasoning before the meeting starts.
“Building a brand is about creating a feeling.”
Giles’ thinking on desirability isn’t a framework he’s developed recently. It’s something he says he would have argued for ten years ago, and that he believes is now more urgent than ever.
“The level of quality around products and services is reaching towards the point of parity. You can’t differentiate yourself necessarily on quality anymore as a brand. So what does a successful brand of the future need to do? We need to be creating a feeling, which creates desirability, which creates a following.”
He’s seen larger luxury organisations begin to formalise desirability as a metric. Most boards, he argues, are still behind
His frustration is partly with the KPIs boards typically ask for. Market share, lifetime customer value, P&L, all necessary, all looking backwards. What he trusts in addition are leading indicators.
“Is there a waiting list? What’s the buzz going on about the brand right now? Because those are the kinds of indicators that give you a feeling for what is happening right now, before it’s too late to do anything about it.“
He’s quick to distance himself from manufactured hype, though. A waiting list should be a natural output, not a target.
“If the right attention is focused on what is that new product or service that’s going to emerge and why it’s exciting to the customer, then the demand will come. It’s a very nice outcome, but based on a really strong plan in the first place.”
“I actually hired a professional historian as the first person in the team.”
Nowhere does Giles’ approach to brand-building look more distinctive than in his first hire at Creed.
“The very first role I hired, I actually hired a professional historian. It might be the first and last time I hire that kind of profile. But the beauty and the depth within that brand with over 260 years of heritage, the richness, the incredible craftsmanship of the generations of the family, how they innovated across history, there was way more depth to it than anyone ever imagined.”
The principle behind the hire was straightforward even if the hire itself wasn’t: heritage has no value sitting in an archive.
“You take those nuggets that are there, and you lift one up and you make it relevant for today, bring it into a really interesting collaboration with a very modern partner that can take the essence of that idea and really explode it into something that’s going to create waiting lists or queues down Oxford Street.”
He found his historian by looking sideways at how ancient gin brands and fine wine houses had done the same thing.
“It’s amazing who you can find if you start to look just beyond your normal blinkered environment.”
“The outcome was not accidental.”
Blackrock acquired Creed in 2020, and Giles is careful not to let the hugely successful result obscure the work behind it. The success came from a specific combination: the right capital, the right timeframe, and the right team, one that was explicitly backed to resist short-term pressure.
“I was part of a very small, hand-picked team that was designed to drive tremendous pace in some ways, but with real support from our backers for restraint and scarcity in others. Because that really was seen as being the magic of the brand.”
That backing gave him room to say no, but it came with rigour attached. His role, he says, was “really quite mathematical” in practice: allocating investment against clear building blocks, reporting honestly on what had actually driven the numbers, and course-correcting when it didn’t land as planned
“The outcome was tremendous top line and bottom line growth. But it was part of a very rigorous approach to luxury brand building. The outcome was not accidental.”
“When your name is above the shop, you have a very different perspective.”
For over fifteen years, Giles has worked directly under three founders: John Frieda, James Dyson, and the Creed family. He didn’t plan it that way, it’s just where the work kept leading. What he’s found across all three is a quality he can’t quite systematise but recognises immediately.
“There is something that really unites all of them, and that is a complete and utter, almost unfathomable obsession with the customer. They will know what that customer does when they wake up in the morning, and the last thing they do before they go to bed, who they hang out with, where they go on holiday. And it’s to an obsessive level. When your name is above the shop, you have a very different perspective to anyone else.”
Working closely with that kind of intensity isn’t for everyone, he adds, and he’s seen capable people struggle with it. What he’s found is that chemistry matters above almost everything else and that founders, despite the reputation, are often more open to challenge than people expect.
“So long as you are very clear on who the customer is and what the product is and can communicate that really well, founders are as open to a challenge as anyone else. They have this innate ambition for success and growth that goes beyond the money.”
What strikes him most, though, is something simpler:
“They are quite agnostic of position. They’re as interested in the points of view of anyone who works in the organisation, so long as they’re founded on some level of credibility.”
“Go and do, and beg for forgiveness afterwards.”
Giles’ view of what a high-performing team looks like didn’t come from a management course. It came from a single piece of advice, delivered at the moment he made the shift from corporate FMCG to the faster-moving world of Dyson.
“I was very used to creating very holistic and comprehensive proposals with scenarios costed out and mapped out. And the piece of advice I got was: go and do, and beg for forgiveness. And that’s something I’ve really instilled in all my teams since then.”
Trust, pace, and a shared sense of mission, those are the building blocks.
“People have got to feel like they can really just go and do. That’s the only way I can describe it. And it can be quite empowering.”
When he hires now, he’s largely screening for something that doesn’t appear on a CV. By the time a candidate reaches him, technical competence is usually a given.
“So in more recent years, what I’ve really looked out for is someone who brings a sense of really strong, positive energy to the room, a really good professional attitude, and rightly or wrongly, a work ethic. It’s those three things that I typically hire on. And within that, I really use instinct.”
“I’ve got loads of things wrong, and I’m much more comfortable with that now.”
The thread running through everything Giles says about leadership is comfort with being wrong, and the length of time it took him to earn it.
“Earlier on, I felt like I had to be really quite defensive.”
What changed was watching the leaders who most impressed him do the opposite: change their position openly when the evidence shifted, and make the people around them feel safe doing the same.
“Those leaders that have inspired me the most have been the ones prepared to change their perspective when a new piece of evidence comes to life. Watching those people embrace that, and make others around them feel comfortable, created a much higher potential for performance.”
It feeds into a broader belief about how organisations actually move.
“I’m a much, much bigger believer in pace and execution of a strategy that is only 70% correct than a 100% spot-on perfect strategy that does not have a level of pace and strong executional detail behind it.”
Precision without momentum, in his experience, isn’t really precision at all.
“It’s a calibration job.”
Asked what he’d tell the next generation of senior marketers about what the role really takes, Giles resists the tidy summary. The truth, he says, is messier and more personal than any formula can capture.
“It’s a calibration job around data, fact, and instinct, knowing when to dial up and dial down, and that’s really only something you get through experience.”
What no one tells you when you take the CMO seat, he adds, is that you’re simultaneously the guardian of the long-term brand and the person everyone expects to answer for the short term. Managing that tension convincingly and consistently is the whole job.
“You have to be very convincing and consistent in order to have longevity. Which is probably why the tenure is quite notoriously short.”
He’s exceeded it. And his explanation, when it comes, is characteristically unshowy: