From Tesco own-brand and British Gas to Boots and Lego, Coley Porter Bell has straddled packaging and corporate identity for nearly half a century.
CEO Vicky Bullen, who joined in 1995, explains how optimising its position in WPP, changing with the times, and staying relatively small have helped the agency survive.
Coley Porter Bell CEO Vicky Bullen
How did Coley Porter Bell begin?
It was a breakaway from Fitch, where Jim Coley, Colin Porter and Sally Bell had been brought up by Rodney Fitch thinking about brand.
They set up in 1978, with Coley and Porter leading creative, and office manager Bell doing everything from finance to client service.
Their original clients, Guinness and M&S, came with them from Fitch.
Sadly Coley, who had been ill with a brain tumour, died in 1980.
In the 1980s, the economy peaked and troughed. How did that impact the business?
At the beginning of the decade, the economy was booming and design was growing up – shifting from being somewhat of a craft business to a professional service, and importantly, from going from design to brand.
CPB began to grow fast. CEO Jan Hall was a marketing and new business dynamo, and she took the agency from small to medium-sized in the first half of the 1980s.
Big FMCG wins came along like Tesco – the largest ever own-brand rebrand, we believe. The agency scaled rapidly to deliver that project, and it led to a 10-year client relationship.
Coley Porter Bell’s work for Tesco own-brand
But towards the end of the decade, when there was concern that another recession was heading down the tracks, the team felt they needed to be part of something bigger to weather a storm. So they started talking to potential buyers.
A conversation with Sam Sampson, who had sold Sampson Tyrrell to WPP in 1986, led to us being bought by WPP in 1989.
This was a time when agencies were being snapped up by the big networks. How did being part of WPP impact on the business?
Soon after joining WPP the recession hit, so growth was sluggish.
However, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell took a keen interest in the new acquisition, and often made introductions to the CEOs and marketing directors of WPP clients, which was a real boost for business.
And Porter and Hall worked hard to meet their WPP counterparts, to look for opportunities.
By the mid-1990s, the leadership team, under new CEO Helena Rees, was starting to have differing opinions about what kind of business they wanted CPB to be.
A few years later, Simon John and Stephen Franks, who joined as group creative directors in the early 1980s, left to set up their own things.
When you’re part of WPP, you’re expected to grow, and that’s absolutely fair enough. We need to give a return to our shareholders.
It wasn’t that John and Franks didn’t want to grow, but they wanted to stay more of a boutique size.
How did CPB boost its reputation for corporate identity work?
A pivotal win was British Gas in 1993, which had been privatised. At this time, corporate identity was all about the logo, and brand wasn’t a word that was used.
Porter’s team believed that brand was just as important in corporate design as in packaging, and that was quite unusual at the time.
Coley Porter Bell’s work for British Gas
CPB pitched against Sampson Tyrrell and other traditional identity agencies. There was a sense that CPB’s win annoyed the whole industry, because we were seen as a packaging agency.
In fact, we already had corporate work, but British Gas brought more our way, like the Environment Agency and BT.
How did the agency reposition for the future?
At the end of the 1980s, our new CEO Amanda Connolly did an agency reset.
The business had done really well through the 1980s. And there was a feeling in the 1990s of, right, where are we going next?
Connolly commissioned some client research which told us that CPB was seen as the Rolls Royce of design companies – brilliant at its craft, top of its game, but a bit traditional, part of the old guard, and extremely premium.
I never worry about being expensive as long as you’re delivering brilliant quality. But there’s something wrong with being a bit fusty and dusty.
Coley Porter Bell’s work for Boots
Connolly reframed the offer around strategy and creative. She wanted us to be the agency that dug deep to understand brands. She created the visual planning product, to introduce a new way of thinking about brands.
And she made sure that the business had a very strong strategy offer. We’d always had a strategic approach, but we hadn’t had strategists until then.
To this end, Connolly brought in Beth Barry, ex-EMEA planning director at WPP-owned Ogilvy, one of the sharpest brains in planning, and a really established name. That was a massive coup.
In 1999, we lost our final founding partner, as Porter – who was then chairman – followed Bell and left to set up his own thing again.
By now, CPB was working very closely with WPP-owned ad agency Ogilvy, becoming their brand identity partner.
What impact did working with Ogilvy have?
Connolly was reporting directly into Sorrell, but WPP got so big that it was no longer tenable for one of the smaller agencies to be reporting that way.
We could have reported into the Brand to Design Group – the WPP division that included Enterprise, Landor, Addison, Lambie Nairn and The Partners.
But we thought, if we go in there, everybody’s going to be fighting for the same bits of new business.
Meanwhile, when Ogilvy were talking to clients about brand and brand identity, they wanted to have expert partners.
We thought we’d have a better chance to grow with Ogilvy, because we would have a more global outlook and would be able to explore new business opportunities with its clients.
We didn’t want to lose all our FMCG business, but we felt that we’d become quite FMCG-focused, and quite local.
Coley Porter Bell’s work for Tesco finest
We also felt we needed a US office, so in 2019 we opened in New York. That made a difference, not just in terms of working on US brands, but for global brands headquartered in the UK, I think we appeared more credible.
Our founding US-based clients, Merck and Nationwide, were both Ogilvy clients. We have 15 people in New York, so we work in blended teams on the US business.
I joined in 1995 as an account director, and took over as CEO in 2005. I sat on the Ogilvy leadership team and so I knew all these people. I still know a lot of them, which is helpful as it gives us such good access.
What’s next for CPB?
Last year, we moved from Ogilvy into the Landor Group, to become a founding part of a new branding network with WPP branding agency CBA.
This new network, which officially launches in January 2026, aims to be the antidote to the monolithic agencies, offering big agency impact with a small agency vibe.
The CBA network was founded in Paris in 1982 and has about 300 people across nine markets. That’s small compared with Landor, which is 1,300 people, Omnicom-owned Interbrand, which has around 650 employees, and 500-strong FutureBrand, which is part of Interpublic Group. But it will give us more global reach.
Coley Porter Bell’s work for the Post Office
There’s some interesting skill-sets in the network, like a fantastic retail and environment design practice in Paris, and some great consumer insight tools in LATAM, which we’ll tap into.
Just sharing the experience and credentials that this network has will be positive for us.
It’s a great opportunity for our people, because they’ll be working with broader, more global teams, in different markets. I think it will help with attracting talent.
The CPB name will remain, because it has got such legacy.
Design and branding is pretty cut-throat. How has CPB survived for nearly half a century?
I think we’re still here because we’ve always adapted. We’ve tried to stay ahead of the game in terms of what brands need.
From the start, we believed in the need for deep consumer insight to get to the right solution.
And then we understood that storytelling was more important. So we developed those skill-sets.
Then we could see that brands needed to think about purpose, brand experience, sustainability. And we brought in the right skill-sets.
We developed a process to deliver unordinary ideas – that are sticky and relevant, and create distinctiveness in a world where differentiation is hard to come by. We’ve embraced AI, and started creating experiences, like the F1 Paddock Club at the British Grand Prix.
The upshot is a massively broad range of work which reflects that ability to move with the times.
Coley Porter Bell’s work for F1
And we’ve chosen our place in WPP very carefully, moving homes within the network, and changing reporting lines.
We’ve always deliberately been WPP’s smallest branding offer, with about 45 people in London, in contrast to stablemates Design Bridge and Partners, which is 900-strong, and Landor.
Being small in the context of WPP agencies means we have to be resourceful, to reach into the network so that we’ve got the right skill-sets, and to be able to scale up and down.
We have to be collaborative, and clients want that, they don’t want bloat in an agency. They want agencies to be simple, agile, lean and dedicated, and staying small has helped us do that. And being small, our clients get access to senior teams.
How do you think CPB is seen by the industry?
Some people say CPB hasn’t done anything radical for a long time. We have done radical things in the past, like Kotex and the Museum of London, but sometimes it’s not right to do something radical.
You have to be super-respectful of very established brand equities – we’re real guardians of iconic brands.
Championing brand ideas-driven creative work that helps our clients grow is a very clear proposition to go out to market with. And it’s something that we can rally our people behind.
Coley Porter Bell’s work for Kotex
We’re very lucky – our people stay. I’ve been here for 30 years and our production director Peter Cottington has been here even longer. About 50% of my leadership team have been here for more than 10 years.
Also, clients come back to us, and clients who’ve moved jobs come back to us. That’s another important part of why we’ve succeeded.
That makes for a very stable business. We look after each other, we’ve got each other’s backs.
And we believe in each other, which makes a huge difference to a business’ longevity. Because when leadership teams start to crack, businesses start to crack.