The Best Marketing Speakers For Corporate Events
3 September 2026
Somewhere, a marketing team is currently debating whether a button should say “Learn more” or “Discover more”. What they don’t realist is that the customer has already scrolled past.
Marketing moves quickly. New platforms appear, consumer expectations shift, AI changes the way work gets done and, just when everyone has finally agreed on the strategy, someone mentions an algorithm update.
That’s where a good marketing speaker can help. They give everyone a reason to step back and think properly about why people choose one brand over another, how businesses earn attention and what the latest changes actually mean once you get past the dramatic headlines.
Whether you’re planning a marketing conference, brand summit, product launch, leadership event or company away day, these nine marketing speakers each bring a different angle to the conversation.
You can also browse our wider selection of corporate speakers and hosts to find the right expert for your audience.
What Does A Marketing Speaker Actually Do?
A marketing speaker talks about the way businesses understand their audiences, build brands and communicate what they offer.
That can cover everything from consumer psychology and brand purpose to influencer marketing, digital transformation, customer experience, emerging trends, and AI.
The right speaker gives your audience a useful way into a topic. They don’t just recap what has already happened or arrive with 74 slides about a vague and abstract term like ‘authenticity’. They help people make sense of what’s changing, question a few assumptions and spot opportunities they may have missed while getting on with campaigns, targets, and reporting.
A marketing speaker might help your audience:
- Introduce fresh thinking around customers, culture and brand strategy
- Make fast-moving marketing trends easier to understand
- Explore how technology and AI are changing audience behaviour
- Help teams build trust and communicate more effectively
- Bring real examples from recognisable brands into the room
- Connect marketing activity to wider commercial goals
- Give guests practical ideas they can use after the event
- Prompt conversations that make a difference
Why Have A Marketing Speaker At Your Event?
They make trends feel relevant
Marketers are never short on trend reports. The hard part is deciding which changes matter, and what any of them mean for your particular customers.
A speaker can filter those shifts through real experience. Rather than generally announcing that AI, Gen Z or the creator economy is important (we already gathered that) they can show how those shifts are changing decisions, expectations, and the relationship people have with brands.
They bring an outside view of your audience
When you spend every day with a product or business, it’s very easy to see it from the inside out. You know what every feature does, why every decision was made and exactly what that mysterious acronym means. Your customer doesn’t always.
A marketing speaker can turn the view around and get people thinking about what the audience actually notices, understands, values, and remembers.
That outside perspective can be useful when launching something new, repositioning a brand or trying to reach an audience that behaves differently from the one in the original marketing plan.
They connect marketing to the rest of the business
A brand isn’t created by the marketing department alone. It’s shaped by the product, the customer experience, the company culture and the promises that the business makes and keeps or doesn’t.
A speaker can make those links clear to a mixed audience, helping senior leaders, sales teams, customer-facing colleagues and marketers understand the part they each play.
They can turn theory into something useful
Marketing has no shortage of powerful words. Authenticity. Community. Purpose. Personalisation.
A good keynote gets underneath the language and shows what those ideas look like when budgets, deadlines and real people become involved. Guests should leave with more than a blurry iPhone photo of a PowerPoint slide; they should have ideas they can actually discuss or test.
They can tailor the session to your brief
The session should fit the room. A keynote for an experienced global marketing team will need something different from one introducing the wider business to a new brand strategy.
That might mean a tailored keynote, a panel, a live interview or a talk followed by an interactive workshop. It all comes back to what you want people to think, feel or do differently afterwards.
What Events Are Marketing Speakers Good For?
- Marketing conferences and summits: Explore the changing industry and give an audience of specialists a genuinely fresh perspective.
- Brand launches and repositioning events: Bring employees, partners or customers together around a new identity, purpose or direction.
- Product launches: Build a wider conversation around consumer needs, innovation and how new ideas earn attention.
- Sales kick-offs: Connect customer understanding and communication with the commercial targets ahead.
- Leadership events: Help senior teams understand changes in customer behaviour, culture, technology, and brand trust.
- Company away days: Add useful outside thinking to the agenda and create a shared topic for different departments.
- Client and partner events: Give guests valuable insight rather than another extended company presentation.
- Internal learning events: Support teams with practical thinking around digital marketing, storytelling or customer experience.
- Panel discussions and roundtables: Add specialist expertise to a focused conversation and invite questions from the audience.
- Virtual and hybrid events: Reach teams across different locations through a keynote, interview or interactive Q&A.
The Best Marketing Speakers For Corporate Events
“Marketing speaker” covers a lot of ground. A retail team thinking about community needs a very different session from a business trying to understand Gen Z, rebuild brand trust or prepare for the next wave of consumer technology.
So, there isn’t one objectively best person for every event. This list brings together founders, futurists, media leaders, a web psychologist and people who have built, launched or transformed brands in the real world.
Rory Sutherland
Rory Sutherland is interested in ideas that don’t make perfect sense on a spreadsheet but work so well on real people.
As Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and founder of its behavioural science practice, Rory explores the gap between how customers are expected to behave and what they actually do. Any marketer who has watched somebody spend three weeks comparing laptops before choosing one because it comes in a nicer colour may understand this.
Using examples from advertising, retail, transport, and everyday life, he shows how small changes in context or perception can transform the value people attach to something. His TED Talk, Sweat the Small Stuff, explores why simpler, less expensive ideas can sometimes solve problems more effectively than the obvious big solution.
His unexpected connections and funny stories make him a great fit for marketing conferences, creative summits, and leadership events looking to challenge conventional thinking.
Popular keynote topics include:
- Behavioural science and consumer decisions
- Advertising, creativity, and brand value
- Finding unseen opportunities
- Challenging conventional business thinking
Bring Rory Sutherland’s thinking to your next event
Timothy Armoo
Plenty of brands say they want to understand Gen Z. Timothy Armoo built a business by helping them do it.
At 21, Timothy, also known as Timo, founded influencer marketing agency Fanbytes. It helped organisations including Nike, Samsung, Deliveroo, and the UK Government connect with younger audiences before being acquired by Brainlabs in an eight-figure deal in 2022. It wasn’t his first exit either: he sold his first business when he was only 17.
Timothy goes beyond generic claims about short attention spans to explore how younger audiences discover ideas, respond to creators, and decide which brands feel relevant.
He suits marketing conferences, social media events, and businesses trying to reach younger customers without treating an entire generation as one target demographic.
Popular keynote topics include:
- Reaching and engaging Gen Z
- Influencer marketing and the creator economy
- New media and modern brand building
- Entrepreneurial thinking
Bring Timothy Armoo’s Gen Z insight to your next event
Nathalie Nahai
Why do people trust one website and not another? What makes an online message persuasive without becoming manipulative? And how can brands protect human connection when more of the customer journey is shaped by automation?
These are the questions Nathalie Nahai explores.
As a web psychologist, behavioural science adviser, and author, Nathalie examines why people behave the way they do online. She has worked with organisations including Google, Unilever, Allianz, Canva, and Harvard Business Review, helping them apply behavioural science with rather more care than “people who bought this also bought that”.
Her human approach to technology makes her perfect for digital marketing conferences and events exploring AI, online influence, consumer trust, or changing customer expectations.
Popular keynote topics include:
- The psychology of online behaviour
- Ethical persuasion and digital influence
- Consumer trust in the age of AI
- Brand resilience and values
Get your audience thinking differently with Nathalie Nahai
Henry Coutinho-Mason
By the time a trend appears in every marketing presentation, Henry Coutinho-Mason is usually looking at the next thing.
Henry spent a decade as Managing Director of TrendWatching, studying changes in consumer behaviour and helping global organisations turn them into practical opportunities.
His keynotes can focus on “the future of” a particular industry or topic, from retail and travel to digital experiences and AI. It makes his insight useful for industry conferences and leadership teams that want something shaped around their sector rather than a quick tour of the latest headlines.
Henry is also an experienced moderator, so he can guide a wider conversation as well as deliver the keynote.
Popular keynote topics include:
- Consumer trends and strategic foresight
- Trend-driven innovation
- The future of retail and digital experiences
- People-first AI strategy
Take a look at what’s coming next with Henry Coutinho-Mason
Holly Tucker MBE
Not every brand begins in a boardroom. Some start at kitchen tables, spare desks, and in the heads of founders who can see something other people have missed.
Holly Tucker MBE has spent her career championing those businesses. She co-founded notonthehighstreet, helping independent makers reach a much larger audience, before creating Holly & Co to support founders through the realities of building a business.
Her talks explore how brands can develop a distinctive identity, create loyal communities, and grow without sanding away everything that made people care about them in the first place.
Being creative and having real founder experience works well for retail conferences, entrepreneurial audiences, and female leadership events.
Popular keynote topics include:
- Building a distinctive, purpose-led brand
- Creativity and innovation in retail
- Community building and customer loyalty
- Entrepreneurship and business growth
Bring Holly Tucker MBE’s colour and creativity to your event
Emma Harris
A brand is only convincing if the experience behind it lives up to the campaign.
Emma Harris spent more than a decade leading marketing and sales at Eurostar, steering the brand through major moments including its move to St Pancras, digital transformation, and continued commercial growth.
She later founded Glow London, a consultancy focused on aligning brand, leadership, and workplace culture. Emma looks at how a business communicates a new direction and asks whether employees and customers can actually recognise it in the way the company operates.
Her humorous, honest, and practical style suits internal brand launches, leadership conferences, and culture events where the people delivering the customer promise need to believe in it too.
Popular keynote topics include:
- Brand culture and purpose
- Aligning employees with the customer promise
- Leading through change
- Sustainable performance and wellbeing
Connect brand, culture and leadership with Emma Harris
Ellis Watson
Ellis Watson’s career has included The Sun, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Greyhound buses, Simon Cowell’s Syco, and DC Thomson. Not a predictable route, but an excellent view of how brands grow, lose relevance, and reinvent themselves.
He began as Marketing Director at The Sun before becoming Rupert Murdoch’s first Head of Digital. As CEO of Celador International, he helped take Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to audiences in more than 100 countries.
Ellis sees brand as more than a campaign or visual identity. It’s a commercial asset shaped by culture, quality, audience understanding, and the willingness to change.
Energetic, candid, and funny, he suits senior audiences navigating disruption, repositioning, or a need to reconnect people with the brand.
Popular keynote topics include:
- The commercial power of a brand
- Brand transformation and reinvention
- Leading through disruption
- Changing audience expectations
Bring Ellis Watson’s take on brands and reinvention to your stage
Dr Alison Edgar MBE
Good marketing gets attention, but somebody still has to turn that into a useful conversation.
Dr Alison Edgar MBE brings the sales and customer-engagement end of the journey into focus. Drawing on 25 years in corporate business and more than a decade advising entrepreneurs and organisations, she explores how communication and behavioural understanding can improve commercial performance.
Alison was awarded an MBE for services to entrepreneurship and business in 2020. Her sessions are direct, energetic, and full of ideas people can put to work.
She’s relevant for sales kick-offs and commercial conferences that bring marketing and sales together around the same customer. Always a useful development.
Popular keynote topics include:
- Sales and customer engagement
- Communication and behavioural styles
- High-performance culture
- Accountability, goals, and motivation
Give your commercial team practical tools with Dr Alison Edgar MBE
Mike Soutar
Mike Soutar has spent a career working out what makes an audience pay attention.
He led some of the UK’s biggest media brands and founded Shortlist Media, the company behind the free titles ShortList and Stylist. Reaching readers in a changing media market required a distinctive brand, a clear audience proposition, and a willingness to question the usual publishing model.
Many people will also recognise Mike as one of Lord Sugar’s advisers on The Apprentice. His work now spans business transformation, leadership, and advising fast-growth organisations.
For media and marketing conferences, leadership events, and founder audiences, Mike connects the initial exciting idea with the less glamorous question of whether it makes commercial sense.
Popular keynote topics include:
- Building audience-led media brands
- Media innovation and adaptability
- Business transformation
- Turning ideas into commercial growth
Bring Mike Soutar’s media and business insight to your event
How Do You Choose The Right Marketing Speaker?
It’s tempting to begin with the biggest name on the list. It’s better to start with the audience in the room and what you want the session to change.
- Your objective: Do you want to explore brand strategy, consumer behaviour, AI, social media, customer experience, sales or future trends?
- Your audience: Are they marketing specialists, founders, senior leaders, commercial teams or colleagues from across the business?
- Their level of knowledge: Will they value an accessible introduction, specialist depth or a challenging outside view?
- The tone: Should the session feel provocative, practical, optimistic, analytical, funny or founder-led?
- The format: Would the speaker work best as a keynote, interviewer, panellist, moderator or workshop leader?
- The wider agenda: What has the audience already heard, and where can the speaker add something genuinely different?
- The takeaways: Do you want practical tools, new ideas, a clearer view of future change or a shared conversation for the business?
You don’t need to arrive with all the answers. Give us the date, audience, rough budget, and we can help narrow things down from there.
We could keep going…
There are plenty more where that came from!
The speakers featured on our website are only a small selection of the talent AOK Entertains can source. If you already have an ideal name in mind, we can approach them on your behalf. If you’re still deciding, send us the details, and we’ll create a bespoke shortlist.
We can also take care of the practical details, including contracts, travel, accommodation and technical requirements! We’re good at multitasking like that.
And if the agenda needs more than a keynote, AOK Entertains can help with the rest of the line-up too. From celebrity hosts and comedians to live bands, DJs, workshops and interactive entertainment, you can count on us to make sure every part of the event works together.
Browse more corporate speakers and hosts or send us your brief to start planning.
entertains@aokevents.com | 020 8222 8420
