Why do humans continue to trust other humans despite everything we know about humans? There was once a time when marketing was relatively straightforward. A company would create an advertisement. The advertisement would tell people how wonderful the company was. The company would then wait patiently for customers to arrive. Sometimes customers came, sometimes they…
How a small brand with a teapot can sometimes outperform a corporation with a helicopter. A lot of businesses hope that marketing will work like a lightning strike: one campaign, one ad, one viral post, or one brilliant moment that changes everything overnight. While this idea is tempting, it rarely happens in real life. Most…
Why buying a hammer doesn’t mean you know what you’re building. A common puzzle in marketing is understanding how strategy and tactics relate to each other. Not because the concepts are particularly complicated. They’re actually quite simple. The confusion comes from marketers using these two words interchangeably for years, often making them seem much more…
How to spend a small fortune communicating brilliantly with people who were never going to buy anyway. Marketing has existed for a very long time. Not always in its current form, obviously. Ancient Romans did not spend their mornings optimising click-through rates or arguing about LinkedIn algorithms. They simply painted messages on walls and hoped…
How to learn marketing while pretending you’re being productive on a walk. There are now approximately 47 million marketing podcasts available to business owners. This number may not be entirely accurate, but it feels emotionally correct. Every day, somewhere on the internet, a marketer acquires a microphone, discovers the phrase “Let’s unpack that”, and begins…
Why nobody ever bought anything because of a seven-layer messaging framework. Marketing has a curious relationship with complexity. If you give a marketer a simple idea, enough meetings and presentation slides can turn it into something so complicated that you’d need a glossary, and maybe even an archaeological dig, to make sense of it. That’s…
Why do humans continue trusting other humans despite decades of corporate effort to prevent this? There was a time when companies went out of their way to hide the people in charge. Companies wanted to look polished, professional, and neutral enough to pass any legal review. Founders were supposed to stay in the background, doing…
If your idea of a perfect June involves sunshine, inspiration, typography debates that somehow become emotional, and at least one person wearing a tote bag ironically… then good news: Birmingham Design Festival is back from 10-12 June 2026. And honestly? We’re very into it. This year’s theme is “Change” which feels appropriate considering most creatives…
The slightly disturbing realisation that every marketing presentation contains arrows. There comes a moment in almost every marketing meeting where reality quietly leaves the room. It usually happens around slide fourteen. Someone shares a strategy that sounds convincing. The slides show diagrams, arrows pointing in all directions, and maybe a triangle in the corner. Suddenly,…
The curious case of humans preferring other humans. Many people in business assume that bigger always means better. Bigger budget. Bigger audience. Bigger marketing teams, huge slide decks, and lots of buzzwords like “omnichannel ecosystem.” Still, even with all this size and sophistication, small brands keep doing something inconvenient for big companies: They keep building…