My Approach: A More Human Model for Modern Marketing

If we were sitting down for the first time to talk about your business, I could probably give you the usual list of things I can help with.

Brand strategy. Visual identity. Content. Social media. Websites. SEO. PPC. Campaigns. Creative production. Marketing strategy. Consultancy.

And, depending on what your business needs, I may well end up doing some or all of those things.

But the individual services aren't really the most important part of how I want to work with you… 

What interests me more is the journey we can build around them.

Because I don't think the best long-term marketing relationship necessarily ends with you paying an agency forever, employing an unnecessarily large department, or remaining dependent on a freelancer to keep everything moving. 

I think there's another model emerging: one that combines experienced human thinking, talented people inside your business and the best parts of modern technology, without inheriting all the cost and complexity of the traditional marketing hierarchy.

Getting there, though, starts somewhere much more familiar.

It starts with me properly understanding your business…

First, Understanding Your World

I believe there are some fairly universal principles behind good marketing. 

People need to understand what you're offering. Brands need to be recognisable. Trust matters. Attention is limited. Consistency matters. Culture changes. And ultimately, marketing needs to help move your business from where it is now towards somewhere you actually want it to go.

Those fundamentals apply whether you're building a personal brand from your spare bedroom, opening your first physical location, running a growing SME or overseeing an established company with hundreds of employees.

What changes are the variables.

And that's why I'd never want our first conversation to start with me telling you what your marketing needs.

We'd sit down and talk about your business first.

I'd want to know where it came from, why you started it, what you sell, why people choose you, what you're proud of, what frustrates you and what you think makes you different. I'd want to understand your customers, your competitors, your ambitions and the things about the company that somebody looking from the outside would never know.

I'd also want to know where you want it to go.

What does the better version of this business look like? Do you want more customers, different customers, greater recognition, stronger positioning, a new audience or simply a company that finally looks and feels as good as you know it is?

I think of this first stage almost like you giving me the lore of a fictional universe. 

If I'm eventually going to help tell stories from inside the world of your business, I first need to understand that world in three dimensions. I need its history, characters, motivations, values, tensions and ambitions.

Because good branding shouldn't be about inventing an interesting story about a fictional company.

It should be about finding and articulating what's genuinely interesting about your real one.

You Set The Destination, I’ll Find The Route

Once I understand the business, I can take all of that information away and start doing the part you're actually bringing me in for.

The thinking.

This is where my own experience, judgement and perspective come into play. 

I'm looking at your business through the lens of the consumer: marketing, branding, creativity, behaviour, technology and wider culture. Then taking the fairly universal principles of good marketing and changing all of the individual variables around you.

The result shouldn't feel like a strategy that's been used ten times before with another company's name replaced by yours.

It should make sense because of where you've come from, where you are now and where you're trying to go.

One of the most important principles behind how I work is that you own the business outcome and I help determine the marketing strategy that gets us there.

You shouldn't need to arrive knowing that you need TikTok, Google Ads, SEO or a rebrand. In fact, I'd rather you didn't decide on those things before we've worked out the problem we're actually trying to solve.

Tell me what you want the business to achieve.

Then let me work out what marketing's role should be in helping you achieve it.

Talking Plain English

Once I've built that strategy, we'd sit down again and I'd talk you through it.

What should we do? What needs changing? What should we stop doing? Where should the business show up? How should it look, sound and behave? What should happen first, and what can wait?

Most importantly, I'd explain why.

I don't believe you should have to blindly trust marketing simply because somebody who works in marketing tells you it's important. If you're investing money into something, you deserve to understand what that investment is supposed to be doing.

That doesn't mean sitting through a lecture full of acronyms, funnels and unnecessarily complicated terminology.

Part of my job is translating all of that.

I want you to understand the logic connecting the business objective to the marketing decision, even if you've never worked in marketing in your life.

The Ugly Part…

Once we've established what the ideal version looks like, we have to talk about the slightly less exciting part.

Money.

There might be forty things I'd ideally like to improve. That doesn't necessarily mean you need to pay for all forty tomorrow.

If budget allows, I could work with you more heavily and personally help build and execute large parts of the strategy. If resources are tighter, we'd prioritise.

What needs specialist attention? What could you realistically do yourselves? What will have the biggest effect? What can wait six months? Where will my time create the most value?

A sole trader and a national company obviously aren't going to have the same resources, and they shouldn't be expected to approach marketing in the same way.

The important thing is simply being clear about the relationship between budget, resources, responsibility and speed.

From there, we can build something realistic.

Getting You On The Map

I broadly think of marketing as two interconnected areas.

The first is brand marketing.

Before we start trying desperately to get everybody's attention, I want to make sure there's something worth finding when they look.

This phase is about understanding what your business is and turning that into a clear, distinctive and authentic identity. Depending on the business, that might include visual identity, brand guidelines, messaging, photography, website, social profiles, sales materials, physical spaces, packaging, presentations or any number of other touchpoints.

The exact list changes.

The objective doesn't.

If somebody discovers you tomorrow, I want them to encounter a company that feels coherent, credible and human. They should quickly understand what you do, what you're about and why they should care.

This is essentially the process of taking the best version of the business that currently exists inside your head and making it visible for everybody else to see.

We're getting you on the world map.

And importantly, we're not creating a fictional marketing persona. We're finding the strongest, clearest and most engaging expression of what you’ve already built.

That work never completely finishes, either. Your company will change. Your customers will change. Culture will change. The outside world certainly won't stand still.

So the brand needs occasional attention to make sure what people see from the outside still reflects what's actually happening inside.

Getting The Word Out

Once those foundations are in place, we can move much more heavily into what I call commercial marketing.

If brand marketing puts you on the map, commercial marketing starts directing people towards you.

Now we're actively generating attention, recognition, interest and, ultimately, business.

That might involve social media, PPC, SEO, advertising, partnerships, events, email, campaigns, content, physical marketing or something else entirely.

Again, the channels aren't the strategy.

A restaurant doesn't need the same marketing ecosystem as a software company. A musician doesn't need the strategy of an accountancy firm. A start-up doesn't necessarily need the infrastructure of a multinational company.

We'll choose the tools because they make sense for your business, not because somebody online said that every company needs it.

Where I’m Different…

At this point, I could simply continue doing the work for you.

And sometimes that might be exactly the right answer.

But I don't think a successful consulting relationship should automatically mean making you permanently dependent on me.

Over time, I'd rather help you build a marketing function that's genuinely sustainable for you.

There's an old saying about giving somebody a fish versus teaching them how to fish.

My version is that, at the beginning, I might do quite a lot of the fishing for you.

Then, once everything is working, I can either teach you how to fish, help somebody already inside the business learn how to do it, or help you hire brilliant people who can fish every day while I stay involved to make sure we're still fishing in the right part of the lake.

That could mean training you or an existing employee to manage more of the everyday activity yourselves.

Or, as the business grows, I can help you work out exactly which marketing people you actually need and help you bring them on board.

And this is where I think things get particularly interesting…

Building a Smarter Marketing System

The traditional marketing structure usually grows into a hierarchy.

You hire a senior marketing person. They build a team underneath them. That team executes the work. More people appear as more disciplines are added.

For some organisations, that structure makes perfect sense.

But it shouldn't be the automatic destination for every growing company.

Today, a small number of talented people armed with the right technology can do an extraordinary amount of work. So instead of automatically building a large hierarchy, we could build the smallest effective internal team your business actually needs.

These are the people who need to be close to the company every day. They're creating, publishing, communicating, optimising and keeping all the plates spinning. They can use AI and other modern tools wherever those tools genuinely make them faster or more capable.

Then I can remain involved from the outside as a strategic marketing and brand consultant.

Rather than paying another full-time senior salary purely to sit above the structure, you bring me back into the room at whatever frequency makes sense for the business and we review everything.

Is the strategy still working? Is the brand still coherent? Has the market changed? Are we moving towards the original objective? Is the team focused on the right things? Are we producing marketing because it's valuable, or simply because we've got into the habit of producing it?

The people inside the business keep things moving.

I help make sure we're still moving in the right direction.

Human Judgement, Modern Efficiency

AI obviously has a role in the future of this world.

We don’t have much choice in that.

So I don't think ignoring it is sensible, and I don't think stuffing every possible job into an AI model is sensible either.

These tools can research, organise, analyse, automate and accelerate. Used well, they can give a very small team capabilities that would've required far more people only a few years ago.

But efficiency isn't the same thing as judgement.

Quantity isn’t the same thing as quality.

Businesses exist inside culture. Brands communicate with humans, and humans are emotional, irrational, nostalgic, tribal, curious, unpredictable and constantly changing.

That's why I still want experienced human thinking sitting at the centre of the system.

The opportunity isn't choosing between the old world and the new one.

It's taking the best parts of both.

Making Myself Useful, Not Indispensable

At different stages of our relationship, my role might look a bit different.

I might initially be deeply involved in strategy, branding and creative production. Later, I might be helping you build campaigns and commercial systems. After that, I might train somebody inside the business, help you recruit your first marketer or work alongside an existing team.

Eventually, the most useful thing I can do for you might simply be to sit around a table every few weeks, look at the business from the outside and help everyone make better decisions.

That's the journey I'm interested in building.

Not selling you the largest marketing package you can afford. Not creating dependency for the sake of recurring revenue. And not replacing human judgement with whatever technology happens to be fashionable that year.

The aim is much simpler:

• We understand your business properly.

•  We work out where you want it to go. 

• We build a brand around what's genuinely true. 

• We get that brand in front of the right people. 

• We create the smallest, smartest system capable of keeping it moving.

• We keep reviewing, learning and adapting as your business and the world changes.

To me, that's what modern marketing should look like.

Thoughtful enough to be strategic. Creative enough to be interesting. Commercial enough to actually work. Modern enough to embrace new tools.

And human enough to remember that, at the end of the day, we’re humans selling to humans.