My marketing thoughts, my marketing projects and anything in between. Since that £150 logo project to now, my journey in marketing, always learning. 20 years and counting in marketing working with small, medium and large businesses. Get in touch today - info@nutsaboutmarketing.com

The final advert can complete a sale without being responsible for everything that made the customer likely to buy. Marketing attribution often rewards the last visible touchpoint while ignoring the load of memory, experience and familiarity already sitting underneath it. The last interaction gets the applause A customer decides they need running shoes, searches online, clicks a paid advert for a familiar sports brand and buys twenty minutes later. The analytics platform reco

This week I started the Mini MBA in Marketing with Mark Ritson, and it feels slightly strange writing that after working in marketing for more than 15 years. Notepad out, headphones in, I have taken to my home office in the evenings and tried to make sense of it all. I've run my own marketing business since 2015, worked in-house at small and large businesses, worked with football clubs, created websites, events, sponsorship, digital campaigns and worked with plenty of busines

A recent story about the amount Ceredigion County Council is taking from parking charges on Aberystwyth promenade sparked the sort of reaction you would probably expect. People argued that charging for parking would push tourists away, reduce footfall and ultimately cost local businesses money. Maybe it does. But I am not convinced we should simply accept that as fact without asking a few more questions. I live locally, I shop in Aberystwyth and I know the town well. I also u

One of the easiest traps in marketing is deciding what we think the answer is, then going looking for research to prove us right. It happens all the time. A new product idea gets everyone excited, a campaign concept gets senior approval, or a customer journey is redesigned because internally it feels cleaner and more logical. The problem is that customers do not see the internal logic. They do not care that your new system brings three databases together, makes reporting easi

You may spend forty hours a week thinking about your organisation. A customer may give it forty seconds, and that difference explains a surprising amount of bad marketing and frustrating customer experience. Customers see a simplified business Inside an organisation, everything has detail. There are teams, product families, systems, acronyms, governance rules and historical reasons why two nearly identical services work differently. Customers do not arrive wanting to understa

A polished website, busy social feed and full campaign calendar can coexist with weak marketing. The uncomfortable question is not whether marketing activity is happening, but whether it is changing anything that matters. Activity is not effectiveness Marketing has become unusually good at producing visible proof of work. Campaigns launch, emails go out, videos are published, events happen and dashboards fill with reassuring numbers. None of those things is inherently bad, bu

Before launching the next campaign, redesigning the website or adding another channel, stop long enough to work out what is actually happening. Diagnosis is not hesitation; it is the step that gives action a chance of being useful. Symptoms arrive disguised as problems Organisations rarely hand marketers a neat diagnosis. They say sales are down, engagement is poor, the website is not working or more leads are needed. Those statements can be important, but they describe outco

Some marketing survives because it looks useful inside the organisation, not because it creates much value outside it. The work is visible, the calendar is full and everyone can see that effort happened, which is exactly why it can be difficult to stop. Why visible work feels safe A new campaign can be shown in a meeting. A video can be played, a brochure passed around and a social calendar displayed in neat coloured boxes. Diagnosis, customer interviews and analysis are hard

'Grow the business' sounds like an objective, but it says very little about how growth is supposed to happen. Marketing becomes more useful when it identifies the mechanism rather than treating every form of growth as the same problem. Step back, look at the company as a whole. Growth has different levers A business can grow through more buyers, higher purchase frequency, better retention, higher prices, broader distribution, new geographies, stronger conversion or new produc

Marketing needs ideas, instinct and creative ambition. What it does not need is a system where the first exciting idea in the room automatically becomes the strategy. An idea is allowed to start as an idea There is nothing wrong with somebody saying, 'We should try TikTok', 'We need an app' or 'What if we completely changed the campaign?' Creative leaps often begin before the evidence is tidy. The mistake comes later, when enthusiasm is quietly promoted into certainty and the