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

Marketing people naturally enjoy new things. A new campaign gives us something different to create, a new visual identity is exciting to design and a new strapline gives everyone something fresh to discuss. There are absolutely times when brands need to evolve, but I think the industry can sometimes underestimate how valuable consistency is precisely because marketers become bored with their own work much faster than customers do. Someone working inside an organisation might

One of the easiest mistakes a business can make is to confuse an ambitious target with a marketing strategy. Targets are useful because they create focus and accountability, but they become dangerous when they are detached from historical performance, available resources, market conditions and the mechanics required to achieve them. I once worked within a marketing team where success was heavily judged by the number of marketing-qualified leads generated. There was nothing un

Why rural destinations need to think beyond social media, and start treating tourism marketing as economic development. There is a common misunderstanding about destination marketing. People often reduce it to social media. Post more reels. Make the Instagram grid look cleaner. Use better photography. Capture sunsets, food, coast, mountains, families and local businesses, then call it a strategy. Social media matters, of course. A destination that looks inactive online is mak

There is a strange problem in marketing. Much of the theory we learn is built from some of the biggest and most successful brands in the world, yet the overwhelming majority of marketers do not work for businesses like Coca-Cola, Nike, Unilever or McDonald's. They work for smaller companies, regional organisations, owner-managed businesses, charities, universities, sports organisations and SMEs where budgets are limited, teams are small and every pound spent has to work incre

Some of the best marketing opportunities I have worked on have not begun with somebody saying, “We need a marketing campaign.” They have started with an operational issue, a commercial conversation, a customer problem or an idea that sits somewhere between several departments. That is because customers do not experience organisations through the same departmental structures that exist internally. A customer does not care whether ticketing belongs to commercial, the website be

I have spent a huge part of my career working in digital marketing. Websites, social media, email, online advertising and digital content have been central to what I have done for years, so I am hardly going to argue that organisations should turn their backs on screens. But some of the marketing ideas that excite me most at the moment are physical. There is something interesting about a real object in a world where so much communication disappears with a swipe. A sticker, sh

For years I have described myself as an ideas man and a problem solver. Give me a coffee and a business or marketing problem and my instinct is usually to start thinking about what could be built, changed, communicated or created. That part of my personality has probably driven most of my career, from graphic design and websites through to social campaigns, events, sponsorship, email marketing and digital projects. What has changed over time is not my enthusiasm for ideas, bu

One of the things I enjoy most about event marketing is how much value can be created from a relatively short period of activity if the thinking around it is right. A major sporting moment might last an afternoon. An athlete interview might take ten minutes. A photographer might capture an image in a fraction of a second. Yet each of those things can feed multiple audiences and channels when the content has been planned as part of a wider system. This year has given me plenty

Marketers are obsessed with getting attention, but attention on its own is not particularly valuable if nobody remembers who created it. We have all seen adverts that are funny, emotional or beautifully produced and then struggled to remember which brand they belonged to. From an entertainment perspective they may have succeeded. From a marketing perspective, that creates a rather obvious problem. The brand needs to get some of the credit. This is why I have become increasing

Why tourism marketing should be treated as economic infrastructure, not just promotion. When a visitor economy is worth hundreds of millions of pounds to a local area, marketing should not be treated as decoration. It should be treated as economic infrastructure. Roads help people move through a place. Broadband helps businesses operate. Events bring people together. Marketing does something similar. It creates demand, shapes perception, directs attention and influences where

Marketing people spend a lot of time talking about growth. We discuss increasing penetration, attracting new customers, expanding market share, generating more revenue and reaching more people. Most marketing theory understandably assumes that an organisation ultimately wants more customers and a bigger business. Spend enough time working around smaller businesses, however, and a slightly different reality becomes obvious. Not every business owner wants to build an empire, op

In one previous role, most working days began with a conversation about the number of leads that had arrived overnight. Sometimes the number was eight, sometimes more and sometimes less, but the discussion was consistently focused on why there had not been more. It was a highly sales-driven organisation and the commercial pressure was understandable. Leads mattered, sales mattered and considerable amounts of money were being spent on digital advertising to generate customers.

One of the lessons I have learned repeatedly through events and sport is that the public moment is usually only a small part of the marketing opportunity. People see the event itself. They see the photographs, social posts, crowds and activity happening on the day. What they do not necessarily see is the thinking that should have started weeks or months earlier: identifying audiences, understanding the stories, preparing content, creating assets, organising people and decidin

How artificial intelligence could change the way visitors discover, plan and experience rural destinations. For many years, tourism websites have worked like digital brochures. They show places to visit, list accommodation, publish a few itineraries, promote events and host attractive photography. That model still has value, but it is starting to look limited. Visitors now expect faster answers, more personal recommendations and simpler planning. They do not always want to cl

There is a conversation I have had with business owners countless times. I ask what they are doing with their marketing and the answer is usually something like, “We post on Facebook a few times a week, we’ve started doing more Reels and we probably need to get onto TikTok.” None of those things are necessarily wrong, but they do not really answer the question. They describe channels and activity rather than marketing itself. If I ask what your marketing looks like and you te

Sport gives marketers an incredibly obvious piece of content every week: the result. Someone won, someone lost, someone scored, someone qualified, someone broke a record. Those moments matter enormously and deserve to be celebrated, but I do not think a strong sports brand can rely on the scoreboard alone. Results are unpredictable. Even the most successful organisations eventually lose, and if all the meaning attached to a sporting brand comes from winning, the marketing bec

Marketers love rebrands. There is something enormously satisfying about unveiling a new logo, typography, colour palette, photography style and strapline, particularly when everything is presented beautifully in a launch deck explaining how each design element represents confidence, optimism, humanity and forward momentum. The organisation sees a dramatic transformation, employees receive new templates and the LinkedIn announcement collects congratulations from other people w

One of the strange things about working in marketing is hearing organisations say that they do not know what to post about. In many cases, the problem is not a lack of stories. It is that nobody has built a reliable way of finding them. Working inside Cardiff Met Sport has reinforced that for me. Once you begin looking beyond fixtures and results, there are athletes, coaches, students, alumni, volunteers, researchers, events, competitions, community programmes, partnerships a

For years, marketers have been told variations of the same story. Your loyal customers are everything, twenty per cent of customers generate 80 per cent of your revenue, retention is cheaper than acquisition and the goal should be to create superfans who love the brand enough to become advocates. There is enough intuitive truth in that story to make it extraordinarily seductive, particularly because the customers who buy most frequently are the easiest people for organisation

One of the easiest sentences to write in a marketing plan is: “Our target audience is everyone.” It is also one of the least useful. There are products with enormous potential markets, of course, and broad reach is incredibly important for growing brands. But that does not mean every person has the same needs, motivations or value to a business. Segmentation is not about making your market artificially tiny. It is about recognising meaningful differences within it. I think th