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.

There is a particular type of social media graphic that I am starting to recognise before I have even read it. It has too much text, an odd mixture of fonts, a slightly over-designed background, colours that do not quite belong to the business and a layout that somehow feels familiar even though I have never seen the advert before. Then I look a little closer and realise why. It is another AI-generated social media poster. The strange thing is that the businesses using these

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

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