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

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

Most of the business conversation about artificial intelligence starts with productivity. AI can write an email faster, summarise a report, generate a presentation, create social posts, analyse a spreadsheet and turn a meeting transcript into a set of actions within seconds. Those capabilities are genuinely useful, and businesses would be foolish to ignore opportunities to remove repetitive work. However, I increasingly think efficiency may be one of the least interesting thi

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