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

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

Social media is incredibly useful, but I think many organisations have accidentally turned platforms they do not own into the centre of their entire content strategy. We create a post, publish it, watch the engagement for a day or two and then move on. Within a remarkably short period of time, a story that may have involved years of work, significant achievement or a fascinating individual has effectively disappeared down a timeline. That has increasingly made me think about

One of the biggest changes in how I think about marketing is that I no longer see strategy as a big document full of objectives, actions, channels and dates. Those things can all be useful, but they are not necessarily strategy. A plan tells you what you are going to do. Strategy should explain the choices behind it. That distinction sounds simple, but I think a lot of organisations struggle with it. You can have a beautifully presented marketing plan containing social media,

Some of the most difficult marketing conversations happen when an organisation is building something valuable but management wants to know exactly how much money that activity generated this month. I experienced this particularly strongly while working with a community sports organisation. Marketing was naturally expected to support commercial performance, but I saw the opportunity as being much wider than simply promoting the next fixture, selling the next ticket or finding

Starting a new marketing role naturally creates the temptation to prove yourself quickly. You arrive with ideas, experience and plenty of things you think you could improve, and there is an understandable urge to start making things immediately. When I joined Cardiff Met Sport, though, one of the most important things I could do was actually the opposite. Before trying to change anything, I needed to understand the organisation I had joined. That might sound obvious, but mark

One of the things that frustrates me most about marketing (i think it pisses me off more because it's my job) is how often it gets reduced to social media. (oh aks Damian he's into marketing and soicla media stuff, rolls eyes) A business says it needs to do more marketing, and within minutes the conversation becomes about posting more regularly on Instagram, making a Reel, designing a graphic or finding something to put on Facebook. Those things can all be useful, but none of

When I first started Red Squirrel Marketing, I needed to do what every new business needs to do: meet people, build trust and somehow convince local businesses that I could actually help them. Rather than spend weeks talking about myself online or sending cold emails, I decided to try something much simpler. I booked a table in a coffee shop in Aberystwyth and offered local businesses a free one-hour marketing drop-in session. There was no complicated funnel, no sales present