Some of My Favourite Marketing Ideas Never Happened

Most portfolios are naturally full of finished work. We show the website that launched, the campaign that performed well, the event that sold tickets and the product that generated PR because completed projects provide visible evidence of what somebody can deliver. What those portfolios rarely show, however, is the large amount of thinking that happens around ideas that never reach the market.

For every project that launches, there are usually several others that stop somewhere between an initial conversation and a finished business case. Sometimes the timing is wrong, sometimes the money is not available, resources are stretched, priorities change or another opportunity becomes more important. Earlier in my career, I tended to think there was little value in talking about those ideas because they had not happened. I see that very differently now.

During my time at Aberystwyth Town, I explored several ideas that never became finished projects while I was there. These included developing a larger business conference around the Black & Green Business Club and looking at whether part of Park Avenue could be improved and used as a co-working and meeting environment during the week. Neither idea ultimately reached launch, but both forced me to think much more deeply about customers, assets, revenue, pricing, demand and what a football club could potentially become beyond matchday.

The conference idea, for example, started from a wider question about the relationship between a football club and local businesses. Traditional sponsorship is often transactional: a business provides money and receives exposure in return. The Black & Green Business Club was already beginning to challenge that by asking whether the club could create something genuinely useful for local companies through networking and relationships. A larger conference could have extended that thinking by bringing businesses together around speakers, workshops, learning, networking and commercial partnerships.

The co-working idea came from a different starting point but led to similar strategic thinking. Park Avenue contained spaces that were valuable on matchdays but had limited use for much of the rest of the week. That made me question whether we were defining those spaces too narrowly. Rather than seeing them solely as football hospitality areas, could they also serve local businesses, remote workers or people needing meeting space? Even though the idea remained conceptual, it introduced me to a much broader way of thinking about asset utilisation.

That way of thinking has become increasingly important in how I approach marketing. Organisations often spend huge amounts of time looking for new products, new customers and new revenue streams while overlooking the assets they already possess. A building, audience, database, community, reputation or set of relationships may have value beyond the purpose for which it was originally created. Marketing can play a role not only in promoting those assets, but in identifying new ways they might create value.

My learning around strategy has also changed how I evaluate ideas like these. Playing to Win reinforces the importance of choices, and I think that is particularly relevant for creative marketers because generating ideas is usually the easy part. I have always had plenty of ideas, but organisations cannot pursue every potentially interesting opportunity. Time, money and attention are limited, which means the real strategic question is not simply whether an idea is good, but whether it is good enough to deserve resources ahead of something else.

That is where I now try to bring much more structure into the process. Before becoming too attached to an idea, I want to understand who it is for, what problem it solves, what evidence suggests demand exists, how it supports the wider strategy and what success would realistically look like. I also want to understand what the organisation would be choosing not to do if it committed resources to the idea. Those questions do not exist to kill creativity; they help separate an exciting thought from a genuinely worthwhile opportunity.

There is a useful connection here with Black Box Thinking too. Marketing tends to celebrate success and quietly forget everything else, but unfinished or unsuccessful projects can still create valuable learning if we are prepared to examine them properly. An idea that never launches can reveal weak assumptions, expose gaps in customer understanding or highlight where the business model needs more work. In some cases, the right decision may actually be not to proceed.

Looking back, I therefore do not consider the business conference or co-working concepts wasted ideas. The conference pushed me to think about building products around communities rather than simply selling sponsorship. The co-working concept made me think more seriously about how organisations can extract greater value from physical assets. The wider Park Avenue work encouraged me to stop defining assets purely by the purpose they had traditionally served.

Perhaps the biggest lesson, though, is that creativity and strategy need each other. Creativity gives an organisation possibilities and helps it imagine things that do not yet exist. Strategy provides the discipline to decide which of those possibilities are worth pursuing, how they fit with the wider direction of the organisation and whether they can create genuine value.

Some of my favourite ideas never happened, but they still changed the way I think. And in the long term, that might make them more valuable than they first appeared.