How we really think about marketing

We don’t believe good marketing starts with deliverables. It starts with how you look at the problem.

That might sound obvious, but it’s where most work quietly goes wrong. Too much marketing begins with activity, like a website, a campaign, a set of messages, before there’s real agreement on what’s actually broken, what needs to change, or what decision someone is being asked to make.

We don’t have a named process or a shiny method for fixing that. What we do have is a shared way of seeing problems, shaped by working closely together for a long time. So, this article is an attempt to put language around the patterns we’ve learned to trust.

Coherence is the real work

Most marketing doesn’t fail because the copy is bad or the design is weak. It fails because the pieces don’t agree with each other.

For example, have you ever taken a step back from your work and thought:

The message says one thing.

The structure implies another.

The visuals point somewhere else entirely.

It may even be that none of it is wrong in isolation, but together it feels unsettled.

It's something your target audience senses too, often immediately, even if they can’t explain why.

We focus on bringing things into agreement. Our job is often to remove contradictions rather than add more material to make sure language, layout, hierarchy, and intent are pulling in the same direction. When that happens, the work feels calmer. More credible. Easier to move through.

We design for decision-making, not attention

Standing out is overrated. Helping someone move forward isn’t.

We spend very little time asking how something will grab attention, and a lot more time asking what decision someone is trying to make when they encounter it.

Expect us to ask questions like:

• What do they need to understand first?

• What are they unsure about?

• What’s stopping them from moving on?

That’s where copy and design genuinely work together. Not to persuade aggressively, but to reduce friction, to pace understanding, to make the next step feel reasonable.

Good marketing doesn’t push people forward, but it does remove the reasons they stop.

We solve the problem underneath the brief

Clients usually come to us with a request. Something like a new website, campaign, brochure or entirely new messaging structure.

What we've learned through our combined 25+ years' marketing is that those requests are rarely the problem, but instead symptoms.

If you're wondering what we mean by that, well...

• A new website often masks a confidence issue.

• A demand for more leads is usually a prioritisation issue.

• Messaging that “isn’t landing” is often about credibility or sequencing, not wording.

We’re comfortable sitting with that gap. We don’t rush to reframe it neatly. We test it, challenge it, and only then build something.

That’s why our outputs often end up simpler than expected. And it's not because less thinking went in, but because more happened earlier.

Simplicity is the result of work, not the absence of it.

We think about marketing with the afterlife of the work

For us, the campaign launch is not the finish line.

We spend a lot of time thinking about marketing materials in terms of who has to live with the work once it’s handed over. Who has to update it, explain it internally, adapt it, or defend it when priorities change?

Marketing that only works while the people who created it are still in the room isn’t finished. So we avoid brittle ideas, over-clever positioning, or language that collapses under real-world use. We design for ownership, adaptability, and longevity, essentially, for work people can actually live with.

We trust pattern recognition over trends

Experience builds a particular kind of confidence.

Seeing the same challenges repeat across different sectors makes it easier to judge what actually needs changing, and what can be left alone. It reduces the urge to chase every new idea or overcomplicate the response.

That steadiness comes from knowing what tends to work, what tends to get in the way, and when intervention is genuinely needed.

We care about felt clarity, not just logical clarity

Something can make perfect sense and still feel wrong.

We pay close attention to how work lands: whether it feels proportionate, honest, and true to the organisation it belongs to. That’s not about tone in a brand sense, but rather recognition.

The best feedback we hear is a quiet “that’s it.” Because it's the moment someone sees themselves in the work, rather than being impressed by it.

Clarity is effectively when something makes sense, and when it feels settled.

If it can’t be explained out loud, it’s not ready

A simple test we come back to often: could this be explained clearly, without slides or jargon, in a normal conversation? If not, it’s not finished.

Marketing should sound like a person. It should hold up in conversation, not just on a page. That’s where credibility really lives.

We don’t think of this way of working as a framework. It’s shared judgement, built through trust and repetition. And it’s what clients tend to feel when they work with us, even if they never put a name to it.

That’s enough.