METHOD.
Before deciding what a business needs, I want to understand what is actually happening.
For more than twenty years, I have worked inside very different businesses, industries and stages of growth. Over that time, the way I look at business has changed.
I started with tools. Then I became more interested in results. Results led me to systems. Systems led me to people, their decisions and behaviour. And eventually I stopped seeing marketing, sales, operations, money, teams and leadership as separate parts of a business.
I began to see the business as a connected, living system.
A problem that appears in one place may begin somewhere completely different. Growth is not always progress. More marketing is not always the answer. And the right tool used at the wrong point can simply help a business move faster in the wrong direction.
The Wayfinders Method grew from that understanding.
First, understand reality. Then understand what is creating it. Only then decide what needs to change.
IT STARTED AS A MANIFESTO FOR WOMEN’S MARKETING.
My thinking began as a manifesto for women’s marketing. And before I reconsider those ideas today, I think it matters not to pretend that version of me never existed. She did.
More than that, without her I would never have arrived at the method I have now. At the time, I genuinely believed the problem lay in the collision between masculine and feminine approaches. I looked at marketing, a field I had already spent more than twenty years working in, and saw a language I knew very well. Capture the market. Beat the competition. Push the customer towards a decision. Overcome the objection. Increase conversion. Scale. Do more. Faster. More efficiently.
Then I looked at myself, no longer only as a marketer but also as an artist, and realised that I did not want to speak to people that way any more. I did not want to turn someone who liked one of my watercolours into a lead. I did not want to identify their pain so that I could press exactly where it hurt. I did not want to manufacture scarcity where none existed. I did not want every human story to end with an instruction to buy something immediately. And I certainly did not want to produce thirty Reels in thirty days simply because somebody had decided that this was what the algorithm demanded of me. At that point, I needed an explanation. I found it in the idea of women’s marketing.
I placed pressure against attraction. The linear race against cycles. Competition against co-creation. KPIs against state of mind. Scripts against real conversation. Control against intuition. I needed those opposites then.
Perhaps sometimes we have to move a very long way away from one wall before we realise that the room is much larger than we thought. Today, I would no longer call it women’s marketing.
Not because I believe that manifesto was wrong. I simply no longer see gender at the centre of it. I have met men with an extraordinary sensitivity to other people, who cannot bring themselves to pressure a customer and who build businesses around trust. And I have met women who are completely at home in fiercely competitive environments, love numbers, thrive on speed and have absolutely no need for permission to be softer.
Structure is not masculine. Intuition is not feminine. Numbers do not belong to men. Empathy does not belong to women.
The ability to understand another human being is not determined by gender.
IT WAS NEVER REALLY ABOUT WOMEN’S MARKETING. IT WAS ABOUT AWARENESS.
Today, I would put it much more simply. None of this was really about women’s marketing. It was about awareness.
About understanding what you are doing. Why you are doing it. What is happening to the person on the other side. What is happening to you. What is happening inside the business itself. And what it actually costs to achieve the result that later looks so impressive in a report.
Marketing has never really been only about marketing. Perhaps that is one of those things you begin to see only after you have been doing the work for long enough.
At the beginning of your career, everything appears to belong to a separate discipline. Here is marketing. Here are sales. Finance. Production. People. Management. Customer service. Everyone has their own part to look after. The marketer brings in the customer. The salesperson sells. Production produces. Finance counts. Management manages. A wonderfully convenient structure.
Except that real businesses have a persistent habit of refusing to work that way.
Over the years, I have worked inside remarkably different businesses: wholesale and food retail, a shopping and entertainment centre, a chain of bowling venues, window manufacturing, restaurants, engineering, construction, radiator manufacturing, cosmetics, the manufacture and retail of men’s suits, and municipal projects. Construction and engineering became a particularly significant part of that experience. More than ten years were spent within those sectors.
And the more businesses I saw from the inside, the harder it became to think of marketing as a separate function.
- You can bring exactly the right customer into a business that does not know how to receive them.
- You can run an excellent advertising campaign for a product that has been priced incorrectly.
- You can increase enquiries for a company that loses half of them somewhere between the first call and the quotation.
- You can build a beautiful brand for a restaurant where the guest never wants to return after their first visit.
- You can increase the turnover of a business that loses money on every additional order.
- And you can bring an owner even more customers and push them to breaking point because every sale, decision, check and problem already has to pass through them.
Which of these is a marketing problem? Which is not?
And where exactly does marketing end if it brings a person into a system, while everything that happens inside that system determines whether they buy, whether they return, whether they recommend the company to someone else and whether they ever want to deal with that business again? It took me years to stop looking for that boundary.
Today, I simply do not find it particularly useful.
Because marketing is about people.
We love talking about channels. SEO. PPC. Facebook. Instagram. TikTok. Email. Content. Influencers. CRM. Funnels. Automation. AI. Sometimes it can feel as though marketing evolves simply because one technology replaces another.
But technology, by itself, explains nothing.
MARKETING CHANGES WHEN PEOPLE CHANGE.
Technology simply becomes part of that behaviour.
Take 2012. Facebook had long since stopped being something used by a small group of early adopters. Instagram was growing. Pinterest was growing. And the smartphone was gradually changing from an additional device into the window through which people communicated, searched, photographed, compared and chose. Pew Research Center’s long-term data shows that the proportion of American internet users using social networking sites rose from 65% in 2011 to 67% in 2012. Between 2012 and 2015, Instagram grew from 13% to 28% of online adults, while Pinterest grew from 15% to 31%. This was not simply the arrival of a few more websites.
The way people existed online was changing.
And marketing changed with them. It was no longer enough for a business to have a website, put some information on it and buy some advertising. People began moving between platforms. They might notice something in one place, check it somewhere else, look through photographs, read comments, ask someone they knew and return a week later. They might eventually buy somewhere else entirely. The customer journey was becoming much less like the neat straight line we still find so convenient to draw in presentations.
Then came another shift. By the middle of the decade, Google was describing a mobile-first world in which more Google searches were taking place on smartphones than on computers globally. That sounds like a technical detail. It was actually an enormous behavioural change. A person no longer necessarily sat down at a computer in the evening to find something. They searched while travelling. In a shop. In a restaurant. In the street. At the moment the need appeared.
The distance between “I need something” and “I am looking for it” became dramatically shorter.
And with it changed the cost of a difficult website, a slow response, unclear information, a poor mobile experience and dozens of other small frictions that businesses had previously been able to tolerate.
THEN ATTENTION BECAME THE PROBLEM.
By 2016, social platforms were no longer simply places people occasionally visited to look at photographs of their friends. Pew found that 79% of online American adults used Facebook, while 76% of Facebook users visited it daily. Instagram was particularly embedded among younger adults: 59% of online 18 to 29-year-olds were using it.
Social media had become part of the information environment. People no longer had to actively search for a company before encountering it. Businesses could appear continuously within the spaces where people were already spending their time. That created enormous opportunity. It also created an entirely different problem. Attention.
A person’s attention was now being contested simultaneously by friends, news, brands, creators, entertainment, politics, work and their own family. There was more content. Then more. Then so much that simply being present stopped having much value. And businesses began asking: “But we’re on Instagram. Why isn’t it working?” Because having Instagram stopped being an advantage at roughly the point when everybody else had Instagram too. This happens repeatedly.
A new channel appears. The businesses that arrive early gain an advantage. Then the market follows. Then comes the noise. People learn to filter the noise. Old techniques lose their effectiveness. And marketers begin looking for the next button.
But it was never only the button that changed. The person changed.
THEN CAME 2020.
I sometimes think we still underestimate how profoundly Covid changed not only online shopping, but the relationship between people and businesses. Online shopping had already been growing in Britain for years. In 2019, around 19% of retail spending was online. Then, in the spring of 2020, much of the familiar choice disappeared almost overnight. Shops closed. People stayed at home. Something that had previously been a convenience became, for many, a necessity. By May 2020, 33.4% of UK retail spending was online. Across 2020 as a whole, the value of online retail sales increased by 46.1% compared with 2019.
But I think the more interesting change happened beyond the sales figures.
People learnt to live differently.
To order differently. Work differently. Communicate differently. Receive advice differently. Compare differently. Choose differently. They became accustomed to doing things remotely that they had previously assumed required their physical presence. At the same time, they lived through extraordinary uncertainty. For some, income changed. Work changed. Their relationship with home changed. Their relationship with their own time changed. For some, the experience changed their understanding of what mattered in life altogether. And afterwards, businesses understandably wanted the customer to return to 2019. But the customer did not return. They could not. You cannot undo experience.
Even when the physical restrictions disappeared, people already knew there were other ways to buy, work, compare, communicate and choose. In January 2021, online retail accounted for 35.2% of retail sales in Great Britain, compared with 19.5% a year earlier. ONS research also found that 21% of adults expected to continue doing more of their grocery shopping online after the pandemic than before it, rising to 33% for other types of online shopping. And just as businesses were beginning to understand one changed reality, another arrived.
THE OUTSIDE WORLD ENTERS YOUR BUSINESS TOO.
War enters your marketing too. I do not mean that as a political statement. I mean it as a statement about people. The person buying a kitchen, a painting, accountancy services, home improvements, cosmetics, dinner in a restaurant or a new heating system does not leave the outside world at the door before opening your website. The pandemic was followed by further disruption, rising prices, an energy crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and changes in the costs of energy, commodities and everyday life.
By late 2022, UK consumer price inflation was at levels not seen for around forty years. ONS analysis found that food and energy were responsible for around half of headline CPI inflation, with gas prices in particular rising substantially in response to the war in Ukraine. But again, I am less interested in the economic indicator itself than in what happened to the person living through it.
In early 2023, 94% of adults in Great Britain said their cost of living had increased compared with a year earlier. 69% said they were spending less on non-essential purchases. Do we really think the customer remained unchanged through all of this? Of course not.
- They may think for longer.
- Compare more.
- Delay a decision.
- Choose a cheaper alternative.
- Decide not to make a purchase they might once have made without much thought.
- They may be more afraid of making the wrong choice. Trust may matter more. They may ask about price earlier. They may need more evidence before committing.
- They may buy less, but buy better.
- They may have changed their definition of what is necessary and what is a luxury.
And that is the point. Marketing does not change because somebody invents a new platform, a new advertising format or another piece of software. Those things matter because they enter people’s lives and change what people can do, what they expect, how they behave and how they make decisions.
Marketing changes when people change.
AND YET, WE STILL EXPECT THE SAME THINGS TO WORK.
After all of that, a slightly mischievous question comes to mind.
Why are you, as business owners, so surprised that what worked before does not work now? Hmm?
Almost everything around your customer has changed. The way they receive information. The amount of information they are exposed to. The cost of living. Their experience of uncertainty. Their relationship with time. Their ability to compare. The number of alternatives available to them. Their trust in advertising. Their habit of checking a company before ever speaking to it. Their expectations around response times. Their financial caution.
And yet, somehow, marketing was supposed to remain exactly the same…You still expect referrals to bring you as many customers as they did ten years ago. You still think it should be enough to “run some ads” occasionally. You expect a website built seven years ago to perform the same job today. You expect someone to see one advert and pick up the phone. You assume that because a product sold at a particular price before, the market is obliged to accept that price today. And if you run an advertising campaign twice, for three days each time, and a queue of customers fails to form outside the door, the conclusion is: “Marketing doesn’t work.” No.
Marketing works much as it always has. It follows people. And people have changed. That is why I no longer find the idea of universal marketing particularly convincing. It is convenient. And wonderfully easy to sell. Give me five steps. Seven touchpoints. Three funnels. Twenty perfect headlines. The ideal sales script. A month’s content plan. The best time to post. The correct number of Reels. Just tell me what to do, and I will do it. I understand the appeal. Uncertainty is exhausting. An instruction is much more comfortable. But the problem begins when the tool becomes more important than reality.
ACTIVITY AND MOVEMENT ARE NOT THE SAME THING.
You can have a perfect content plan for a business whose customers do not make decisions through social media at all. You can have an excellent sales script for a customer who does not need a script. They need someone to finally listen to them. You can run PPC for a product that makes no economic sense to advertise. You can increase the number of leads going into a sales team that does not know what to do with them. You can build a new website for a company that has no clear proposition. You can introduce a CRM before anyone has agreed on what actually qualifies someone as a potential customer. You can hire another person into a team where nobody understands who is responsible for what. And all of this will look like activity. Sometimes very expensive activity.
But activity and movement are not the same thing.
That realisation was when my old manifesto gradually began to turn into a method. I am not against numbers. In the original manifesto, I drew a fairly sharp line between numbers and people. I wanted to reclaim the right to say that energy, enjoyment, the depth of a relationship, our state of mind and a sense of meaning matter too. I still believe that. But I no longer need to diminish the value of numbers in order to make that argument.
Numbers are wonderful. They simply cannot think for us.
Revenue can rise while profit falls. The number of leads can increase while their quality deteriorates. Reach can grow without producing a single suitable customer. An employee can complete an impressive number of tasks without producing a meaningful result. A sales team can report an excellent conversion rate simply because the inconvenient leads never make it into the report. A business can have impressive turnover and still have no cash because its money is sitting in unpaid invoices. And the reverse is also true. A very small audience can support an excellent business. A small number of customers can be exactly the right model if the economics have been built accordingly. A pause in growth can be a perfectly rational decision when the system is not ready to carry the next level of volume.
None of this makes the number wrong. The problem begins when we stop asking: What is this number actually telling us?
Metrics are not a whip or decoration for a presentation. They are one way of having a conversation with reality.
But they are only one way. There are always people alongside the numbers. And I am no longer against structure. In the original Magnetika Method, I wanted very much to protect a space in which you could stop and listen to yourself. A space where you did not have to publish something simply because you were told you “should”, or turn creativity into a content production line.
Flow, Cycles & Resonance became my way of describing that different rhythm. I still love those three words. I simply understand them differently now.
- Flow does not mean doing only what feels easy.
- Cycles do not mean working only when inspiration arrives.
- Resonance does not mean waiting for the right people to somehow magically feel your energy.
Sometimes, good flow requires a very boring system. If an artist has to work out from scratch every time where the photographs of their work are stored, how much delivery costs, who they promised to contact and who asked about a painting, there will not be much flow left for long. If a business owner makes the same decisions every day because nobody else knows the rules, there is not much freedom there either. If a salesperson is afraid to remind a customer about an overdue payment, the absence of a process does not make the communication more human. And if a team does not understand who is responsible for what, a manager’s kindness will not save it from chaos.
Structure can be a form of care.
Good structure removes unnecessary tension. It means a person does not have to keep everything in their head. It allows an employee to make a decision without fear. It allows a business owner to disappear for a few days without returning to find a small fire waiting for them. It allows an artist to create without turning every sale into an administrative adventure. So I no longer choose between the system and the person.
I am interested in building a system that fits both the person and the task.
AN OBJECTION IS INFORMATION. NOT SOMETHING TO BREAK.
EVERY SYSTEM TEACHES PEOPLE HOW TO BEHAVE.
The same shift happened in the way I think about management. I increasingly see the same paradox. A business owner tells me that their employees do not want to make any decisions for themselves.
Then I look at how the company actually works. Every decision has to be approved by the owner. Every mistake is corrected by the owner. Every difficult situation is taken over by the owner. If an employee does something differently from the way the owner would have done it, they are corrected. If they ask a question, they are immediately given the answer. If they make a mistake, the owner concludes that it would simply be easier to do everything themselves.
After a few years of working like this, the owner becomes genuinely frustrated: “Why can’t they do anything without me?” Because you taught them not to. Not deliberately. But every system teaches people the behaviour that is safest within that system.
- If asking is safer than deciding, people will ask.
- If taking initiative regularly ends with somebody redoing the work, initiative will disappear.
- If someone is given responsibility without authority, they will learn to avoid responsibility.
- And if the owner continually compensates for weaknesses in the business with their own time, the business will learn to depend on exactly that.
This, too, is part of awareness. Not only looking at what other people are doing, but looking at the system that keeps producing that behaviour.
PEOPLE ARE NOT THE PROBLEM THE SYSTEM NEEDS TO REMOVE.
I sometimes think traditional management has spent a very long time trying to solve an almost impossible problem:
How do we make people predictable?
Hence our great affection for procedures, scripts, standards, instructions and KPIs. I am not against any of them. We need them. But a person will remain a person.
They have fear. Self-esteem. Experience. Fatigue. Ambition. Biases. Habits. Their own relationship with risk. Their own way of responding to conflict.
One salesperson discounts before the customer has even objected because they believe the product is expensive. Another starts talking too much when they are nervous. A third avoids follow-up because they are afraid of rejection. A manager does not delegate because, in truth, it really is quicker to do the task themselves. A business owner holds on to an old product not because the numbers suggest it still has a future, but because that was the product their success originally began with.
A person can rationally understand one thing and continue doing another.
That does not mean business consulting needs to become psychotherapy. But it does mean we cannot pretend this layer does not exist.
Business, marketing, sales and management all happen through human decisions.
AWARENESS DOES NOT MEAN SOFTNESS AT ANY COST.
Business exists through human decisions.
Marketing exists through human decisions. Sales exist through human decisions. Management exists through human decisions. And if we want to change the result, sometimes changing the spreadsheet is not enough.
We need to understand why a person is making that particular decision.
This matters because words such as people, empathy, rhythm and awareness can very easily conjure up an image of a business where nobody ever makes anyone uncomfortable, everything happens organically and, somehow, the money simply arrives. No. Sometimes an aware decision is deeply uncomfortable.
- Close the product.
- Raise the price.
- Let someone go.
- Tell a customer “no”.
- Chase an overdue invoice.
- Stop doing an employee’s job for them.
- Walk away from a direction you have already invested heavily in.
- Admit that the idea you love does not have a market.
- Tell the business owner that advertising is not the problem.
- Choose not to scale, even while everyone around you is talking about growth.
Awareness does not make decisions soft. It makes them understandable.
- You know why you are making the decision.
- You know what you are basing it on. You understand the consequences. You know what price you are prepared to pay for it.
- And you know what you are not prepared to do.
For me, that is far more honest than the endless positive rhetoric around growth.
Because growth is not always the right goal.
In business, the word growth is treated almost automatically as something good.
More customers. More revenue. More employees. More locations. More products. More markets.
But more of what, exactly?
If every new customer brings a lower margin, why do you want more customers? If the owner is already working seven days a week, what happens when sales increase by another thirty per cent? If the team cannot cope with the current volume, why double lead generation? If production is the bottleneck, what exactly will more advertising solve? If the business depends on one person, scaling may simply scale that dependency. And if the product no longer fits the market, increasing the advertising budget will not persuade the market to return to the past.
Growth does not automatically mean progress.
I am far more interested in a different question: What in this business actually deserves to grow?
And sometimes the answer will be uncomfortable.
- Nothing.
- Not yet.
- First, something needs to be repaired. Recalculated. Simplified. Stopped. Tested. Understood.
Then, and only then, does it make sense to amplify it. This is probably one of the biggest differences between the way I think today and that first manifesto. Back then, I was looking for a way not to destroy myself through marketing. Today, I am interested in how we avoid scaling the things that are already damaging the business and the people inside it.
CYCLES ARE STILL HERE.
I have not abandoned that part of Magnetika. Quite the opposite. I simply understand cycles much more broadly now. An artist has a cycle. A product has a cycle. A team has a cycle. A company has a cycle. A market has a cycle. A technology has a cycle. Customer behaviour has cycles.
Even a marketing tool has a cycle.
- First it appears.
- Then it creates an advantage.
- Then everybody starts using it.
- Then the market becomes saturated.
- Then people learn to recognise it.
- Its effectiveness declines.
- And eventually, something else takes its place.
Look at digital marketing over the past fifteen years. 2012 was not 2016. 2016 was not 2020. 2020 was not 2022. 2022 is not today. And today will not be 2030. Not because somebody changes the rules of the game every four years.
Because the game itself is made of living people. And living people adapt.
What surprised us yesterday becomes normal tomorrow.
What created trust yesterday can begin to look like a rehearsed technique tomorrow.
What once felt like personal communication becomes irritating after people have received thousands of automated messages that sound exactly the same.
What feels like a wonderfully useful AI tool today may create an ocean of identical content tomorrow, against which a genuinely human voice becomes valuable again.
Every successful tool changes the environment in which that tool operates.
The more businesses adopt the same technique, the less capable that technique becomes of distinguishing one business from another on its own. Which is why you cannot “set up the marketing” once and consider the job finished.
Just as you cannot understand your customer once and assume you understand them forever.
They are alive.
NOT MAGIC. NOT EASE. ALIGNMENT AND LESS UNNECESSARY RESISTANCE.
I START WITH REALITY.
Today, if I need to explain my approach, I no longer want to begin with marketing terminology. I begin with reality.
WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING?
Not what we think is happening. Not what worked five years ago. Not what the owner has become accustomed to believing is the cause. Not what the consultant happens to be selling. What is happening now? With the market. The customer. The money. The product. Sales. People. Processes. And the business owner themselves. Then comes the next question. Why is it happening? Then: What actually needs to change? Then: What solution fits this particular system? And only after that: What tools do we need?
- Sometimes the answer will be advertising.
- Sometimes a new website.
- Sometimes sales training. A change in price. A different offer structure. A new process. Letting someone go. Hiring someone. Automation.
- And sometimes we need absolutely nothing new.
We simply need to stop doing something that stopped working a long time ago.
For me, this is what a conscious business means. Not slow. Not soft. Not feminine. Not masculine. Conscious. And people remain at the centre of it, not because that sounds nice, but because without them it is impossible to understand how a business actually works. A customer is a person. An employee is a person. A manager is a person. A business owner is a person. Even an investor, a supplier and that particularly difficult customer who still has not paid their invoice three months later are people too. Each has their own logic. Their own motivations. Their own constraints. Their own information. Their own version of what is happening.
Marketing cannot exist separately from any of this.
Which is why I am increasingly uninterested in marketing that begins with the question: “Which channel should we use?” I want to begin somewhere else.
WHO ARE WE TRYING TO BRING, AND WHERE ARE WE BRINGING THEM?
What will this person see after the advert? What will they understand? What happens when they call? Who answers? What do they ask? How is the price explained? What happens next? Why should they trust this business? What happens if they are not ready today? What happens after they buy? Will they want to come back?
Only when that entire journey makes sense do I become interested in discussing the advertising account.
WHY WAYFINDERS, AND WHY NOW?
Perhaps this is why Wayfinders appeared now. Not twenty years ago. Back then, I was still learning the tools. Then I learnt about results. Then systems. Then people. Then my own limitations. And then art. Strangely enough, art brought me back to business with a much clearer view of it. Because in art, it becomes very obvious when form begins to consume the substance. When you create not because you have something to say, but because it is time to publish. When the work itself becomes raw material for content. When the audience’s reaction begins to determine what you will make next. When the algorithm becomes your co-author.
The same thing happens in business. It is simply harder to see. A company begins serving the processes it once created to serve the company. The owner begins serving the business that was supposed to serve their goals. Marketing begins producing marketing activity instead of customers. The team begins producing reports instead of results. And everyone is very busy.
That is why Wayfinders gradually became, for me, something other than a way of giving businesses more tools. There are enough tools around us already. I am much more interested in helping someone see the whole system. Where is the business now? What has changed around it? What has changed inside it? What still works? What continues to exist simply because it has always been done that way? What can the business actually carry? And what does it genuinely want to build next?
First see reality. Then understand the person. Then understand the system. Then make the decision. Only after that choose the tool.
And only then do we look for the route forward. If I were rewriting that original manifesto today, I would not write, “women attract, men conquer.” I no longer believe that. I would write this instead:
Do not apply pressure where you can understand.
Do not persuade where you first need to listen.
Do not scale what does not work yet.
Do not turn a metric into a goal simply because it is easy to measure.
Do not confuse activity with movement.
Do not make a person serve a system that can be changed.
Do not cling to a tool simply because it once produced results.
Do not expect today’s customer to behave like yesterday’s customer.
Do not be afraid of structure. Be afraid of structure whose purpose nobody remembers any more.
Do not be afraid of numbers. Be afraid of decisions made without understanding what those numbers actually mean.
Do not be afraid of sales. Be afraid of the moment you stop seeing the buyer as a person.
Do not be afraid of growth. Just ask first what, exactly, you are planning to grow.
And perhaps one more thing. Leave room to change your mind. Because a method that cannot be reconsidered very quickly becomes another dogma. And I have had enough of dogma.
WHAT REMAINS FROM WOMEN’S MARKETING?
Quite a lot, actually. The respect for rhythm remains. The rejection of meaningless pressure remains. So does the belief that relationships have economic value, even when that value cannot immediately be placed neatly into a report. The understanding that a person’s state affects the quality of their decisions remains. The preference for invitation over pursuit remains. Honesty remains. Cycles remain. Flow remains. Resonance remains. What has changed is that there is now a more mature structure around them.
Data. Economics. Responsibility. Structure. The market. Processes. The team. Real constraints.
And the right to say “no” not only to a customer, but to your own beautiful idea when reality does not support it. Perhaps that was what I was missing then. I was trying to find an alternative to the system. What I actually needed to learn was how to build a system in which the person does not have to disappear. And that is why the question I ask a business today sounds different. Not: “How do we sell more?” But: “What is happening?”
Why are there fewer customers?
Why has the channel that used to work stopped working?
Why has turnover increased without leaving more money in the business?
Why is the owner exhausted?
Why are employees waiting for someone else to make every decision?
Why do people ask for the price and disappear?
Why is the advertising bringing the wrong people?
Why are previous customers not coming back?
Why does a product that sold beautifully five years ago now have to be pushed into the market?
Sometimes the answer will be marketing. Sometimes it will not. And that is perfectly fine.
Marketing does not have to be responsible for everything simply because the first visible symptom was a fall in sales.
The world changed. Your customer changed too. And perhaps that is the point I return to most often. 2012. 2016. 2019. 2023. And every year after them. Each period changed something about the way people live, search, choose, trust, buy and decide not to buy. Social media changed the information environment. Smartphones changed the moment at which demand turns into action. Algorithms changed the distribution of attention. The pandemic dramatically accelerated digital behaviour. Economic shocks changed people’s relationship with money and risk. Wars and global instability changed the sense of security for millions of people. And now AI, automation and an enormous volume of synthetic content are entering that environment too. We are only beginning to understand what this will do to trust. Perhaps, in a few years, the scarce thing in marketing will not be content. There will be an almost infinite amount of content.
The scarce thing may become trust that behind the communication there is a real person, real expertise and a real product.
And if that happens, marketing will change again. Of course it will. It always has. Because marketing is not Facebook. It is not Google. It is not a funnel. It is not advertising. It is not a CRM. It is not Reels. It is not AI.
Marketing is the relationship between a business and people in the reality they are living in now.