Essays on brand strategy, positioning, websites, identity, naming, and the work behind brands that get chosen. Written for UK business owners and leadership teams.
Latest thinking
Practical thinking on brand, design, websites and marketing, written for people responsible for making the next decision.
AI has made competent content easier to produce. See why trust, taste, proof and participation now matter more than simply producing more.
A useful brand story makes the customer problem, the change you create and the reasons to believe easier to understand.
New data shows YouTube has overtaken Reddit as the top source AI search cites. Here is what the shift toward video and creator content means for brand strategy.
Sustainable web design is not about making websites less ambitious. It is about removing waste so the brand becomes faster, clearer and more resilient.
AI makes visual content easier to create and harder to trust. Content Credentials give brands a way to show where important assets came from and how they changed.
Privacy choices are often the first interaction someone has with your website. Here is how to protect trust while building useful marketing measurement.
If your website makes it hard for someone to read, navigate or buy, that is not only a technical failure. It is a brand failure.
Search has split into three different ways of being found. SEO, AEO and GEO. Here is what each one means, how they differ, and why the businesses acting on them now will get chosen.
Most rebrands fail because the order is wrong. Design without strategy is decoration. Here is the right sequence and what it changes about how your brand performs.
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini all cite businesses differently. Here is how to test your visibility and improve your chances of being cited.
Generative AI has changed how design starts. It has not changed what makes design work. Here is where AI belongs in the process, and where human craft still has to take over.
Local search has changed. Here is what UK service businesses need to do in 2026 to get found by customers ready to buy.
Differentiation and distinctiveness are not the same thing. Confusing them keeps your brand invisible. Here is the difference and what it changes.
Strangers do not become customers without a reason to trust you. Here are the five trust signals every business website needs to convert.
Businesses that try to be for everyone end up being for nobody. Here is why narrow targeting wins more of the right customers, without losing revenue.
Inconsistent branding silently erodes credibility, recall, and conversion across your business. Here is what it actually costs and how to fix it.
If your marketing copy could be swapped with a competitor's without anyone noticing, you have a positioning problem dressed up as a copy problem.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are the new search engines. Here is the practical playbook for making sure they cite your business when customers ask.
A bad business name limits SEO, memorability, and word-of-mouth. Here are the naming mistakes UK businesses make most often and how to avoid them.
Most business websites lose 98 out of every 100 visitors. Here are the conversion mistakes costing UK businesses revenue every day, and the fixes that work.
Customers are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews instead of typing keywords. Here is what UK businesses need to do to get cited.
Most marketing fails because it speaks to no-one in particular. Defining a precise ideal client is the highest leverage marketing decision you can make.
Most businesses confuse purpose with mission. They are different things, and only one of them does any real strategic work.
Brand voice is more than how your marketing sounds. It is the cumulative signal of whether your business knows itself. Inconsistency erodes trust.
Most positioning statements describe what a business does, not why anyone should choose it. Here is how to write one that does the latter.
Brand strategy is treated as a marketing topic. It is actually a leadership topic. Here is what changes when leadership owns it properly.
Purpose, positioning, audience, narrative, voice, visual direction. Six layers that determine whether your brand is infrastructure or decoration.
There is a specific point in the life of a founder-led business when the brand stops working. Knowing when it has arrived is the difference between scaling and stalling.
Most positioning problems are invisible until you know what to look for. Here are seven signs your brand is losing you the wrong clients, and the right ones.
These two terms are used interchangeably. They should not be. Confusing them is why polished new identities so often fail to change anything.
Most founders treat brand clarity as a marketing task. It is not. It is a strategic decision that determines how fast your business grows.
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