Make a conscious choice to narrow the playing field — ‘I love that idea. But won’t it limit our audience?’ If you’ve ever worked with a growing brand, you’re probably familiar with this sentiment. Most businesses want to be big, and that means appealing to as many people as possible — right? Well, not really. Because being ‘for everybody’ means…

Creators should stop obsessing over metrics they never chose — When freshly manufactured TV sets were shipped from Soviet Moscow, they contained more than just circuitry. Hidden inside many of these TVs were piles of bricks. Why? Because human beings get weird when they start measuring stuff. See, the producers’ performance was assessed not based on the quality of their…

We’ll tell you what the people on your payroll can’t — We were forty five minutes into the call when I realised I was wasting my time. I had come into this meeting optimistic: the brand’s platform was interesting, and their marketing nascent enough for me to make a real mark. …

Every ambitious digital creator can learn from Chris Rock — To reach a mass audience, you have to dumb things down. Most people just can’t handle too much thinking. So let’s not confuse them with complicated ideas. This a pretty common view in digital creator communities, and it’s one I believe is completely wrong. Why is it wrong? Well, let’s…

B2B buyers are not as mesmerised by data as you think — David Ogilvy had it right in 1963, when he said: “People use data like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination” But what he probably didn’t foresee was the extent to which this approach would be normalised, encouraged and rewarded within otherwise intelligent organisations. Rarely have I…

Leaders naturally want a sense of control, but it comes at a cost — Human beings despise uncertainty. Few ideas are as unanimously accepted as this. Over the years, a large body of research has emerged which purports to prove just how much people hate uncertainty — often preferring a definite negative outcome to prolonged uncertainty. The simple fact of not knowing an outcome…

Give your audience a choice between two versions of themselves — At the heart of every compelling story is a simple question: who will this person choose to be? Our hero faces a series of obstacles — it could be a crazed warlord or an overdue tax return — and how they respond comes to define their character. In The Science…

Brands need to face uncomfortable truths to make a connection — We all had that one friend at school. (If you didn’t, it was probably you.) The guy who told absurd stories about what they got up to at the weekend, or their outlandish sexual escapades. Maybe his dad once beat up Bruce Lee. Maybe he secretly invented the iPod. If…

This simple reframing can 10x your tech marketing — “It’s obvious what the problem is: people are afraid of new things.” I was consulting with an AI startup, and their CTO took it upon himself to explain why the brand wasn’t gaining traction. They had a unique product, built on (his) stellar tech, and every business they had sold…