How Everything Truly Great Is Inspired

This is the story of a trap we all fall into. Every single entrepreneur or creator without exception is thrown off course by following a similar pattern. It doesn’t matter if you are on the board of a Fortune 500 or a designer trying to get her blog off the ground. The same struggle happens…

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The Meaning Business

In the past most businesses gained competitive advantage from size, scale or dominance. Whoever the biggest marketing budget and could sell the most stuff won. Success was more about what you did and much less about the way that you did it. But today it’s the way that you go about your business and how…

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My New Book—Marketing: A Love Story

My new book is here. You can buy it now on Amazon in paperback and in Kindle. I’ve wanted to find a way to juxtapose the concepts of marketing and love in a book for a long time. I like to think that even if you never opened the book, just owning it—seeing it on…

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How To Get Attention

Everyone will tell you that in the age of distraction it’s harder than ever to get attention. Actually that’s not strictly true. It’s not difficult to interrupt the rock star as she checks into her hotel to ask for a selfie—just a quick tap on the shoulder, fake smiles and you’re done. It’s easier than…

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Where Are The Holes?

It’s hard to be objective when you evaluate your competitors. When you’re feeling vulnerable there is a tendency to think about all of the things your competitors are doing right and how you don’t measure up against them. The irony is that opportunities are realised and groundbreaking ideas are brought to life by doing exactly…

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What if?

What if I don’t do what the bus driver says? What if sharing my dream makes people believe the impossible is possible? What if there were no buttons? What it we made the wallet disappear? What if the ‘one more thing’ changed everything? What if we taught our kids how to lose? What if this…

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What Lens Do You Use?

I’m a huge fan of Human’s of New York. It’s the kind of generous and rare content on the Internet that makes you grateful, sad and optimistic all at once. Brandon (lying down in the photo above because he is 6’4″ and always wants to get down to the level of his subject), will happily…

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Two Simple Questions Most Content Marketers Forget To Ask

For fifty years marketing was all about pushing. We used advertising to get us closer to our end goal—which was more sales. Today marketing is more about drawing people closer. We use content (amongst other things) to help us build relationships with potential customers. And yet sometimes we forget that we’re no longer marketing like…

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Lessons In Non-Profit Storytelling From The Best In The World

If you think times are tough in a marketing world where you’re actually providing goods or services in exchange for money, spare a thought for the marketers of charities who need to convince us to part with money without wrapping up something for us to take home. One of the biggest challenges non-profits face is…

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Play To Your Strengths

If you look hard enough at what’s going right (and sometimes wrong) in a business there are always lessons to be learned. Take the story of Tom the decorator who built a great business over many years, then suddenly seemed to lose his way. Part two of that story explains why Tom succeeded in the…

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