Growth Marketing in the AI era. Why Original Thinking is essential.
I think it’s important to kick off with the point that growth can mean different things to different people. If I’m working with an entrepreneur who’s starting a business, they’ll be focused on growing an idea or vision into a minimal viable proposition to get funding. I’ve just done exactly this with Indyrct and Cotillion.
But if I’m partnering with a commercial growth leader in an established business that’s just had its first PE injection, the focus shifts to establishing the brand, and getting a commercially sharp and pipeline oriented go-to-market strategy in place.
Brand is the decision-making system
In all growth situations, strategy provides the framework for meeting your objectives. Brand guides how decisions are made and how every go-to-market interaction performs. As technology reshapes how organisations show up in our lives, brand remains the blueprint for how you behave, communicate and engage.
If you’d read this page six months ago, you’d have seen pretty much the same statement. My brand (or belief system) hasn’t changed. But the world around us has.
AI is changing where and how decisions are made, making it more important than ever to have a clearly defined brand guiding those decisions. And with automation and agentic AI increasingly driving execution, more decisions are being made autonomously, on your behalf.
This means your brand, strategy, content and campaigns need to work together with more clarity than ever.
If you’re not achieving growth or ROI from your campaigns, then something in that system isn’t working. Maybe your brand no longer represents your business in the right way – a common challenge for growing organisations. Maybe your content isn’t aligned with what your audiences are looking for. Or maybe you’re simply not connecting and engaging with people in a way that feels natural, authentic and useful to them.
Everything you’ll see on this website relates to solving these issues. And you can see how I solve them on my Approach: Original Thinking page.
Why Original Thinking is essential.
Technology is capable of delivering amazing insight. But it’s also capable of becoming the great leveller.
The more marketing is driven by systems that optimise patterns and reward what’s proven, repeatable and efficient – the more important it is to define (and protect) what makes you distinctive.
Right now, a brand that encapsulates all your original thinking is more important than ever. Brand protects your essential ingredients and puts them in a framework that enables you to amplify originality, rather than recycled ideas and content, that are being used in hundreds of different places by lots of people, who are starting to look, feel and sound just like you.
Why my Approach works
My approach works because it’s collaborative, inclusive and transparent. When I develop a growth strategy built on a distinctive brand using original thinking, I bring you and your team on the journey with me.
It is deliberately hands-on and collaborative – featuring one-on-one interviews, interactive and collaborative workshops. And most importantly, it gives you clear documentation with clear rationales and background thinking.
I can feature as much detail as your team requires. It’s entirely your choice.
This ensures your brand is grounded in reality and directly connected to your business or operational objectives. It aligns to your vision and commercial strategy, and translates into clear frameworks embedded into your go to market workflows – including AI-driven execution.
With clear dependencies tied into pipeline, growth and go-to-market decisions, you can accurately measure outcomes and ROI. The result is a brand that moves beyond positioning or ‘just a deliverable’ to a decision-making and operating system your team uses every day to drive growth.