How brands really grow.
Short, practical breakdowns of real marketing and ecommerce decisions, the same ones I share with 4,000+ people on LinkedIn. No theory, just what actually moves the number.
Borrow the moment: how Paddy Power turned Obama's pint into an ad
When Obama visited Ireland in May 2011, Paddy Power renamed 13 shops O'Bama Power and took bets on which pub he would drink his Guinness in. Why borrowing a moment everyone is already watching beats paying to build your own.
ReadEvery number was right. Most of the advice was already done.
Five agency documents arrived before a marketing meeting. The figures matched ours to the penny. Most of the recommendations had already shipped. Why accurate data is not the same as a current view.
ReadDraw ketchup: why 97% of people drew a Heinz bottle
Heinz asked people to draw ketchup with no brand mentioned and 97% drew a Heinz bottle. Then an image generator did the same. Why the picture in a customer's head is worth more than the name, and how brands rub it out.
ReadDo you need a marketplace integrator? Not until something breaks.
Do you need a marketplace integrator like ChannelEngine or Linnworks, or can a small brand manage marketplaces manually? Count the failures, not the channels. Three signs it is time, and one reason to do the first marketplace by hand.
ReadAre marketplace sales cannibalising your own website? Four checks before you panic.
Marketplace sales cannibalising your own website sales is a real worry and a measurable one. Four checks an operator can run in an afternoon, and what the overlap actually costs you.
ReadDoing a Ratner: the joke the customers heard
In 1991 Gerald Ratner told a room of directors his own decanters were total crap. Around £500m came off the company. Why cheap was never the problem, and making customers feel daft was.
ReadThe progress bar that told shoppers they had barely started
A £100 free gift offer, a checkout bar showing about 17% full at £70, and why a progress bar that understates the distance tells shoppers the goal is far away just as they get close.
ReadYou either love it or hate it: why Marmite stopped chasing the haters
In 1996 Marmite stopped trying to win over people who hate it and put them in the slogan. Seventeen years later its Neglect spoof drew 504 complaints and was cleared. Why picking the half you are for beats sanding your brand down for everyone.
ReadYour site search is following instructions nobody remembers writing
A shopper typed "autumn wreath" and got 970 results led by Christmas wreaths. The cause was six old keywords in the wrong group, and the fix built nothing. Why site search needs rereading every season.
ReadYour best performing channel might be the one with the highest returns
Ad platforms report the sale and never hear about the refund. In a category with heavy returns, the channel showing the best ROAS can be the one losing you the most money.
ReadHow many products should you list when you launch on a new marketplace?
Advice about launch SKU counts is written for new brands choosing what to make. If you already have a catalogue, the question is which slice to send first, and the answer is not all of it.
ReadShould you join a marketplace's Black Friday event? Answer three questions first.
The retailer's Black Friday invite looks like free traffic. Before you say yes, check the deal against your own website, make sure your stock can survive success, and decide the price you go back to on Tuesday.
ReadShould've gone to Specsavers: the advert the whole country runs for free
Specsavers wrote a tagline in 2002 that never mentions glasses. It got shouted at referees, turned into a two-day press ad after Lampard's disallowed goal, and repeated by the Speaker of the House of Commons. Why a line about someone else travels further than a line about you.
ReadOne clean test run proved nothing. The page broke one load in three.
A Shopify collection grid painted three products across, then jumped to four, roughly one load in three. Why a single test run called it fine, where the rogue CSS was hiding, and the one-line fix.
ReadPatagonia bought a Black Friday page to tell people not to buy the jacket
On the busiest shopping day of the American year, Patagonia ran a full page in the New York Times headlined Don't Buy This Jacket, and printed what their own fleece cost to make underneath it. A board member called it hypocritical before it ran.
ReadYour ROAS target might be a CPA target with a better name
Set a target ROAS on conversion actions that are all worth 1 and you have not set a ROAS target at all. You have set a cost cap, and quite possibly one above what a lead is actually worth.
ReadCadbury answered a salmonella recall with a gorilla playing the drums
The year before, Cadbury recalled more than a million bars. The fix was 90 seconds of paid television with no chocolate in it, no message, and a marketing director who scored the first edit three out of ten.
ReadThe marketplace keeps the customer. Here is what you can still do about it.
You made the sale, packed the box and never got the email address. Every loyalty tool assumes you own the customer record. When you do not, these are the levers that still work.
ReadShould you charge the same price on a marketplace as on your own site?
Marketplace commission comes out of the same price the customer sees, so parity means you earn less per order there. Here is how to think about the gap without starting a price war with yourself.
ReadWhat to ask your marketplace account manager (not how you are doing)
The quarterly call defaults to your own sales figures read back to you. Here is what to ask your marketplace account manager instead: the things only they can see, and the two topics that waste half of every call.
ReadTwo clients ended in the same week, so we bought a van
Kruze crossed £100,000 and 1,000 leads in three months. It started because my entire income, two consulting clients, disappeared inside seven days with the work finished and the invoices unpaid.
ReadThe sale price that read the shop window backwards
A sticky mobile buying bar copied prices from the page text and showed every sale price the wrong way round, with the old price as the price and the real one struck through. Why a buying bar should read product data, not the screen.
ReadThe Christmas garland that was somehow personalised
One inverted condition in a product feed rule labelled 1,828 of 1,905 products as personalised. The Shopping campaigns built around that label did exactly what they were told, and looked broken. Why a campaign that will not spend is often a feed problem.
ReadBrewDog put one word in a tweet and it cost the founder £470,000
Ten solid gold Punk IPA cans were hidden in twelve-packs. What turned up was gold plated. The ASA upheld the complaints, and James Watt paid the winners out of his own pocket.
ReadLive is not the same as seen. Seven new products were on page 10.
Seven new Christmas products went live before a seasonal launch and nobody could find them. They were on page 10 of 10. Why a green status in the admin tells you nothing about what a shopper actually sees.
ReadHow long should you give a new sales channel before you kill it?
Nobody can tell you whether ninety days is enough, because revenue is the wrong thing to watch early. Judge a new channel on the things that move first, and write the kill criteria before you launch.
ReadOatly printed the complaint on a T-shirt before anyone could make it
Oatly knew people would hate its Super Bowl advert. The free shirt reading I totally hated that Oatly commercial was ready before the spot aired, and it sold out by the Monday evening.
ReadAdd up what your ad platforms claim. If it matches your revenue, they are lying.
Google, Meta and every other ad platform count the same sale independently, so their reported revenue can add up to everything your shop actually took. Here is the ten minute check that tells you how badly, and what to do with the answer.
ReadHow to stop overselling across Shopify and marketplaces. Your last sofa is in three shop windows.
Sync apps lag hardest when you sell fastest, so they cannot stop overselling on their own. Size your stock buffer to what you sell in one sync gap at peak, and hold it back on the channels where a cancellation costs the most.
ReadThe check that could only ever say yes
A verification step passed every day for weeks. Then it passed on a page that does not exist. Why a check you have never seen fail is not evidence of anything.
ReadCompare the Market could not afford its own name, so it invented a meerkat
In 2008 the site was 16th in its category and the words it needed were the most expensive on Google. Rather than outbid anyone, VCCP built national demand for a word with no competition and no reserve price.
ReadCostco has sold the same hot dog for $1.50 since 1985. On purpose.
Costco loses money on its most famous product and refuses to raise the price. The hot dog is not a menu item, it is the cheapest trust-building exercise in retail.
ReadWeetabix spent £5,000 on a photo of beans and ended up in the House of Commons
In 2021 Weetabix poured Heinz baked beans over two Weetabix and the whole country argued about it. The budget was under five thousand pounds. The reach came from six hundred other brands, and that was the plan.
ReadA gap in your spreadsheet is not a queue of customers
Five obvious pages were missing from an otherwise tidy grid. Building them was the easy call and the wrong one. Why a structural gap is never proof of demand.
ReadOld Spice worked out that men were not the ones buying the body wash. Then it made the advert for their girlfriends.
In February 2010 Procter and Gamble noticed that women were making most of the purchasing decisions for men's hygiene products. Wieden and Kennedy made an advert that talks to her, about him, and it took the Cannes Grand Prix and a Primetime Emmy. The lesson in writing for the buyer, not the user.
ReadHow much promotional funding should you offer a marketplace? Do not answer with a percentage.
A retailer asks what percentage you co-fund on promotions. Naming a number sets a floor for every future promo. Measure the gap between your marketplace price and your own site price first, because the discount may already be sitting in it.
ReadEvery guide to marketplace ads assumes you are on Amazon
How sponsored products actually work on retailer marketplaces like the Mirakl ones behind Debenhams and friends: smaller auctions, catalogue gates, and the bulk-upload trap nobody warns you about.
ReadPiers Morgan tried to bury the Greggs vegan sausage roll. He accidentally launched it.
In January 2019 Greggs released a vegan sausage roll with a straight-faced Apple parody, Piers Morgan called them PC-ravaged clowns, and Greggs replied with seven words that helped power a record year. The lesson in feeding your loudest critic.
Read115 reviews lost to nine. It was never the reviews.
A waste business with 115 five star reviews ranks fourth in Leeds Maps and vanishes completely in Bradford, where a rival with nine reviews gets in. The Google map pack is decided by the pin, not the profile, and hiding your address does not move it.
ReadA chicken shop ran out of chicken. KFC apologised with one word: FCK.
In 2018 nearly 900 KFC restaurants closed because the chicken could not reach them. Then KFC ran a full-page ad with an empty bucket relabelled FCK, and turned a national embarrassment into the most admired apology in British advertising. The lesson in owning a screw-up.
ReadThe item was not blocked. Nobody had ever tried it.
Blocked and dead are honest statuses, because someone paid an attempt to earn them. Untested is the one that looks like progress and costs you a fortnight.
ReadYour 5.0 rating is costing you sales. A perfect score looks fake.
Northwestern found purchase likelihood peaks at 4.2 to 4.7 stars and falls as you approach 5.0. A wall of perfect reviews reads as filtered. Why a few honest one-stars sell more than manufactured praise.
ReadA caterpillar cake went to court. Aldi answered a lawsuit with a joke.
When M&S sued Aldi over Cuthbert the Caterpillar in 2021, Aldi did not lawyer up in silence. It logged on, started #FreeCuthbert, and turned a trademark claim into millions in free marketing. The lesson in brand humour.
ReadIs Mirakl Ads worth it? Yes, but the SKU list is not the lever.
Mirakl Ads sponsored products does work, but the SKU roster everyone keeps re-pasting is the wrong lever. What actually moves ROAS is budget allocation, click-through rate, and knowing which categories lose money the moment you advertise them.
ReadCustomers add to cart, then vanish. Here is where you actually lose them.
Why customers abandon their cart at checkout: it is almost never the price of the product. It is the surprise on the last screen. An operator's view of where the sale really leaks.
ReadA cereal put a fake footballer on a billboard. A billboard is not a media buy.
How Surreal cereal puts celebrity namesakes on billboards (a property surveyor called Morgan Rogers) and turns one panel into millions of views. Out of home is content that happens to be printed big, not a media placement.
ReadA business asked me to fix its ads. The problem was 239 leads it never quoted.
Before you buy more traffic, count the leads you already have that never got an answer. A real CRM diagnostic: quoted leads closed at 62 percent, the ones never quoted at 4.8.
ReadYou read the number. You did not read the list.
A metric you glance at daily is not a surface you have checked. What one week-old entry on a list I open every morning taught me about the difference between counting and looking.
ReadThe number was not wrong. It was too young.
A metric read at thirteen hours said one thing. The same metric at forty eight hours said something thirteen times bigger. Nothing changed except the clock, and most operators are calling results before the counting has finished.
ReadA test with no date is just an opinion
A set of pages went from one internal link each to forty four. Nobody checked whether it worked for fifteen days. When it finally got measured, the pages had gone backwards, and the answer had been sitting in Search Console the whole time.
ReadLinkedIn built a button to flag your posts as AI slop. It is really a taste test.
LinkedIn's new 'Seems like AI slop' button has been tapped over a million times in two weeks and cuts flagged posts to 40 percent fewer views. It is not an AI detector. It is a taste test, and the fix is not sounding less like a robot.
ReadWhat should you automate first? Not the biggest time sink.
Every answer to this question is a list of tools. Here is the three-part test an operator actually uses to pick the first job to automate, and why the biggest time sink is usually the wrong one.
ReadShopify DDU vs DDP: which should you actually use?
Shopify DDU vs DDP, explained for merchants: what each one does, when to charge duty at checkout and when to let the customer pay on delivery, and the question that actually decides it.
ReadWe fixed the site speed. The slowest thing on the page was a stock photo.
Render-blocking scripts cut from ten to one, lazy loading on, and 159 pages were still serving a 2.8MB hero borrowed from someone else's server. An operator's note on why the performance work looked finished.
ReadShopify is killing DDU. On 24 August, your checkout total goes up.
Shopify Managed Markets ends DDU on 24 August and moves stores to DDP, so duty is collected at checkout instead of on the doorstep. The doorstep ambush dies. The checkout total rises. Here is the one number to watch.
ReadAldi wins by selling you less choice
A typical Aldi carries around 1,500 products. A full-size supermarket carries tens of thousands. Why range is a bill you send the customer, not a service you provide.
ReadThe audit said zero. The page said otherwise.
An automated check reported that a claim on the homepage did not exist. It was sitting there in large type. Why a zero is the easiest wrong answer to believe.
ReadDuolingo killed its own mascot. It was the cheapest advert it ever ran.
In February 2025, two days after the Super Bowl, Duolingo announced its owl was dead. No ad slot, just a dead cartoon bird, and it landed like three Super Bowl spots.
ReadA first order is not a customer. It is an audition.
Why retention beats acquisition on pure maths: the new customer is the expensive one, and the profit lives in the second and third orders most brands never chase.
ReadWayfair is not ignoring your listing. It cannot see it.
Why a Wayfair listing gets no impressions: it is almost never an advertising problem. An operator's fix from a channel that grew 1,690 percent year on year.
ReadOnline, your product photo is the only salesperson you have
In a shop the customer can touch, weigh and try the thing. Online that whole experience collapses into one image, and most brands treat it like an afterthought.
ReadThe email address with no letterbox
My site listed a professional contact email that could not receive a single message. The gap between looking finished and being finished is one boring line of DNS nobody tests.
ReadRyanair sells seats, not windows. That one line is a marketing masterclass.
The most hated airline in Europe runs the marketing everyone else envies. The lesson is not about being rude. It is about owning your flaw out loud before the customer can.
ReadThe ten-second window most brands mail away in a plain brown box
There is exactly one moment when a customer gives you their full, undivided attention. It is the ten seconds they open your parcel, and most brands waste it.
ReadHow a $1.4B water brand won the most boring aisle in the shop
Liquid Death sells mountain water, the same thing that falls out of the sky for free, and turned it into one of the fastest-growing drinks brands on the planet. Here is what most brands miss.
ReadYou do not own your followers. You rent them.
A brand spent three years building 200,000 followers. One algorithm change and their reach fell off a cliff. The only audience you actually own is the one you can reach without asking permission.
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