What do you call a magician that’s lost his magic? Ian. (You’re welcome). But what if your businesses loses its magic? What then?

Well one thing NOT to do is to look, or wait for, the next big thing. Because there is no next big thing. You know this because the last big thing was just as shit as the last big thing before that. And before that.

The next big thing is not going to save you. But you doing a few little things just might.

Our holiday cottages have been in the market for 3 years.  We’ve explored email marketing, specialist portals, generalist portals, offers, packages and more. But the thing that always works best, and gets people talking, are the little things.

Like turning a small back corridor into a Tiny Riverside Gallery, selling local artist’s work (100% goes to them). Like old Chesterfield Settees by a fizzy river. Like a Dream Corner with a blackboard for guests to write and read about the dreams of others. Like ‘I’m on holiday’ dog tags, with our phone number, so lost dogs are found quickly. Like giving all guests a ‘Bye for Now Bag’ containing a reusable water bottle and snacks as they check out. Like only using partners that care. Like Spoon, Spill, Who Gives a Crap and The Grateful Bread.

There is no next big thing. But fast and inexpensive little things? There are loads. You just need to now where to look.

Most businesses, when they’re talking about ‘we’ are actually talking about just themselves. That’s why customers ignore them.

“We were founded in 1998. We have more qualifications than… ahshitoffimnotbotheredImboredalready.”

The ‘we’ you should be talking about, is the business and its customers ‘we’. Both of you. Together.

When Nike said, “We Run Over a Million Miles a Day” in a 1970’s advert, this is what they were doing. It’s a lovely ad.

Here are the rules, follow them and your audience will feel involved and motivated to get involved with you. Don’t, and they won’t:

1. Make it clear that we’re in this together. Where ‘this’ is the precise, distinct and important change we’re making as-one.
2. Make sure the thing you’re in together, you both care deeply about.
3. Make sure the thing you’re in together, you’re enabling better than anyone.
4. Say it compellingly and consistently.

Most businesses, when they’re talking about ‘we’ are actually talking about just themselves. That’s why customers ignore them.

Lovely businesses don’t have secrets. In fact if they did have secrets, they wouldn’t be lovely at all. And truly lovely businesses don’t worry about being copied either. They want to be copied. Here’s why.

If you really are a lovely business, your primary focus is making lovely change that is good, important and worthwhile – for everyone. You do this by making a profit from doing your lovely thing, then getting excited because the lovely profit you made fuels more lovely.

Then, any special and unique way you fathomed to do the lovely – you tell people. Because it’s the lovely that drives you, and you want as many people as possible to do the lovely too. In fact, you publish the blueprint for your lovely as an invitation to be copied, thus accelerating the overall loveliness.

This approach to business is an abundance mentality at its purest and finest. That and a confidence in yourself that you will have more and better ideas for doing lovely in the future. You’ll share those discoveries too, of course.

I believe in this approach. But I rarely see it. I love its naivety, simplicity, generosity and loveliness. I love that it sounds almost anti-business. But most of all I love that, in fact, because there are a lot of lovely people in the world, they’d buy from lovely businesses like this in a fucking heartbeat.

Truly lovely businesses don’t have secrets and want to be copied. Seek them out. Buy from them. And change the world.

Great businesses are involving. They talk with you, not at you. They make you think and get involved. They connect. They make you feel the same way  Vic and Bob made you feel when they asked that question on Shooting Stars:

“True or false? Jim Kerr from the pop group Simple Minds was born in Spain and was actually christened Juan ?”

The only way that’s funny is if you think, get involved and connect.

And so it follows that if the way you communicate your business is all facty and explainy, that’s no good. Because it’s not involving, it’s just telling. And if the way you communicate your business sounds like some undentable crusade, that’s no good either. Because it’s not involving. It’s just a pipe dream.

Involving businesses do four things:

1. They are consistently focussed on making a clear and precise change.
2. They can clearly have significant impact on that change.
3. The change is change you care about.
4. The change is change you can tangibly help them to achieve.

With those four things in place, you have an involving business. Your audience will think, get involved and connect. And if you don’t? They just won’t.

Don’t buy anything beginning with ‘P’ from a Brand Strategist.

Good Brand Strategists help founders to craft and connect:

1. Organisational Objectives.
2. Brand.
3. Strategic and Tactical Marketing.
4. Creative/Design/Message/Writing.

4 feeds 3 feeds 2 feeds 1.

These days, I really don’t enjoy, so I don’t want to do, Presentations, Posturing, Post rationalisation, Pussyfooting around or Pretending that the answer can’t come quickly.

It makes me less expensive not because my day rate is low (it isn’t) but because you’re not paying for the P-stuff I don’t want to do or charge for.

So there you go. My advice. Don’t buy anything beginning with ‘P’ from a Brand Strategist.

I like asking founders I work with this question,

‘What’s the most magical thing about your business?”

I like asking founders this question because if there’s a vivid, sincere, heartfelt and consistently prioritised response in the founder’s mind, they physically change in the seconds before they answer.

‘What’s the most magical thing about your business?”

Eyes widen. They smile open-mouthed. Both eyebrows raise by a full 10mm. Their eyes lock on my eyes. The palms of their hands open and face me as fingers splay. And just before the founder speaks, their eyes –  quick-as-a-flash – flick right and left, as if checking for poachers as they reveal all. The founder becomes, well, childlike.

Try it. Ask yourself. ‘What’s the most magical thing about my business?” Answer quickly and instinctively. If you get the childlike thing, that’s amazing! Hold on to it. Home in on it. Anchor it at the heart of your business – for good. And if you don’t get the childlike thing, you likely have a problem. So pause. Rethink. Think back to why you started. Think back to the change you wanted to make – on day one. Be childlike. And go again.

I’m a nice person. When it rains, I pick worms up off the pavement so they don’t get squashed. I pop them somewhere safe, where they won’t drown either. See. Nice.

So when I’m working as a Brand Director and I ask someone I’m helping why they want me to help them to be famous for what everybody else is famous for, I’m not being rude. I’m basically asking why on earth they, you, or indeed anyone would want to spend a penny of marketing budget on marketing the entire category within which you trade, including your competition, as opposed to communicating the unique and owned reason why people should choose you over everybody else.

I’m saying that, before you’ve got something unique and owned to say, no matter how compellingly you say it, you’re still marketing you and everybody like you until you do. So don’t spend a penny on communicating. Don’t market at all. Do nothing.

And at that point, the client either sacks me and cracks on. Or we get to work. We get to work turning a same-thinking, marketing budget-gobbling clone – into a brand.

The kind of work I look to do is the kind of work I’d do for free. And the kind of people I look to work with are those who, knowing that, still pay me what’s fair and right.

In September 2023 I was on a boat, sailing home from a job when I first heard that the Sycamore Gap tree had been chopped down. It was numbing. Maybe because it’s 2 miles from my home (Old Post Office). Or because of the madness, the badness and the sadness woven in to such events.

In July 2024 I was invited to be Creative Lead on a creative communications project born to reinvigorate global awareness of, engagement with, and visits to Hadrians Wall and the Sycamore Gap site. And when I said it’s the kind of work I’d do for free, because the organisers are the kind of people I look to work with, they’re paying me what’s fair and right.

It’s a narrowly focussed project in terms of who can get involved. But it has global impact and effect. The chosen creative thinking and work will be seen around the world, for decades.

We launch this month. I’ll talk about it here, as-we-go.