Blogs

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ Most organisations invest in marketing training at some point. Conferences, online courses, workshops, off-site days. The spend is real. The results, more often than not, are disappointing. Not because the training is necessarily poor, though sometimes it is. But because generic training programmes, however well designed, are built for an imaginary average participant. They are not built for your team, your challenges, your strategy or the specifi

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ Most organisations believe they understand their customers. Very few actually do. That is not a criticism. It is an observation borne out repeatedly when working with marketing teams and senior leaders across a wide range of sectors. When pressed, most teams are working from a combination of historic data, anecdotal feedback and untested assumptions that have accumulated over time and hardened into something that feels like knowledge but is not qu

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ Marketing leadership is one of the most complex and demanding roles in modern business. Marketing directors and CMOs are expected to be strategists, creative thinkers, data analysts, people leaders and commercial operators, often simultaneously. They must manage up to a board that does not always understand marketing, manage down to a team that needs direction and development, and manage outwards to agencies, partners and customers, all while stay

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ The term brand strategy gets used a great deal in business. It appears in agency pitches, board presentations and marketing plans with such regularity that it has started to lose its meaning. And yet, the organisations that have invested seriously in brand strategy are almost always the ones that grow with more consistency, compete with more confidence and retain customers with less effort. So what does brand strategy actually involve? And when do

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ Ask most business leaders what their single biggest marketing challenge is, and the answer is rarely the strategy. It is the team. Finding the right people, developing them effectively, keeping them aligned and motivated these are the questions that keep marketing directors and CMOs awake far more than any campaign brief. And yet, building a high-performing marketing team is one of the least systematically addressed challenges in business. Most or

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ Most boardrooms agree that marketing matters. Far fewer understand what truly excellent marketing looks like and fewer still have built the conditions for it to thrive. That gap is not a marketing problem. It is a leadership problem. And it is costing organisations more than they realise. Marketing excellence is not a campaign that lands well. It is not a rebrand that turns heads. It is not even a quarter where the numbers go in the right directio