Our Latest Thinking

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ A customer comparing your brand with its competitors should be able to answer one straightforward question: why choose you? For many businesses, the answer is surprisingly difficult to explain. Teams talk about quality, experience, innovation or excellent service, but their competitors often make the same claims. The result is a proposition that sounds reassuring without giving customers a clear reason to prefer the brand. A strong brand propositi

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ Every marketing leader eventually faces the same uncomfortable question: how much of what we believe about our customers is actually true, and how much is assumption? Too often, the answer is uncomfortable. Teams accumulate internal beliefs about why customers buy, what they value and how they perceive the brand, and over time those beliefs get treated as fact, whether or not the evidence supports them. This is where genuine customer understanding

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ Every marketing leader eventually runs into the same limitation: the strategy is sound, but the team delivering it is not ready to execute it consistently. A brand can have a clear position, a strong proposition and a well-researched customer base and still underperform, because the people responsible for bringing it to life lack the confidence, capability or alignment to do so. This is where marketing team development becomes essential. Marketing

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ Marketing leaders are under constant pressure to deliver. Growth targets need to be achieved, customers need to be understood, brands need to remain relevant and marketing teams need the skills and confidence to make better decisions. Achieving all of these objectives consistently requires more than individual campaigns or short-term marketing tactics. It requires marketing excellence. Marketing excellence is about creating the capabilities, custo

By Dr Mark Smith, Direction™ Every marketing leader eventually faces the same question from the boardroom: why should a customer choose us over everyone else? Too often, the answer is vague. A brand might point to product features, service quality or price, but none of these consistently explain why customers choose one option over a near-identical alternative. This is where a brand positioning framework becomes essential. A brand positioning framework gives marketing leaders

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