We Don't Do 'Reasonable' Marketing

Most digital marketing is designed to survive a meeting, not to change a mind. The charts look neat. The decks are well-organised. The arguments seem reasonable. And the work leaves customers completely unmoved.

When you simplify it, this happens because most marketers treat rationality as the end destination, while for us, it is only the entry ticket.

It’s not the work’s rationality that truly moves people, but its emotional resonance. This is the upper tier, the one that influences how people feel rather than how they calculate, that builds a brand in ways performance dashboards rarely capture or describe.

Our role isn’t to be the most sensible voice in the room. Our role is to be the only ones asking, “What would make this feel like magic to the person on the other side of the screen?”

Spreadsheets Describe Reality But Don’t Control It.

Many marketing decisions start with the easiest metrics to measure, such as time on site, cost per lead, click-through rate, or number of sessions. However, you can optimise each of these metrics and still end up with a product that feels irritating, cold, or forgettable.

Imagine a sign-up process where you remove three fields and save six seconds. The conversion rate increases slightly. The presentation looks excellent for the quarterly review.

Now imagine a different question.

Instead of asking “How do we reduce friction in these steps?”, the more impactful question is “How do we make the moment someone joins feel like an upgrade to their identity?”

That shift takes you away from the safe lane of micro-optimisations and into territory that feels much less predictable. It could be a welcome video recorded by a real person on their phone, a small yet meaningful perk that appears unexpectedly a few days later, or a simple ritual that makes someone feel genuinely “in” rather than merely “registered.”

None of these results appear clearly in a one-week A/B test, but all of them influence the story people tell themselves about you.

We treat metrics as tools, not as absolute authorities. They show us what occurred, but they do not determine what is worth trying.

The Real KPI Is How Reality Feels

Consider a typical SaaS example: two companies charge the same monthly fee and offer nearly identical features, yet one focuses its messaging on a specific efficiency benefit like “Save an average of 12.7 hours per week,” while the other directly appeals to how users feel after using it with statements such as “Never dread your reporting day again” or “Sleep without that small knot in your stomach about unpaid invoices.”

Both claims can be accurate, but only one speaks to the user’s lived experience.

The rational mind cares about price and features. The emotional mind cares about relief, status, reduced uncertainty, and small bursts of pride.

We create campaigns and journeys guided by a simple principle. If the metrics improve technically but the overall experience remains the same, we’re likely addressing the wrong issue.

Reframing Value Is More Powerful Than Adding Features

New features are expensive, while new frames cost almost nothing. History is full of moments where someone simply rephrased what already existed and unlocked entirely new behaviour.

The digital world is full of examples: step counters turning a casual walk into reaching 10,000 steps, streaks transforming light language practice into maintaining a 40-day chain. The word creator turns someone who posts online into a person with an identity.

Beneath the surface, nothing substantial has altered, but the significance attributed to each action has transformed considerably.

We apply that same perspective when examining a client’s product or service.

Questions we often ask: can this sound less like software and more like a superpower, can it shift from the language of a tool to the language of belonging, and can it make someone feel early to something valuable rather than late to the trend?

More often than not, the greatest breakthrough in a project arises from a single phrase in a headline, plan name, or onboarding step that finally resonates with how customers want to see themselves.

Stop Benchmarking Your Competitors And Start Exploiting Their Blind Spots.

Most categories tend to default to a single obsession. Email platforms focus on deliverability and template builders, payment tools centre their identity on fees and security badges, and agencies cling to ROAS screenshots and case study graphs.

When an entire category unites around a single altar, something predictable happens: differentiation disappears, buying choices blur, and everything starts to feel indistinguishable.

We conduct a simple exercise with clients. List every aspect of the customer experience you could compete on. Circle the ones everyone in your category talks obsessively about. Examine carefully the areas no one mentions on their homepage.

Those overlooked areas are usually where the magic happens.

For example:

Every CRM vendor claims to offer integrations. Very few take emotional responsibility during the first 7 days of use. Make that week feel guided, forgiving, and confidence-boosting. You immediately notice a difference.

Every e-commerce brand claims about delivery speed. Very few focus on how returns feel. Make returns respectful, straightforward, and free of blame, and people will quietly trust you more than faster competitors.

Every agency boasts about its data and processes. Very few genuinely communicate, in plain language, where they would personally risk money and reputation, and where they would not.

We call this blind-spot arbitrage. You win not by copying what leaders excel at, but by being uncomfortably strong where they are absent.

The Explore Budget And Optionality As A Line Item

If your marketing plan fits perfectly into a spreadsheet, it is too cautious. Real breakthroughs rarely arise from campaigns that fit neatly into a forecast.

They usually develop from small bets that felt slightly awkward at the time, whether it was a strange landing page angle the brand police disliked, an email sequence that sounded like a real person having a difficult day rather than a polished mascot, or a scruffy community experiment that started as an unmeasured Slack group.

In nature, the equivalent is a small fraction of bees ignoring the hive’s instructions and flying off in random directions. Most of these journeys are pointless. Occasionally, one of them discovers an orchard that sustains the colony for a season.

Within our work with clients, we embed this mindset into the system by reserving a specific portion of the budget for experiments that may seem pointless, applying a different standard of judgment so these ideas aren’t suppressed by the same logic that governs search adverts, and committing to share the insights openly even when outcomes are disappointing.

If every test “works”, the portfolio is too cautious, and if nothing works, the portfolio is chaos.

The interesting brands exist in the tension between the two, where a few projects initially appear embarrassingly bold during planning but seem like obvious moves when revenue is reviewed two years later.

Surprise Beats Polish

Customer satisfaction is straightforward to attain. Fulfil your promises. Steer clear of obvious mistakes. Respond within a reasonable timeframe.

The issue is that satisfaction is cheap in the memory. It’s rarely discussed in the group chat.

Surprise lives longer.

Surprise is the newsletter that comes with a brief, brutally honest founder’s note about a mistake they made.

Surprise is a subscription that adds a handwritten joke on the inside flap of the box.

Surprise is the churn survey that doesn’t try to trap you; instead, it provides a genuinely helpful resource that supports you wherever you go next.

These touches seem minor compared to the vast scale of ad platforms and data stacks. But they are not tiny in the customer’s story.

They do not always appear on a dashboard either, but they often explain why, two years from now, your retention graph looks very different from the rest of your market.

Your Most Advanced Channel Is Still A Human Being

AI will take over much of frontline communication. Every year, the automated parts sound increasingly convincing. That does not render humans obsolete; it makes them rare.

Rarity changes value.

Reflect on the single most positive support experience you’ve had with any company in the past year, whether it was a representative who genuinely went off-script to resolve your issue, an account manager who advised you not to upgrade just yet, or a salesperson who recommended a competitor because it was truly a better fit for your needs.

A single conversation like that can disproportionately influence how you view the entire brand.

Treat those human touchpoints as assets rather than overhead, which means allowing people to be generous when the rulebook says “no,” equipping them with enough context from your CRM and analytics so they appear almost psychic rather than reactive, and training them in simple storytelling instead of just objection-handling, so they can reframe situations rather than merely close tickets.

You can automate contact, but care cannot be automated.

How We Actually Work With These Ideas

All of this sounds romantic until it hits a marketing plan. Here is what it looks like when we apply this thinking to a real digital strategy.

We examine not just numbers but narratives. What story does your pricing tell, your onboarding tell, your retargeting tell? Where are you unintentionally causing people to feel small, rushed, guilty, or bored?

We examine your category for obsession and neglect. What rivals proudly measure. What they pretend does not exist. That gap is where we build your unfair advantage.

We allocate an explore budget focused not on incremental lift, but on non-linear upside. Strange campaigns are part of this. It also includes experiments with language, format, and channels that others in your space may be ignoring.

We craft one or two unforgettable brand moments that are deliberately difficult to imitate. A particular ritual, visual, phrase, or interactive element that is so unique to you that competitors will look foolish trying to copy it.

We view your human touchpoints as strategic assets, not as “cost of service”. Scripts are revised. Constraints are adjusted. People earn trust.

Average marketers tend to adjust sliders back and forth. We prefer asking questions that make the sliders themselves seem less significant.

If you want work that only ever looks good on a slide, there are cheaper places to get it. If you want to change how people experience you, that’s where our kind of thinking truly makes a difference.