The best thing about your business never leaves the building.

We need to do more marketing.

I hear it most weeks, from founders running twenty people and from CEOs with a full marketing team. Enquiries have flattened, a competitor seems to be everywhere, the website’s started to embarrass everyone. So the conversation jumps to a new site, some ads, a content calendar. Something you can point at.

Before any of that, I ask the leadership team one question. Why should someone choose you?

Ask five of them and you’ll usually get four answers. The founder talks ambition. Sales talks relationships. The website lists capabilities, and the marketing reaches for quality, service and innovation. None of it is wrong. It just doesn’t add up to the same business.

Here’s what took me years to see clearly. The value is almost always there. These are good businesses, and their best customers know it. What’s missing is the translation from the inside to the outside.

Our clients keep saying versions of the same sentence. Below&Above’s co-founder: “We knew what made Below&Above different. We just couldn’t make other people see it.” Wild Chiropractic’s founder said they “couldn’t articulate why we were different in a way that meant anything outside the building.” KSA Architects’ principal: “We always knew how we worked. We just didn’t have the language for it.”

Three industries. One problem. And it isn’t one that more marketing fixes. More marketing just broadcasts the gap to a bigger audience.

The difference, without the jargon

Brand strategy decides what your business should be known for, and why anyone should pick it over the alternatives. It’s the decision about what gets out.

Marketing strategy decides how far it goes: who you go after, what you offer, at what price, through which channels, with how much money. Mark Ritson’s shorthand is hard to beat: “Marketing strategy is where we play and how we win in the market.”

The marketing plan is the bit everyone sees. Channels, campaigns, content, timing, budget. Plenty of what gets called a marketing strategy is really a plan, reassuringly organised, without explaining why any of it should work.

And that’s where things go sideways. Skip straight to the plan, and the brand still gets decided. Just not by you.

Which comes first is the wrong fight

The textbook answer is that positioning lives inside a good marketing strategy, and that’s fair. You don’t need two documents finished six months apart.

What you do need is for the decision about what you stand for to be made by the leadership team, on purpose, before serious money goes out the door. Not by the web designer in week three. Not by the agency in round two of concepts. Otherwise the designer, the copywriter, the sales team and the agency each work out what the business stands for on their own. They might all do good work. They might also hand you four different answers.

This happens far more than anyone admits. The 2021 BetterBriefs global study surveyed 1,731 marketers and agency people across 70 countries. Six in ten of the marketers admitted using the creative process to clarify their strategy. And while 78% of marketers believed their briefs gave clear strategic direction, only 5% of agencies agreed.

You’ve probably watched it play out. The website gets rewritten because leadership can’t agree on the proposition. A campaign gets knocked back because it doesn’t “feel like us”, when nobody has ever written down what “us” is. Round three gets commissioned to answer a question that should have been in the brief.

Deciding early isn’t bureaucracy. It gives you something clearer than personal taste to judge the work against.

Inside-out doesn’t mean navel-gazing

Here’s where brand people, me included, get it wrong. We fall in love with what makes a business different and forget how people actually buy.

True uniqueness is mostly a fantasy. As Ritson puts it, “Finding something unique is almost impossible and when you do find it then it’s replicable in one way or another relatively quickly.” Researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute go further, with evidence that buyers rarely see their chosen brand as all that different and buy it anyway.

So getting what’s inside out isn’t about inventing a claim nobody else can make. It’s about choosing the true thing that matters most to customers, and making sure people recognise you and think of you at the moment they need you. Professor Jenni Romaniuk calls that mental availability: “being easily thought of in buying situations.”

That matters more than most leadership teams realise, because most of your future customers aren’t buying right now. Ehrenberg-Bass professor John Dawes estimates businesses change providers like their bank or law firm around once every five years, which means something like 95% aren’t in the market in any given quarter. He’s clear it’s a rule of thumb, not a precise number. The implication is still brutal. Most of what your marketing earns is whatever people remember when they’re finally ready. If what they remember is “quality and service”, you’ve paid to be forgotten.

For an accounting firm, those moments might be buying a business, hiring the first employee or outgrowing the current adviser. Same firm, three very different moments. Inside-out means starting with what’s genuinely true about the firm and connecting it to what’s happening in the client’s world. Start inside. Don’t stay there.

What it looks like when it gets out

When Validated Property Group came to Hum, the brief was straightforward: help us market the business more effectively.

Validated had serious expertise across valuation, acquisition, investment and advisory. From the outside, it looked like a broad collection of property services, with capability everywhere and no single idea explaining why it was worth more together than apart.

So we didn’t start with the marketing. We looked at how clients actually used the team and how the wider property-advisory market worked, and the insight fell out. Property decisions rarely happen in isolation, but property advice often does. Clients were stitching the picture together themselves. Validated had the rare combination of expertise to stitch it for them.

That turned a list of services into a connected advisory model, expressed in the line “Clarity behind decisions.” The strategy didn’t invent new capability. It revealed what the existing capability added up to. The value was always inside. It just finally got out.

As founder Blake Lieschke put it: “What Hum gave us was clarity. On the inside and the outside. Since that work, the way I talk about our business has completely changed. Clients are responding to it.”

And the marketing brief didn’t disappear. It got useful, because there was finally something specific to build.

Stop starting again

Get the inside-out work right and you earn something most businesses never get: permission to stop starting again.

I spent years on big brand accounts across agency and client side, and the discipline that mattered most had nothing to do with budget. It was knowing what stays fixed and what’s free to change. The campaign can change. The channel mix can change. The thing underneath can’t keep moving.

The numbers back it. System1 and the IPA’s Compound Creativity study looked at 80 brands in the IPA Effectiveness Databank. Among the most consistent fifth, 38% of campaigns reported very large profit gains. Among the least consistent fifth, 20%. It’s award-entry data, so correlation, not proof, but nearly double is hard to wave away.

Consistent doesn’t mean boring. Give a creative team “we’re experienced and customer-focused” and you’ll get wallpaper. Give them a true, sharp position and they’ve finally got something to dramatise.

Three questions before you spend another dollar

None of this means hitting pause for a six-month brand project. If the market already gets what you’re about, your problem might be reach, a clunky buying process or enquiries nobody follows up. A new brand won’t fix any of that.

But before you commission the next website or campaign, put these to your leadership team:

1. What’s true about this business that our best customers value, and everyone else hasn’t heard?

2. What’s happening in a customer’s world at the moment we should come to mind?

3. Will the work we’re about to commission say that, or are we paying someone to work it out for us?

The answers don’t need a hundred slides. They do need to be specific enough to settle an argument. If they fit on a page, go and get loud. If they don’t, that’s the work to do first.

Because the next dollar you spend should build on the last one, not start from scratch. That’s what getting your business humming from the inside out actually means.

Think your best stuff is stuck inside the building? No pitch. Just a conversation. Book a diagnostic call

If you want a next step, see Hum’s fractional CMO page.