The promise gap
A claim can help win the deal and still make the customer harder to keep.
Insights and selected work
Articles and case studies on communication, strategy and making complex ideas clear.
Insights and selected work entries
Category
Positioning is not finished when the workshop ends
Positioning becomes useful when people can apply it, adapt it and recognise when the evidence genuinely requires it to change.
The cheaper the draft, the more valuable the judgement
Generative AI has made plausible writing easier to produce. That moves the difficult work into framing, evidence, review and ownership of the final claim.
A leader's voice begins with what they notice
A credible leadership voice is more than tone. It begins with the problems a leader notices, the experience they draw on and what they ask others to reconsider.
Rebuilding KOKO Manufacturing's website from factory floor to go-live.
The inherited website still reflected Saarus, the pre-acquisition manufacturing identity. KOKO needed a site that showed the factory’s scale, manufacturing depth, quality systems and people, while serving prospective employees, partners and investors. As part of my in-house communications role, I led the strategy, information architecture, technical interviews, writing, visual design, photography and employee-video direction, site build, QA, launch and ongoing content governance.
A manufacturing story needs operating proof, not innovation adjectives
Manufacturing businesses often have more evidence than their marketing shows. The job is to select the operating proof that helps a buyer judge whether the larger claim is credible.
What “because” asks us to prove
Impact overclaiming often enters through the words connecting real evidence. This essay examines what causal verbs ask an organisation to prove.
A useful diagnosis can open a market
When a market has learned to accept an inefficient process as normal, explaining a better solution may not be enough. A useful diagnostic can help prospects recognise the problem for themselves.
Technical accuracy is not the same as clarity
Technical teams often skip connections that feel obvious to them. Clear technical communication preserves the substance while making the logic visible to a non-specialist.
Faster drafts were creating more senior rework.
A B2B marketing team was using AI to produce content faster, but the speed had moved the bottleneck downstream. Drafts were often generic or product-led, revision rounds remained high, and senior leaders still had to spend too much time correcting work before it could ship. I reviewed the content, AI-assisted drafts, revision history and stakeholder feedback to see what senior reviewers kept correcting. I turned those recurring issues into pre-draft questions, then used two practical workshops to make the team practise the reasoning before another draft reached senior review.
A polished draft can hide the learning problem
AI can improve an early-career marketer's output before their underlying judgement improves. That changes what managers need to inspect, teach and develop.
Creating capacity for higher-value work without weakening service.
A large digital-commerce operation had reached scale and was performing well. The constraint was that skilled attention was being consumed by work that did not all require the same level of judgement, while new priorities continued to arrive. In an in-house leadership role at Accenture, I worked with delivery, account and client leaders to identify where capacity could be released without weakening service, prioritise changes the live operation could absorb, and redirect that capacity towards new work and emerging needs.
The business had outgrown its market story
A planned website refresh exposed a deeper problem. The company’s products, teams and market had evolved faster than the story holding them together. I reviewed the market, product and sales material, developed three complete positioning routes and helped leadership choose one direction. I then translated that choice into a message hierarchy the website and sales teams could use.
The company had expertise; the market could not see it
A B2B technology company had four senior leaders with valuable perspectives on its market, product, customers and sales practice. Most of that thinking remained inside the business. I developed the company point of view, shaped four distinct leadership voices and built 54 topic concepts with enough editorial direction to move into writing and a 12-week publishing pilot.
The deck was rebuilt around four questions the audience needed answered
An impact-led technology venture needed a major external presentation to carry substantial market, product, operating and impact material. The existing deck was accurate, but its order followed the business rather than the questions an external audience would ask. Working as a fractional communications lead, I rebuilt the argument, wrote and produced the slides, shaped the data visualisation and evidence, and prepared the speaker to carry the case in the room.
The team was doing too much work before a prospect had even qualified
A project-delivery software company relied heavily on referrals and direct outreach to create new conversations. Reaching unfamiliar prospects was difficult, follow-up was intensive and early qualification consumed substantial team capacity. I designed a short online assessment that gave prospects a useful result, matched them to relevant evidence and captured enough context for Sales to decide who warranted a deeper conversation. The 12-week pilot set out how to build, promote and measure it before scaling spend.
The B2B Message Stress Test
Strong sellers often reveal where a proposition still depends on interpretation. The repairs they make are useful evidence.
“People reached” is a unit, not an outcome
Reach shows scale. Its value grows when an organisation follows what happens next, using the gaps between exposure, adoption, continued use and change to learn.
The impact story starts before the writer arrives
Impact stories are often constrained before the brief reaches the writer. Sometimes, the evidence decisions made shape what a funding narrative can honestly claim.
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