About

Order

My label maker has a label. It says “label maker”. I know how that sounds, and I’d defend it anyway. If the drawer is open and you’re looking for the thing that makes labels, you shouldn’t have to think about it.

It’s the same reason I keep coming back to Melvil Dewey, who came up with his classification system without having read every book in existence first. He divided all of human knowledge into ten classes, let each one split as far as it needed to, and any book you handed him, written yet or not, would have exactly one place to go. He didn’t find that order sitting on a shelf somewhere, he built it before most of the books did. That’s the part I like. You can always make one, which is more or less the same idea as the label maker, just pointed at a library instead of a drawer.

My own files live in PARA, projects, areas, resources, archives, four folders where everything I own has exactly one place it belongs. Somewhere between the label maker and the folders I stopped pretending this is a quirk. I genuinely can’t sit with chaos. A pile of things with no order makes me twitchy, and I will start sorting it whether or not anybody asked me to.

So of course I ended up doing this for a living.

A few other things

A few other things that are true about me, since we’re here.

I hate waste. Time, money, decisions, attention, doesn’t matter which kind.

Which is also why I buy the same clothes in five colours and call it a wardrobe. Same socks, same jacket, same trousers, same shirt, repeated down the colour chart. I have never once stood in front of it wondering what goes with what, because every combination already works, they’re all the same combination.

I write everything in Notepad. No formatting, no styles, no autosave asking if I’m sure. Word has spent decades trying to be a design tool, a project manager and a legal department all at once, and most days I just want to type a sentence without negotiating with it first.

I take notes constantly, thousands of them, filed the moment I write them into a Zettelkasten, each one linked to the ones around it instead of sitting there alone. A note nobody can find again isn’t a note.

And I read at least 52 books a year, about one a week, filed and rated the moment I finish them.

Two decades in marketing

I’ve been in marketing for about two decades now, which is long enough to watch the same scene play out more times than I can count. Somebody arrives genuinely excited, full of the tactics that work beautifully in B2C, emotion, storytelling, a bold campaign that makes people feel something, and aims all of it at a DMU, six or eight people who have to agree, where every single one of them is quietly working out whether backing this will be the decision that follows them around for the rest of their career.

So the bold campaign lands in a room where the real question is which option is defensible on Monday morning. It’s not that the tactics are bad per se but they were built for somebody choosing a shampoo, and this is somebody choosing whether to put their name on something.

After enough rounds of that I stopped blaming the tactics and started looking at the order. People were producing before they had decided anything, so I began writing down what has to be true before the producing starts, what comes first, what that unlocks, what breaks three steps later if you skip it. Twenty years of those notes, plus a strong dislike of doing things in the wrong order, turned into a system. Same instinct as the label maker, just pointed at something bigger.

The system

That’s the system. I believe marketing can be coded. I don’t mean that as a clever hack, I mean it as architecture, the same way a building has architecture. Ten steps, from a validated problem all the way through to a referral, each with its own questions and its own mistakes. Problem, audience, value proposition, message, media plan, lead generation, follow-up, sales enablement, onboarding, referral. And then brand, which is really just what those ten add up to.

Each step builds on the previous one. A sales team that keeps falling back on features usually hasn’t got a sales problem at all, it’s got a messaging problem. A company that thinks it doesn’t have enough leads usually has an audience or a positioning that isn’t sharp enough. The system makes those connections visible.

The work

My work is applying that system. Diagnosis first, production after. I look at where the signal is coming from, not where it’s making the most noise. From there I build the missing or misaligned steps together with the team, from working out who your customer really is, all the way to why they’d choose you over the alternative, and the biggest alternative is usually doing nothing at all.

I write about it, I advise on it, and I regularly say things that sound uncomfortable in a boardroom. That’s usually a good sign. The companies that benefit most are the ones that want to move beyond the “more leads” reflex and are willing to look more closely before pushing harder.

One article a week, same day every week. Which is, I’ll admit, another small act of filing.

Marketing is mostly about what you’re willing to take away. If that sounds like a relief rather than a limitation, we should talk.