Growth doesn't come from better PR, sharper creative or a new website. It comes from a marketing system working in harmony - diagnosis before strategy, strategy before tactics, and demand generation running alongside demand harvesting.
Growth doesn't come from better PR. Sharper creative. A new website. It comes from a marketing system working in harmony - using multiplier effects, cutting friction, and working with the grain of human behaviour rather than against it.
That's a different starting point to how most marketing gets bought. Most businesses I work with already know what they want: a brand strategy, a PR push, a paid campaign, a new site. Fair enough - that's often a perfectly good place to start. But knowing what you want and knowing what you need aren't always the same thing, and getting from one to the other takes an understanding of how markets work, not just how marketing works.
Systems thinking is simply this: connecting diagnosis and strategy to tactics, in that order. Most marketing skips straight to the tactic - the campaign, the channel, the creative - because that's the visible, fundable, easy-to-brief-in part. The system is the less visible part: the thing that decides which tactics actually earn their budget back, and which ones are just activity.
Here's the uncomfortable bit most marketing plans quietly ignore: most of the time, your customers aren't ready to buy what you sell. I wrote about the maths of this properly in the 95:5 rule - the short version is that the overwhelming majority of any market is out of market at any given moment. Which means a system built only to harvest today's demand is leaving almost all of tomorrow's on the table. You need both: generating future demand and harvesting existing demand, running at the same time, not competing for the same budget line.
Generating future demand comes down to two things marketing science has understood for a long time: mental availability - being the brand people think of first, easily, without effort - and physical availability - being easy to actually buy, whether that's online or in person, on the shelf of a bricks-and-mortar store. Building both is what marketing scientists call salience. It's also the idea I've built my training programme around. The concept earned the name.
None of this works without measurement - not vanity metrics, but the kind that tells you whether the system is actually moving penetration, fame and trust, and ultimately revenue and profit. AI has a real role here: doing the research and the heavy lifting at a pace no team could match on its own. What it can't do is replace the judgement that decides whether a result actually means anything.
Systems thinking isn't a choice between brand building and digital activation. It's both, working in the same system, because that's how growth actually compounds - through penetration, fame and trust, not through any one campaign.
This is the thinking behind Vector, the growth system I've built, and Sapiens & Co, the marketing consultancy where I apply it with clients. If any of this sounds like the gap in your own marketing, that's a good place to start a conversation.
