Charlie Love

22/09/2026

Don't run ads.

Not yet.

Spoke to a founder last week who wanted to double his ad spend. Leads were down, so the answer had to be more traffic.

It wasn't.

His ads were fine. His landing page had 9 buttons, 3 offers and the proof buried at the bottom.

More ads would have poured more water into a bucket with a hole in it.

Before you spend another £1, find the leak.

1. Awareness. Do the right people know you exist?
2. Trust. Is there proof they can see in 5 seconds?
3. Offer. Would you buy it at that price?
4. Sales process. What happens after someone says "tell me more"?
5. Follow up. Who chases, and when?

Fix the leak. Then turn the tap up.

Not more traffic. Just fewer holes.

21/09/2026

Stop paying for leads you can't be bothered to follow up.

A 2026 study of 939 B2B companies timed how long they took to reply to a new lead. The average was 47 hours.

47 hours.

By then your lead has spoken to someone else. Probably booked a call with them too.

Same study: leads answered within 5 minutes closed at 32%. Leave it 24 hours or more and that drops to 12%.

So before you ask for more ad budget, ask 3 questions.

How fast do we reply?
Who owns the reply?
What happens when nobody picks it up?

If the answer to the last one is "nothing", you've found your leak.

Fix the follow up. Then buy more leads.

This is my view on it, anyhow.

18/09/2026

Sonos spent two years apologising for an app.

This week it started talking about feelings.

The new global campaign went live Monday across the US and Mexico with a big push in New York. Love the Sound. Feel the System. First proper repositioning under a CMO who arrived last November from Snap, and Wieden and Kennedy before that.

The work moves Sonos off spec sheets and onto what the sound does to a room.

And the strategy is right. Nobody ever loved a speaker because of the driver count.

But.

A brand campaign cannot repair a product that let people down. It buys you a second look. What happens after that is entirely down to whether the thing works when they open the box.

This is the order that keeps getting reversed.

Fix the product. Then fix the story.

If you are sat on a repositioning because the numbers have gone soft, be honest about which one you are actually dealing with. Is it the story, or is it the thing the story is about?

Only one of those a new campaign can solve.

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/sonos-brand-repositioning-trades-specs-for-vibes-in-hunt-for-comeback/830462/

 A refreshed strategy centers on emotions and experiences over appeals to audiophiles as the brand recovers from a prior misstep.

17/09/2026

Over a decade ago, I left an industry I hated and started again with a laptop on a desk in my bedroom.

No clients.
No plan.

Then 1 client. Then a few more. Eventually it started to look like an actual business.

And I did every job in it badly before I did any of them well. The copy, the creative, the ads, the website, the outreach, the email campaigns, the CRM and every automation behind it. Then the invoices. Then chasing the people who owed me money.

People talk about that stage like it was character building.

It wasn't. It was just slow.

But it gave me the only thing I still get paid for.

When you've done every job in a business yourself, you can walk into someone else's and tell within an afternoon which one is actually broken.

That isn't a framework.

It's scar tissue.

What was the job you did worst when you started out?

PS. I went looking for a photo of me hunched over that bedroom desk, looking distressed. Turns out nobody photographs that bit. So here's me in Greece instead. Same scar tissue, much better lighting.

12/09/2026

AI has made it cheap to look like you know what you're doing.

That sounds like progress. For buyers, it's a nightmare.

Every feed is now full of confident, polished, perfectly structured advice. Carousels that look the part. Posts that sound like an expert.

A lot of it is a machine wearing a person's face.

Here's the problem that creates. When anyone can look competent, looking competent stops meaning anything. The polish is free now.

So what's left? The stuff AI can't fake.

→ A specific story that actually happened to you → A number from a real project → An opinion you'd defend to someone's face → The mistake you made and what it cost

That's your edge now. Not better production. More proof you're a real person who has actually done the thing.

The irony isn't lost on me. In the age of AI, the most valuable thing you own is your scar tissue.

Show more of it.

Ps. This is a real picture of me.

10/09/2026

Autumn tends to be when people start thinking about next year.

It's also the busiest quarter a lot of businesses have. Which is exactly why the thinking rarely turns into anything built.

I'm taking on 3 more clients for the rest of this year. Then I'm done.

Here's what it is.

You message me. I send over a qualification form so I can see what I'd actually be working with. If it's a fit, we start.

Strategy first. Then the systems underneath it. Your CRM, your automations, your follow up, your reporting. All built on a platform that bends around your business instead of your business bending around it.

Fully remote. Built in the order your business actually needs it, not the order that looks tidy on a slide.

And you get me inside your comms the whole way through. No waiting for a monthly call to ask a question. Ask it when you think of it and get an answer.

Now the part that saves us both time.

This is for you if you want it built, not discussed. If you've got a business that works and you want the infrastructure to match it. If you want to walk into 2027 with it already running.

It's not for you if you want a deck. If you want to revisit it in Q1. If you want someone to agree with you.

That's not me being difficult. It's 3 spots and I'd rather they go to people who'll use them.

Message me and I'll send you the form.

3 clients. Rest of the year. Then the door shuts until 2027.

08/09/2026

"We're doing a rebrand."

Every time I hear it I ask the same question. What will this rebrand change, and by when?

Nobody in the room has a number.

New logo. New font. A colour palette that took four months and a workshop full of Post-it notes.

Utter rubbish.

A rebrand does not fix a weak offer.

It does not fix a sales process where nobody follows up.

It does not fix pricing you are embarrassed to say out loud.

It puts a nicer jumper on the same problem.

I am not anti-brand. Brand matters enormously. If a business has outgrown its name, or merged, or is selling to a completely different buyer now, change it properly.

But when the honest answer to "what does this change by December" is a shrug, that is not a rebrand.

That is redecorating while the roof leaks.

The uncomfortable version of that meeting is much shorter. Why did the last forty people who enquired not buy?

Almost nobody can answer it. That is the actual job.

Rebrand after you have fixed it. Not instead of fixing it.

07/09/2026

HOKA just bought screens in Times Square and put no shoes on them.

No slogan. No model running through wet streets at golden hour.

Just numbers.

They teamed up with Strava for a month long challenge across New York's 5 boroughs. Runners log miles. The boroughs compete. The leaderboard runs on screens in Times Square, Tribeca, SoHo and Williamsburg. Ticker style. Updated weekly.

The creative is the customers.

An ad you watch is a moment. A scoreboard you check is a habit.

You pay for one every time you want it seen. The other one people come back to on their own.

Now the awkward bit.

It only works because somebody was already counting. Strava counts every run. Hoka plugged into the count.

So here's your question. What do you already count about your customers that they would actually want to see?

Orders shipped. Hours saved. Jobs completed. Miles driven.

You've got a number like that sat in a dashboard nobody outside the building has ever looked at.

Put it on a screen and it stops being reporting. It starts being the reason people check in.

Send me your number. I'll tell you what I'd build with it.

Here's why this campaign caught my eye.

I stupidly signed up to run the Florence marathon on 29 November with my brothers, and I'm now deep in the training programme.

Every run gets logged. The count is the only thing getting me out the door on the days I'd rather not be.

20 km to get through at the end of today.

Wish me luck. Or tell me what got you through yours, because right now I'll take anything!

03/08/2026

I saw the same post twice this morning. Same words. Two different people.

One wrapped it in a slick carousel. The other in a tidy little graphic. Different colours, different fonts. Same exact copy.

"Post daily."
"Nail your personal brand."
"Just add more value."

Word for word. Just a different coat of paint.

That's the whole game. Change the design, keep the words, call it your own.

It is not expertise. It is packaging.

When everyone's saying the exact same thing, that's your signal. None of them are thinking. They're just passing it down the line.

Here's the difference. Real advice is specific. It comes from someone who's actually been in it.

→ Built something
→ Watched it flop
→ Worked out why
→ Fixed it

They can tell you why it worked, because they were there when it didn't. This is my view on it, anyhow.

Have a proper scroll this morning. How much of what you're reading is real experience, and how much is the same thing dressed up differently?

31/07/2026

Delete 2,000 people off your email list this week. I'm serious.

Had a chat with another marketing consultant last week, someone I've worked alongside loads over the years. Email came up, as it does. And we both realised we were seeing the exact same thing with clients right now.

Lists that look healthy. Dying open rates. Everyone blaming the copy.

Nobody willing to say the list is the problem, because the list is the number that goes in the board deck.

That figure in your dashboard isn't an asset. It's a bill nobody's handed you yet.

Gmail stopped being polite about this around November last year. No warning, no soft bounce, just gone. You find out three weeks later when someone asks why the newsletter went quiet.

And it's not even the complaints that get you. It's the silence. You mail all 6,000, the third who forgot they signed up do nothing, Gmail reads that as nobody wanting it, and the whole lot lands in Promotions. Your actual customers stop seeing you too. They did nothing wrong. Wrong crowd, wrong time.

So no, the problem was never your subject line. Sorry.

You've been treating list size as a scoreboard. Gmail's been treating it as evidence.

I've written down the check I run before I say anything useful about anyone's email. Eight things to look at, takes about ten minutes, and you don't need me for any of it.

Not putting it behind a form. If you want it, comment or drop me a message and I'll send it over.