Clarity over theatre. Marketing should behave like capital.

Marketing earned its reputation. I say that as someone who has done it for twelve years and loves it. Too much of what wears the name is noise in a strategy costume: buzzwords, vanity metrics, decks that impress a room on Thursday and change nothing by Monday.

The companies I work with can't afford that version. They are late-stage, mostly PE-backed, building hardware, climate infrastructure and applied AI. The product works. The revenue is real. Somebody signed a value creation plan with a revenue line in it, and every quarter that line gets compared with reality. In that world, marketing doesn't get to be a vibe. It has to behave like capital: deployed deliberately, measured honestly, expected to return more than it costs.

Somewhere in the last year I started writing down the rules I actually run engagements by. They fit on a page. Here is the page, with the reasoning.

Clarity over theatre.

Every claim survives the question "so what?" or it gets cut. Every metric walks the whole way from spend to revenue, or it stays out of the deck. This sounds obvious and is quietly radical, because most marketing reporting is structured to avoid exactly that walk. Activity is easy to show. Attribution is uncomfortable. A practice built on clarity accepts the discomfort, because the alternative is a budget defended by adjectives.

The aha is the strategy.

People forget information. They remember the moment they suddenly understood. Deep tech loses more value here than anywhere else: brilliant machines described in language only their builders love, while buyers nod politely and remember nothing. The work is engineering the moment of understanding, for a specific buyer, in seconds. That is what creative is for. Not decoration. Transport.

Every euro works.

I spend client budgets the way I spend my own: reluctantly, and only on what compounds. Positioning compounds, because every deal reuses it. A demand system compounds, because it runs after I leave. A one-off campaign mostly doesn't, which is why it is the last thing I reach for and not the first. Marketing that cannot show its value is drag with an invoice.

Think in 10x, not 10%.

Optimisation buys percentages: a better subject line, a tighter ad, a faster page. Worth doing, never decisive. Multiples come from somewhere else, from being the company a buyer can actually place, in a category where you set the terms of comparison. Position, story and system are the levers that bend a growth line rather than trim it. A late-stage company doesn't need louder marketing. It needs a sharper lever, applied where the plan actually bends.

Cut the drag.

The usual reaction to slow growth is to add: more sales heads, more content, more ads. More push. But when a working product with real revenue undershoots its plan, the cause is usually the opposite of missing effort. It is drag: positioning nobody can repeat, so every deal starts from zero. Pipeline built ad hoc, so revenue depends on heroics. A story buyers can't retell, so deals die in the internal meeting you're not invited to. Cut the drag, and the growth you already paid for shows up. Same team. Same spend.

That is the whole manifesto, and it is also a description of the job. If your board deck has a slide asking why growth is behind plan, the answer is probably not another slide.