How a brand-new idea (adopt a pistachio tree, share in its harvest) went from a pitch-deck sentence to a brand people could understand, trust and buy as a gift.
This is how Abdi Moinian first described his business to me: “A company that generates social, environmental & financial benefits by creating a new agro-farming crowd platform, where adoption of trees and investment in agriculture is made accessible to the masses.”
Every word of it is true. And unless you’d already decided to invest, you probably drifted off somewhere around “agro-farming”.
He knew it, too. When I asked what worried him most about talking to his audience, he said: “Them understanding the concept in a few seconds…how do we get them interested?”
That rare thing – a new idea, but only a few seconds to explain it
MyTreehood lets people adopt a tree on an organic farm, follow how it’s growing, and take a share of what it produces, either as income or (eventually) as the harvest itself. You could be closer to nature without having to buy a field or don wellies. You could start with just one tree.
There was a lot to fit into those few seconds. Abdi’s key messages covered the fun of adopting a tree, a way to diversify your investments, learning about orchards and agriculture, organic farming that’s good for the soil, a share of one of the healthiest nuts going, and jobs for the people who work the land. All of it mattered to him, and he was trying to say it all at once.
Two very different people, one tree
The audience research narrowed Abdi’s “anyone, really” into two people with very different reasons to buy.
The first I called the Non-Conformist. She has money to invest and no interest in taking the traditional route. She wants her investments to be environmentally and socially credible, she’s nervous about risk in a new area, and (honestly) she’d quite like something better to talk about at parties than her pension.
The second was the Thoughtful Gifter, looking for a present that isn’t mass-produced, that shows she put some thought in, and that lasts longer than a box of chocolates. She may not know much about investing at all, and she’s not really interested in learning loads about it right now.
The same research turned up three reasons either of them might walk away:
trust and financial risk,
not understanding how it works (the investing or the farming),
and a healthy suspicion of anything calling itself “green”.
Everyone else was telling one story
Then I looked at where else those people might go.
Treedom sold tree gifts with a personal touch
Ecologi was all about doing good for the planet, with no investment angle at all
Ecotree talked about sustainable forestry
The Walnut Fund focused on the money, leaning on jargon like “generational wealth” and “democratize investments” to sound credible.
The other brands were each telling one story about trees. MyTreehood could tell the whole story (the money and the meaning) without the jargon.
So the Brand Messaging Guide set out a voice that was educational, friendly and fun, and three key messages to carry everything else:
Invest in something more interesting than tech stocks, and more tangible than bitcoin
Get closer to your food
Do something good for the planet with your money
It also set out how to answer the three barriers.
Explain the whole process, from handing over your money to the end of your tree’s life, as simply as possible
Use trust markers (partnerships, credentials, clear numbers on risk and return, behind-the-scenes content from the orchards)
And be honest about farming’s environmental limits, because that’s what makes the green claims believable
Trees with Benefits
Then we put the Guide to work on the website, including my favourite headline I’ve ever written.
The MyTreehood homepage headline
When the site launched, the homepage spoke to both buyers. For the Non-Conformist, a section called “Break free from boring” asked why you’d invest like your grandad. For the Thoughtful Gifter, there was a gift route right there on the homepage. “Farm without the wellies” brought in the part about getting closer to your food. And “How it works” walked through the whole thing in five plain steps, from choosing your tree to receiving your share of the harvest, because the Guide said the simpler the explanation, the more likely people are to trust it.
A long-lasting investment
The Brand Messaging Guide gave MyTreehood a clear sense of who it’s talking to and what they need to hear, so that three years on, every new piece of work still has something to stand on.
Over the last 3 years, Abdi and I have used it to build social media strategies, reach out to influencers, and create a gifting guide.
So more people can get closer to the soil (without wellies), and munch on their very own pistachio nuts!
Got an idea that’s hard to explain in a sentence?
If you’ve built something that does lots of good things at once, there’s a fair chance your audience is getting all of them at the same time (and remembering none of them). A Brand Messaging Guide sorts out who your thing is really for, what they need to hear first (the rest can wait), and how to show them they can trust you.
How a coach with a decade of happy clients realised her message was no longer working, and how a messaging audit discovered what her audience needed to hear instead.
Pippa’s first message about working together was a lot like a lot of messages I get from people…steeped in frustration that her business didn’t fit traditional marketing “rules”.
She’d been told, by more than one person, that a mastermind needs to promise specific, tangible results. She agreed with that in principle, she said, but also “I’ll be buggered if I can articulate the results.”
A decade of happy clients and no way to say why
Pippa runs The Disobedient Business Co. with Lucy, and the Disobedient Business Mastermind is the main event. It’s for ADHD and autistic business owners who’ve been at it a while. People join and then stay. One member had been there since September 2021, and others for well over two years. Pippa knew it worked, partly because “none of the people that are in the mastermind are dickheads, and they wouldn’t stick around if we weren’t doing something right.”
The trouble was selling it. She wanted to get it back to being “an easy sell”, and she told me straight that it was “def not landing in the current marketplace at all.”
The advice she’d been given was to hang the Mastermind on one thing, so it became a sales mastermind or a launch mastermind. But that was too narrow for what the Mastermind does, and a bit disingenuous. She was stuck.
Which was why she needed me.
Five years of tweaking at the edges
She’d written the messaging a couple of years earlier, and since then she’d tinkered with different sections, sharpening and tweaking, without changing the structure underneath.
She could feel the gap, too. “We’re definitely missing the mark in terms of speaking to people the way that they need to hear things now, as opposed to maybe the way they needed to hear them in 22, 23.” She needed some kind of golden thread that would run through everything – something suited to the new context we found ourselves in in 2025 – a bin fire globally, cost of living crisis nationally, and everyone in the online business world finding selling more difficult.
Send me everything
The Messaging Reset is a week-long messaging audit for businesses whose messaging used to work and has stopped landing. I work out what’s still doing its job and what’s drifted, then map out what to say first (and who to say it to) right now, in a doc you can copy and paste straight from.
It starts with me reading everything, and I mean everything. Pippa took me at my word. She sent the website pages, her welcome email, a filtered view of every email she’d sent since April, her draft framework, onboarding answers from Mastermind members, a testimonials spreadsheet she was embarrassed about, and a brand-new doc she’d pulled together that morning.
Then we talked it through on a kickoff call, and I sorted what her people were dealing with into three groups.
There’s their brain, and the judgment, self-doubt and shame that come from being told one-size-fits-all and finding it doesn’t fit.
There are their ethics, and the bro marketing, manipulative tactics and toxic productivity they keep being told they need.
And there’s the vibe they’re looking for, which is a space where they can be themselves and find people like them.
Her voice was already doing its job for all three, and that part of the Reset map simply says “Do Not Touch!” The humour, the swearing and the generosity of it all stayed exactly where they were.
What needed work was the order things were said in, and who they were said to.
Knackered, and just trying to stay upright
Pippa’s people were the same ADHD and autistic business owners, allergic to blueprints and drawn to her for the same reasons as ever. What had changed was their context.
The old messaging assumed a reader who was angry and ready to burn it all down. Five years ago they wanted to rage against the system. Now they’re knackered, and just trying to stay upright. Most had spent a lot of money on coaches and programmes, and the cost of living had made every decision feel heavier. What they wanted to know was whether this could finally work for them.
Yes, they still wanted the world and unjust systems to change. But this Mastermind couldn’t just give them that – it actually had to make their business work, too. They were in a “put your own oxygen mask on first” situation.
So the Reset moved the lead from rebellion to relief. The core shift went from “This is a space for business rule-breakers” to “This is where your business finally works, because it’s shaped around your brain, not someone else’s formula.”
What you put in place of the rulebook
The ideal Mastermind member needs to believe two things before they’ll jump in:
“You can help me get the results I want.”
“I won’t have to leave part of me at the door to get them.”
Everything else in the map hangs off those two lines.
There’s a new value proposition for the Mastermind, the messages to lead with and the order to use them in, a clear signal that this is for people with three or more years in business, and a sales page opener written for someone who’s tired rather than furious. There are before-and-after rewrites of her existing copy, a swipe bank of lines she could lift straight into emails and posts, and five mini case studies built from what her members had already told her.
It all arrived as a Google Doc with a video walk-through, so she could copy and paste from it rather than squint at a shiny PDF.
“Ohhh, yeah that makes sense'”
“It all makes total sense,” she wrote, “and to be honest, both comfortingly and also fucking annoyingly (on me not you), 97% of it is stuff I’ve been circling for aggggges.”
That’s the bit I hear most often after a messaging audit. Most people have been circling the answer for a while, and they need someone outside the business to point at it and say yes, that one.
After years of the industry shouting about launch numbers and revenue, she’d come to believe her clients’ results were “too squishy” to count, even though she knew how much they mattered.
So we used the implementation call for exactly that. We triaged the sales page so the new messaging could go in without a full rewrite, planned content around each part of the messaging shift, and worked through how to show results from the testimonials and feedback she already had, without sounding “bro-ey”.
Seven weeks
The last time Pippa had torn her business down to start again, her website was offline for eighteen months.
This time she rewrote the whole thing, copy and design, in seven weeks. When she got to the two pages she’d been avoiding (the Mastermind page and the homepage), she brought me back in to red-pen the first and write the second. The Mastermind page she’d drafted was already a long way from the old one. It felt like a significant shift towards what the Mastermind offers, and the struggles her audience were dealing with right now, and I didn’t change much.
A few months later, Pippa joined me on an Instagram live to talk about the Reset. Without being asked, she made the case for it better than I ever have.
“Downwards of a thousand quid, I cannot think of another thing that would be better to invest in at the moment. If you are not saying the right things to the right people in the right way… you can put all the content out in the world that you like and it’s gonna be an absolute load of nonsense.””
Pippa Parfait, The Disobedient Business Co.
Circling the same answer for a while?
If your business works, your clients stay, and you still can’t quite say what you do for them.
Or selling has gotten more difficult, but you’re not sure why.
A Messaging Reset is a messaging audit that keeps what’s working, shows you what’s drifted, and gives you the words to put your messaging back where your people are.
Brilly’s Tone of Voice Guide: How a sports bra brand with a patent, lab results, and too many ways to describe itself found its positioning, its voice, and a customer journey that carried women from “not another sports bra” to checkout.
Claudio Storelli’s team designed their sports bra the way you’d design a trail-running backpack. You cinch a good backpack so the weight sits exactly where you want it, loosen it off for a walk, tighten it up for a run, and adjust each side on its own. When Claudio first told me about it, he described the moment the idea clicked as a slightly mad realisation: “we’re sending people to Mars”, and women with bigger busts still can’t get a sports bra that’s comfortable.
So they engineered one. It wraps around you, each side adjusts independently (because nobody is perfectly symmetrical), and in lab testing it outperformed every sports bra on the market. They called it Brilly, because the product is clever and they wanted the brand to be a little bit clever too.
Plenty of ways to describe it, none that landed
Claudio had the patent and the test results. He also had a problem. “I have many ways of describing what this does,” he told me on our first call, “but we need a way to nail it.”
The science was the obvious place to start, and the trouble was that the test results were, in his words, “very dry”. Look at how everyone else sold sports bras, and you got two options. At one end, the hardcore athlete running two marathons back-to-back. At the other, women having pillow fights with clouds in the background. Neither was the woman Brilly was for: “the smart, busy woman who squeezes a workout when she can”, then picks up the kids, grabs a coffee and meets her friends for brunch, all in the same bra.
Underneath it all was why the brand needed to exist. Women had told the team they’d stopped doing certain workouts, or stopped working out at all, because of what happened to their chest. Claudio wanted a brand that told them “you don’t have to hide, just go do it”, and put a smile on their face while it did. (He was also very clear it shouldn’t be pretentious. He hates pretentiousness.)
Finding the space between the lab report and the pillow fight
We started with strategy, because a voice with no position behind it is just a nice tone.
Everyone on the team filled in the brand discovery questionnaire. There were no customer interviews to draw on yet, so I went message mining for the words women with bigger busts already use about their sports bras: the uniboob, the straps digging in, wearing two or three bras at once, and the sweaty fight to get the thing off afterwards. The competitor research showed brands promising comfort or support or style, and nobody claiming all three at once, so that became Brilly’s ground.
The positioning gave Brilly a cause. Brilly rebels against bad bras on behalf of all women, and its lead message puts the blame where it belongs: “Your body is right, the garment is wrong.” Angela, Brilly’s fractional CMO, called the “on behalf of all women” idea “a powerful connective tissue community statement”, and summed up the strategy better than I could: “We want to create the community out of these people, not just spray and pray.”
A voice that can explain engineering over a martini
Then we ran a brand voice workshop with the whole team, sorting a long list of tone words into the essentials, the nice-to-haves and a pile we called “no, heck no”.
Brilly came out as a blend of two voice types. The Translator handles the science, so a patented engineering design becomes something you’d happily read on your phone in the queue for coffee. The Friend at the Bar keeps it human, a bit cheeky, and on your level (the Guide describes it as chuckling at the bar over a couple of martinis). Claudio had asked for copy that would “smirk like your clever, smart, cool friend”, and this is the voice that does it. The never list mattered just as much: Brilly is never embarrassed (boobs are natural, and the language says so) and never judgmental, because every body is worthy of a bra that fits.
Who she is, and what she needs to hear when
The first draft of the personas talked about bodies changing through the month, and Angela pushed us wider. Bodies change across a whole life, and a bra that adjusts can go with you through all of it, which also gives a customer a reason to come back for a new size. So the personas follow life stages: before children, pregnancy, postpartum, mums wrangling small children, perimenopause and menopause, and the women who practically live in their running kit. Each one has her own story and her own reasons to need Brilly.
Then we mapped the key messages to where she is in the buying journey. When she’s fed up but not looking, “Your body is right, the garment is wrong” and “We ripped up the rulebook” are there to stop the scroll. When she’s comparing options, the Translator steps in with science-backed support and engineered comfort for real life. When she’s ready to decide, “Move freely, live fully” shows her what changes, with the science repeated for reassurance.
Putting the strategy to work
The Positioning, Messaging and Tone of Voice Guide became the brief for everything that followed, and Brilly’s team brought me back for most of it.
The homepage and product page follow that same journey: the problems she recognises, how each one is solved by the design, everyday use cases from the school run to the sofa, and a route into the full engineering for readers who want the geeky detail. An ad landing page and personas for their ad campaigns came next.
Angela expected most people to need a few visits to the site before they bought, so the welcome email sequence was built to carry them there. Six emails move from Brilly’s story to real wearers, then the product, the engineering, a day in the life, and finally the guarantee, which opens on a line that came straight out of Angela’s comments on the Guide: “We get it, you’ve been burnt before.”
Then came naming the product, its technology and the new category Brilly wanted to own. I built two complete naming architectures from category design principles and tested every name against the Guide, plus guardrails we agreed early on. Nothing that sounded like constrictive shapewear, nothing that told women what shape their bodies should be, nothing cutesy or patronising about bigger busts, and nothing that would sound odd coming from a friend at the bar. (One strong contender fell at the last hurdle, after a certain billionaire decided to rename a social network after the letter X. Naming is a contact sport.)
What the team said
Angela read the Guide slowly, leaving comments as she went, and told me on our feedback call:
“I feel like you really understand what I think we’ve all been trying to put into words.”
Angela, Brilly
Tyler said: “I felt like I knew what the brand was now, and the story we’re trying to tell… it really helped me kind of visualize it.” Tom’s verdict was that it “seems really spot on”.
Claudio read the whole thing within half an hour of it landing in his inbox and replied, “I just read through it and it’s awesome!” A few weeks later he emailed again: “we LOVED working with you and are so proud of your work. I have already bragged about you to a couple of fellow CEOs and will continue to do so.”
Got something brilliant and no way to nail it?
If you know your work is good (you might even have the proof), and every way you describe it comes out too dry or sounds like everyone else, a Brand Messaging Guide is where I’d start. It gives you the position, the voice and the messages, and a plan for which message goes where. Brilly’s went from first questionnaire to draft Guide in about two weeks.
Comments Off on Before the spotlight: getting your website copy ready for a big moment
by allwordsbypeta
Got a press feature, podcast interview or launch coming up? A practical guide to getting your website copy ready before a lot of new people land on it, with a real example from a client who did exactly that.
The way I clean before someone new is coming round is like no other cleaning.
The kitchen gets done properly for the first time in a month (even behind the toaster), the hoover comes out at a speed that alarms the cat, that pile of tupperware on the side finally gets put away, and everything that doesn’t have a home gets bundled into the cupboard under the stairs with the door shut firmly behind it.
Because nobody opens the cupboard.
Until they do.
Someone goes looking for the loo roll, and there it all is.
Your website is that cupboard. Most days it’s fine, because the people who visit already know you. They’ve been reading your posts for months, and they forgive the homepage that hasn’t been touched since 2022 because they know what you’re actually like.
Then something good happens (a newspaper wants to feature you, or a podcast host with a proper audience finally says yes), and a lot of people who have never met you are about to go looking for the loo roll.
What happens to your website when you get press or a podcast feature?
A press feature, podcast or launch sends a wave of cold visitors to your website, people who have never heard of you and give your homepage a few seconds to decide whether you’re for them. Copy written for people who already know you (or that you haven’t touched since 3 offer stacks ago) often doesn’t give strangers enough to go on.
Your regulars forgive a lot because they’ve met the real you somewhere else, and new visitors don’t have that to go on. And if the big moment is in a field where people are already sceptical (health, money, coaching, anything with a comments section), they may be arriving primed to doubt you.
A real example: getting a doctor’s website ready for a national newspaper feature
I worked with Kirstyn, an NHS-trained doctor and personal trainer, in the run-up to a national newspaper feature. The day before our kickoff call, she’d read the comments under a peer’s article. They were exactly what you’d fear: strangers deciding a health professional was only in it for the money.
Her website at the time was, in her words, a DIY job that she’d changed a lot over the last few months, and she didn’t love it at all. She knew what she did and why. She just couldn’t see it written down anywhere in ways a stranger would get.
Except she could, because it was all over her social media. Her followers already knew the warm, sensible, slightly exasperated-with-the-nonsense version of her. The job was to bring that person onto her homepage and course page before the crowd arrived.
After the copy came back, she said:
“Without Peta’s help, I know I would have felt uneasy about a large volume of people landing on my website. Now, I know I will feel happy and content with what is on there.”
How do you get your website copy ready for a big moment?
Look at your homepage the way a stranger would, then build the new copy from words you and your audience already use. In order:
Do the stranger test on your homepage.
Plan your website copy from words you’ve already written.
Put your credentials where the doubt lives.
Give cold visitors one next step.
Leave yourself weeks, not days.
1. Do the stranger test on your homepage
Open your homepage on your phone (that’s where most of them will be) and cover everything below the first screen.
Does what’s left tell a stranger who you help and what you do?
If you have to scroll to find out, so do they, and most won’t.
2. Plan your website copy from words you’ve already written
Before you write anything new, go back through your posts, newsletters, reviews, DMs and the comments your people leave. Copy out every phrase that sounds like you on a good day, and every phrase someone else has used to describe you.
Your best website copy is very often sitting in your own captions, in words your audience has already responded to.
It’s a much better starting point than a blank page (or a chatbot). And because it’s how you already talk, it’s the easiest way I know to get website copy that converts without sounding salesy.
3. Put your credentials where the doubt lives
If the people arriving are likely to be sceptical, answer the doubt early and simply, in words they’d use themselves.
Kirstyn’s qualifications are extensive and technical, but “NHS-trained doctor” is what a stranger actually understands.
Say the thing they need to hear to keep reading, then get on with it.
4. Give cold visitors one next step
People who’ve just met you are unlikely to book a call.
Give them one easy, low-commitment thing to do (join your newsletter, grab your free resource) so the attention you’ve earned doesn’t evaporate the day after the article runs.
5. Leave yourself weeks, not days
Copy that sounds like you takes some digging, and some sitting with once it’s drafted. Start early enough that you’re not rewriting your homepage at midnight before the big day, so you actually get to enjoy the moment.
Questions people ask about getting their website ready
What copy do you need on your website before a launch or press feature?
At minimum, a homepage that passes the stranger test and a page for whatever the new visitors came to find (usually your main offer or course). An about page that says why you’re credible, and one clear next step for people who aren’t ready to buy, will do more for you than a full site rebuild.
How long does it take to write website copy?
For a homepage and one offer page, allow two weeks from first conversation to finished copy. Most of that time goes on research and listening. The writing is faster once you know what you’re actually saying.
How far in advance should I update my website before press coverage?
As soon as you know the date. Features and interviews can go live earlier than expected, and you want time to read the new copy a few times and live with it before a stranger does.
Should I use AI to write my website copy?
It can help, if it’s working from your own words. Kirstyn’s old copy had been pieced together between her brain and a chatbot, and she didn’t love a word of it. Give it real context (your posts, your clients’ language, clear messaging), and it’ll save you time without flattening your voice.
If you don’t have clear messaging, then anything that gets written will be less focused and strategic – and less effective.
When they open the cupboard
Big moments are lovely, and they’re also slightly terrifying, because suddenly a lot of people can see the thing you’ve been meaning to sort out for ages.
The version of you they need to meet usually already exists, though. Your people have met them. It’s just a matter of getting them onto the page before the doorbell goes.
If you’ve got a spotlight moment on the horizon and you’d like another frontal lobe on the case, get in touch. I’ll happily talk through the best approach.
The short version: The Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey are two different story architectures with two different ideas about where strength comes from. The Hero gets stronger by going it alone. The Heroine gets stronger with every person she gathers. Almost every brand story framework you’ve been handed (Storybrand very much included) is built on the first one, which is a problem if your work is relational, values-led or community-centred. Let’s dig into the comparison, and then why it matters.
The Hero’s Journey
The Heroine’s Journey
Where strength comes from
Independence. The hero must face the final challenge alone.
Connection. The heroine gets more powerful with every person she gathers.
Other people
Obstacles or distractions, to be transcended on the way up.
The point. She delegates to people whose skills complement hers.
Asking for help
A sign he isn’t ready yet.
A strategy.
Systems and structures
Absent. Change is personal, and the product of individual grit.
Load-bearing. The exhaustion is structural, and the structures can be changed.
How it ends
Clean victory. One battle, one outcome, story over.
Compromise. A third way found together, with some things left unresolved.
Where the protagonist finishes
Apart from everyone. The higher he climbs, the more isolated he becomes.
Restored to her community, still connected, still part of the network.
What it suits
A single problem with a defined solution and a measurable finish line.
Group programmes, memberships, peer spaces, and work that takes years.
The second column is not the first column with a woman in it. It’s a different architecture, and if you’ve been trying to force your work into the first one, that’s why it keeps coming out sounding like everyone else.
I have a confession to make.
I have never been a fan of Storybrand.
I read the book, took the Hero’s Journey underneath it seriously, spent proper time with it, and then put it in a box marked “we can do better” and got on with my life. It was too easy and too reductive, and I never bought the promise that any business, any offer, any kind of change could be squeezed into one seven-part framework. Some of the most meaningful work I know (the relational work, the community-led work, the work that takes years and doesn’t come with a tidy before and after) simply does not compress into that shape. Force it, and you get messaging that ticks all the boxes and disappears into the same vague soup as everybody else’s.
What frustrated me more was that I couldn’t find an alternative I could actually explain to someone.
I knew what good brand storytelling needed, because I’d been doing it for clients for years and the results were sitting right there. But when someone asked me “so what do you use instead of Storybrand?”, I had nothing.
Then I found Gail Carriger’s book The Heroine’s Journey and fell down a rabbit hole so deep my family briefly wondered if I’d ever come back up.
The rabbit hole was story structure. Specifically, why so many of my values-led, community-centred clients went vaguely uncomfortable the moment they tried to apply a standard brand story framework to their own work, and why none of them could put a finger on what was wrong with it.
It comes down to who helped you write your brand story in the first place.
What is the Hero’s Journey, and why is it everywhere in marketing?
The Hero’s Journey is a narrative structure identified by mythologist Joseph Campbell in 1949, first adapted for Hollywood by Christopher Vogler, and turned into a brand messaging framework by Donald Miller in his Storybrand methodology. At its core: a character has a problem, meets a guide, gets a plan, takes action, and either succeeds or fails.
That’s it. That’s the whole architecture that most of your marketing has been built on.
Campbell’s original research identified a pattern of storytelling that appeared across mythology, religion, and folk tales from completely different cultures. He called it the monomyth: the idea that all great stories follow the same fundamental arc. A hero leaves their ordinary world, crosses a threshold into the unknown, faces a series of trials, reaches a moment of crisis, and returns transformed.
Vogler condensed Campbell’s seventeen stages into twelve when he was working at Disney in the 1980s, applying the structure to film narrative. Miller then applied Vogler’s framework to marketing, making brands the “guide” in the story and positioning customers as the hero on a quest.
The result is a framework so embedded in how we talk about business that most people don’t even notice it’s there. Every time someone tells you to “identify your customer’s pain point,” every “before and after” transformation story, every email sequence that builds to a dramatic call to action – these are all Hero’s Journey mechanics, applied to marketing.
And it works – for a very specific kind of business, telling a very specific kind of story.
The problem is that it’s been handed to everyone, regardless of whether the story it tells is true for them.
Why does the Hero’s Journey feel wrong for values-led, community-centred work?
The Hero’s Journey carries a specific set of values (individualism, personal triumph, clean resolution) that are fundamentally at odds with relational, community-led work. If your clients aren’t lone heroes on a quest, the framework will always produce messaging that doesn’t fit.
If you’ve ever sat down to write your website copy, your Instagram bio, or a launch email and felt like you were forcing something – this is probably why.
It centres the individual over the community
The Hero’s Journey requires your client to go it alone.
Love, friendship, family, community – these are all treated as distractions or obstacles on the path to individual triumph. The hero must eventually leave behind everything that ties him to his ordinary world. The story ends with one person standing apart from everyone else, victorious and changed. The higher he climbs, the more isolated he becomes. And that isolation is presented as evidence of his growth, rather than an awful (and unnecessary) cost.
Now, consider what that means for your messaging if your work is built around community. If you run a group programme, a membership, a peer support space, or a coaching container where the whole point is that nobody has to figure things out alone.
You’ve been using a framework that treats community as something to transcend on the way to individual growth. And then wondering why your messaging for community-led work feels hollow.
Your clients aren’t looking to go it alone. They’re looking for their people. And the Hero’s Journey has nothing useful to say about that.
It ignores the systems your clients are navigating
The Hero’s Journey takes place in a vacuum.
The hero’s transformation is entirely personal – the product of his own skill, resilience, and grit. The systems that shaped him before he ever made a choice are simply irrelevant. The structural inequalities, the inherited narratives about who gets to succeed and how, the sheer cognitive weight of existing inside capitalism, the patriarchy, and whatever else the world is currently throwing at everyone – none of it appears anywhere in the framework.
The Hero’s Journey doesn’t talk about the collective struggle against the patriarchy (because it IS the patriarchy), or racism, classism, or the connection we have with nature. It’s not interested in any of this – because it’s too complicated.
Which means every time you use the Hero’s Journey to write for clients who are exhausted by those systems, you’re implicitly agreeing with the narrative that their exhaustion is a motivation problem. Something to overcome on the way to buying your offer.
It’s probably not the message you want to send, and it’s almost certainly not true.
The people I work with (and I’d guess most of the people you work with) are navigating systems that were built for someone else; their exhaustion is structural. It can’t be fixed by the right guru, or morning routine, or uncovering a magical productivity hack. And a brand story framework that pretends those systems don’t exist is actively misleading.
It promises a clean ending that real transformation never delivers
The Hero wins
One battle, one outcome, one moment of triumph
Story over
Which makes for a very satisfying film and an almost completely useless model for the kind of transformation most of your clients are going through.
Real change (the kind that involves questioning what you’ve always believed about success, untangling inherited beliefs about money and ambition, rebuilding your identity after leaving systems that no longer fit) doesn’t have a tidy endpoint. It’s messy, open-ended, frequently nonlinear, and often requires revisiting. The “transformation complete” moment of the Hero’s Journey exists in fiction because fiction gets to end. Your clients’ lives don’t.
When you use a Hero’s Journey framework to talk about your work, you end up promising before/after transformations that are cleaner and more complete than anything you can deliver. And your clients (who are living the reality of ongoing, complicated, still-in-progress growth) can feel that gap.
What is the Heroine’s Journey?
The Heroine’s Journey is a separate narrative structure identified by author Gail Carriger, built around connection and community rather than individual triumph. Where the Hero becomes stronger by going it alone, the Heroine becomes stronger with every person she gathers. She ends the story restored to her community, not alone in her triumph.
In 2020, Carriger published her analysis of a narrative structure that can be seen across some of the most commercially successful fiction ever written. Romance novels, cosy mysteries, young adult fiction, stories that critics consistently undervalued and readers consistently loved.
What these stories had in common, Carriger argued, was a fundamentally different story structure from the Hero’s Journey.
She called it the Heroine’s Journey.
The three acts: Descent, Search, and Ascent
The Heroine’s Journey works in a cycle rather than a straight line. It has three broad movements:
The Descent: something breaks the heroine’s familial or community network. Her pleas for help go unheard. She loses power, often not by choice. She withdraws out of necessity.
The Search: in isolation and danger, she begins to search. Not for a boon or a victory, but for connection. She finds a surrogate community – people asking the same questions she is. She delegates tasks to people whose skills complement hers, gathers information alongside her found family, and does the deep, uncomfortable work of transformation supported by others.
The Ascent: she moves toward reunion and negotiation. She seeks to restore what was broken, or build something better in its place. The resolution is a third way – a compromise, found together, rather than a clean victory. And she ends the story restored to her community. Stronger, yes, but still connected, and still part of the network.
Revenge and individual glory are irrelevant – her network is everything.
What makes the Heroine’s Journey so different
A few things I need to point out before we go any further:
The Heroine’s Journey is not the Hero’s Journey with a woman in the lead role. It’s a completely separate narrative structure with different values, different mechanics, and a different definition of what strength looks like. You don’t swap one protagonist for another and get the Heroine’s Journey. You need a different architecture entirely.
Heroines can be any gender. Carriger is explicit about this (Ted Lasso follows the Heroine’s Journey). The terms hero and heroine describe the story structure, not the character’s identity. A man who leads with community, who asks for help as a strategy, whose strength comes from his relationships – that’s a heroine. A woman who goes it alone, who defines her success through individual triumph – that’s a hero. The gender of the protagonist is beside the point.
Asking for help is a strategy, not a weakness. This is perhaps the most fundamental difference. In the Hero’s Journey, the hero must eventually face his greatest challenge alone. Asking for help is a sign that he hasn’t yet become the person he needs to be. Once he’s there, he can leave any guides behind. In the Heroine’s Journey, the heroine gets stronger with every person she gathers. The more companions she has, the more powerful she becomes. Requesting aid doesn’t diminish her – it expands what’s possible.
The ending reflects reality. The Heroine’s Journey ends in compromise. Some things remain unresolved, and some things need revisiting. The resolution is a third way, found together, that acknowledges the ongoing and imperfect nature of real change. Because real transformation is an open-ended process, and the Heroine’s Journey is honest enough to say so.
The Hero’s Journey vs the Heroine’s Journey: three key differences
Community vs isolation
The Hero’s Journey treats the people in your client’s life as obstacles or distractions on the path to individual triumph. The story ends with one person standing apart from everyone else.
The Heroine identifies people whose skills complement hers and delegates accordingly. She asks for help without shame and ends the story restored to her people, having achieved something together that none of them could have managed separately.
What this means for your messaging: If your work involves community programmes, group containers, memberships, or clients whose lives are full of people and real commitments, your messaging has been telling a story that actively contradicts what you actually do. The Hero’s Journey positions your clients as lone warriors. Your work is built around the idea that they don’t have to be. Those two things are not compatible.
Systems vs vacuum
The Hero’s Journey has no interest in the structures your clients are navigating. Their exhaustion, their complicated relationship with ambition and success, the weight of inherited beliefs about who gets to take up space – all of it gets flattened into a motivation problem. Work harder, the framework suggests. The tools are here.
The Heroine’s Journey starts from the understanding that we are all operating inside systems (capitalism, patriarchy, structural inequality) that shape what’s possible long before anyone makes a single decision. The exhaustion is structural, and the Heroine doesn’t just learn to survive those systems, she has the capacity to change them.
What this means for your messaging: If your clients are carrying the weight of inherited beliefs, systemic barriers, or the accumulated cost of being told to work harder inside a system that was never designed for them – your messaging needs a framework that acknowledges that weight exists. The Hero’s Journey doesn’t. The Heroine’s Journey was built around it.
If you’re recognising your own clients in this, the Regenerative Story Map is what I built to work it through properly. It takes you through all five phases with questions at each stage, and it won’t cost you a penny.
The Hero wins one battle – one outcome. This is enormously satisfying in a film and almost completely useless as a model for the kind of transformation your clients are actually going through.
The Heroine’s Journey ends in compromise – a third way, found together, that acknowledges the ongoing and imperfect nature of real change. Some things remain unresolved, some things need revisiting. The resolution is shared rather than individual, and it doesn’t pretend that everything is fixed.
What this means for your messaging: The before/after transformation story your marketing has been pushing you toward is a product of the Hero’s Journey’s obsession with clean endings. Your clients know their transformation doesn’t work like that. Messaging that reflects the reality of open-ended, collective, ongoing change builds the kind of trust that a polished before/after never will. (I’ve written more about what that trust actually looks like in practice over here.)
What is the Regenerative Story Framework?
The Regenerative Story Framework is a brand storytelling framework built on the Heroine’s Journey, developed specifically for values-led, relational, community-centred work. It translates the Heroine’s Journey into five phases that map the kind of change your clients are actually going through: Uprooting, Composting, Germination, Sprouting, and Rooting.
After coming across Carriger’s work, I spent a considerable amount of time (even my teenager would tell me to go touch grass amount of time) looking at her ten stages through the lens of brand storytelling. Specifically for the kind of work that doesn’t fit neatly into a before/after, problem/solution box.
Five things kept coming up that followed the kind of change my clients help people through. So I mapped them, named them, and built a framework around them.
Here’s what they look like:
Uprooting is where your audience recognises that the system they’ve been operating inside no longer fits – and begins to leave it behind. Their exhaustion is a structural mismatch. And your messaging at this stage needs to name what they’re walking away from accurately enough that they finally feel seen.
Composting is the messy in-between. Things are breaking down, but nothing new has quite taken root yet. Old identities are softening. And the old solutions keep whispering. Your audience is toggling between “I’m ready for something different” and “maybe I should just go back.” This is a key part of transformation
Germination is where the deep, invisible work happens. The unlearning, and the examination of inherited narratives about success, money, ambition, and who gets to take up space. This work happens beneath the surface, in community, before anyone can see any evidence of it. It’s the phase that’s hardest to talk about and most important to acknowledge.
Sprouting is where your audience begins tentatively trying new ways of working alongside others, with permission to get it wrong. A sprout isn’t a tree. It doesn’t need scaling or monetising. It needs certain conditions to thrive: space, warmth, shared learning, and absolutely nobody standing over it demanding to know when it’s going to start generating revenue.
Rooting is where stability comes not from standing apart from your community, but from belonging to it. Deep networks, mutual support, strength that comes from connection rather than isolation, and success that’s measured differently. The focus is on the quality of relationships and the health of the ecosystem, rather than revenue milestones and follower counts,
No mountain, or sword. And nobody galloping off into the sunset wondering why it feels so lonely at the top.
Just a truer story about how change happens in real life, and how your work fits into it.
How to use the Regenerative Story Framework in your messaging
The Regenerative Story Framework is a lens for understanding where your audience actually is, what they’re carrying, and what your messaging needs to do at each stage of their journey. Working through it helps you locate the context your clients are living in, name it accurately, and build the kind of trust that brings them to your work when they’re ready.
Most brand messaging tools ask you to start with your customer’s problem. The Regenerative Story Framework asks you to start earlier – with what your audience is quietly opting out of, what systems they’re trying to leave behind, what context they’re operating in before they’ve even articulated a “problem” in the way a marketing template would recognise.
Working through the five phases will help you:
Understand what your audience is carrying when they find you. Not just the surface-level problem, but the structural mismatch underneath it
See what they actually need at each stage of the journey, rather than what a marketing template assumes they should need
Position your work as part of a wider ecosystem of change, rather than the definitive solution to a neatly packaged problem
Write messaging that tells the truth about what you do, without flattening it into a soundbite or squeezing it into a framework that was never designed for it
It ends with what I call an Impact Statement – a way of articulating your work built around two questions:
What changes for my people because we exist?
And how does that change happen?
These questions keep the focus on impact rather than performance. On collective movement rather than individual triumph. On the conditions you create, the community you hold, the slow and invisible work you make possible.
If you want to work through it properly, with questions at every phase to help you locate where your audience actually is – I’ve made something for you.
Frequently asked questions about the Hero’s Journey and brand messaging
What is the Hero’s Journey in marketing?
The Hero’s Journey in marketing is a brand storytelling framework popularised by Donald Miller’s Storybrand methodology, itself based on Christopher Vogler’s adaptation of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. In marketing terms, your customer is the hero on a quest, your brand is the guide who gives them a plan, and the story ends with the customer achieving success or avoiding failure. It’s embedded in most brand messaging frameworks used today.
Why doesn’t the Hero’s Journey work for community-led businesses?
The Hero’s Journey doesn’t work for community-led businesses because its core structure requires the protagonist to eventually go it alone. Community, relationships, and collective effort are treated as distractions on the path to individual triumph. If your work is built around the idea that people are stronger together (through group programmes, memberships, peer support, or community), the Hero’s Journey actively contradicts what you do.
What is the Heroine’s Journey?
The Heroine’s Journey is a narrative structure identified by author and archaeologist Gail Carriger in her 2020 book of the same name. Where the Hero’s Journey centres individual triumph, the Heroine’s Journey centres community and connection. The heroine’s strength comes from the people she gathers around her. She asks for help as a strategy, delegates to people whose skills complement hers, and ends the story restored to her community rather than standing apart from it. The Heroine’s Journey appears in commercially successful fiction across genres – including stories with male protagonists, like Ted Lasso.
What is the difference between the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey?
The key differences are: the Hero goes it alone and becomes more isolated as he succeeds; the Heroine builds her community and becomes more connected. The Hero’s Journey ignores the systems and structures people operate inside; the Heroine’s Journey acknowledges them. The Hero’s Journey ends with a clean victory; the Heroine’s Journey ends with compromise and reunion. The Hero’s Journey defines strength as independence; the Heroine’s Journey defines strength as the capacity to ask for and receive help.
What is the Regenerative Story Framework?
The Regenerative Story Framework is a brand storytelling framework built on the Heroine’s Journey, developed by brand messaging strategist Peta O’Brien-Day specifically for values-led, relational, community-centred work. It has five phases (Uprooting, Composting, Germination, Sprouting, and Rooting) that map the kind of change typically experienced by people leaving broken systems, doing the slow work of unlearning, building new ways of working alongside others, and finding stability through community rather than isolation.
Is the Hero’s Journey the same as Storybrand?
Storybrand is a brand messaging framework built on the Hero’s Journey. Donald Miller adapted Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and Christopher Vogler’s twelve-stage version of it into a seven-part framework for brand storytelling. The two are not identical (Storybrand has specific mechanics around the guide/hero relationship), but the underlying story structure and values are the same. If you find Storybrand doesn’t fit your work, it’s likely because the Hero’s Journey architecture underneath it doesn’t fit either.
What kind of businesses should use the Heroine’s Journey framework?
The Heroine’s Journey framework is most useful for businesses whose work is relational, community-led, or built around collective transformation. This includes coaches running group programmes, course creators whose value comes from peer learning and shared experience, service providers working with clients navigating systemic issues or inherited beliefs, and any founder who wants their messaging to reflect the reality that their clients’ lives are full of people and commitments – not a lone quest for individual triumph.
Ready to tell a truer story about your work?
If you’ve spent time trying to fit what you do into frameworks that were clearly built for someone else’s business, the Regenerative Story Map is where to go next.
It’s something to sit with, annotate, and keep coming back to. It takes you through all five phases of the Regenerative Story Framework with questions at each stage, and ends with a scaffold for writing an Impact Statement that tells the truth about what you do.
And if you want to talk about whether your messaging is actually telling the right story about your work, my Messaging Reset is probably the place to start.
Peta O’Brien-Day is a brand messaging strategist and conversion copywriter. She helps founders rethink how they tell the story of their work – specifically the founders whose work is too relational, too collective, and too complicated for most marketing templates to handle. Find her at wordsbypeta.com and on Instagram @allwordsbypeta.
Comments Off on Understanding your audience starts with a better question
by allwordsbypeta
I’ve just spent 15 minutes trying to work out which song from the Taylor Swift Eras tour Erica wanted to listen to this morning.
She kept repeating a line from it (but it was her 6-year-old version of the line that she’d heard). She tried to describe the outfit Taylor was wearing during the song (but again that wasn’t very clear). And she did the dance moves (again, her 6-year-old version of the dance moves).
15 minutes of frustration later, I finally opened Spotify on my phone, and got her to scroll through the songs…
Turned out she wanted Dua Lipa’s Dance The Night…
Yeah.
So that was fun.
The challenge of understanding your audience in business
I was absolutely convinced that she wanted one particular thing – based on what she was saying (and dancing).
But I was wrong.
I needed to look a little deeper to discover what would actually solve her problem (and give me 5 minutes of peace and quiet!)
Your future clients are doing exactly the same thing.
They’re searching desperately for someone who understands them, who speaks their language, understands their struggles, and takes into account their background, experience, barriers, visions, hopes, and dreams.
But it can be pretty hard to work out what they’re on about sometimes.
Why your client feedback isn’t telling you much
And then, when we launch our new course, service, or product (in response to what we think they want) and we’re not bowled over by a stampede towards the sales page…
Well, it can be a little frustrating.
We read the comments! We chatted with people about their struggles! We looked at the SEO! We turned our testimonials into Canva graphics for goodness sake!
But what people say, isn’t always what they mean.
Which is where all that lovely feedback you’ve already collected comes in. It’s sitting in a folder somewhere being polite at you, when it could be telling you exactly what your audience needs and exactly how they’d describe it themselves.
Three ways to work out what your audience actually means
So, as I bop along to Dua Lipa (it’s a tune, don’t get me wrong!), here are some tips to really finding out what your audience wants:
Ask better questions when you offboard
When people finish your programmes, or you offboard them at the end of an engagement, don’t just ask them how it went. Testimonials that say “You were fab!” are lovely for your ego and useless to future you, sitting down to write a sales page for something new.
Ask why they came looking for you in the first place. Ask what they’d already tried before they found you. Ask what they were worried about before they said yes (that one is worth its weight in gold, because it hands you every objection you’ll ever need to answer). And ask for a specific example of how the work changed something, then push for the detail. What they did differently on a specific occasion, rather than how they felt about it in general.
That’s the bit that turns feedback into research you can write from.
I’ve put the whole process into a free guide: the framing that makes people open up, the questions themselves, and the follow-ups that get them to say more. Squeeze More From Your Social Proof is here. If you’ve got a folder of “she was great” and no idea what to do with it, start there.
Look for patterns
It’s time to get out the murder board. Understanding your audience means looking for those red threads. Pull together all your feedback, and look for patterns. What changes keep coming up? What problems pop up all over the place? What language are they using to describe both of these things? These are golden nuggets that you can use to shape your offers, write your copy, and connect more effectively with your ideal client.
And pay attention to when they said it. Feedback from eighteen months ago was written by someone living in a different economy, with a different set of things keeping them awake at 3 am. If your messaging is still built on what they told you back then, it’s answering a question they’ve stopped asking.
Your programme, service, whatever, is your baby. You are inclined to think it’s the most beautiful thing that’s ever existed (when everyone else might think its nose is a little weird). So, when it comes to developing a new thing, grab someone you respect, tell them about your audience, show them that spreadsheet full of feedback, and ask them what they think. I can guarantee they’ll see something you don’t. Or have a perspective that sparks ideas in your brain.
If you’d like me to be the objective baby viewer (weird?), then Get My Brain On Your Business is the quick-hit version. You bring the spreadsheet, I bring another frontal lobe.
Understanding your audience means business growth
Once you’ve gathered all that, it’s time to put it to work.
Use the patterns to refine your offers, and to speak to the problems your audience is actually sitting with. Don’t be afraid to pivot. If you’ve been talking non-stop about self-belief, and it turns out your clients really value the supportive community you’ve built, take a breath and talk about that instead.
When you’re working from what they actually said, you end up with offers that feel tailor-made (because they are).
When to call in the experts
Yes, this all sounds like a lot of work. Because it is.
But we all only have so many hours in the day, and very different skillsets. Which is why some people run the process themselves, and some people bring me in to do it for them.
The Messaging Reset ($795) for when selling has got harder, and you want to know which bits of your messaging are still working (and which bits your audience has outgrown).
A Brand Messaging Guide (from $1,350) for the root-and-branch version, where I run the interviews and the research and hand you everything you need to make a success of this business thing.
Like finally working out which song your 6-year-old wants, understanding your audience takes patience and a willingness to be wrong about what you thought they were asking for.
Most of the people who can tell you have already worked with you. You just need to ask better questions.
Comments Off on I am a disappointing social activist
by allwordsbypeta
I am not active enough or “left” enough for a lot of people.
People I admire.
I am not vocal enough. Or hard-line enough.
I work with brands who might not completely align with all of my values.
I don’t post about Gaza or ICE or PIP reforms every day.
I have turned the breaking news notifications off on my phone.
And I haven’t shared enough GoFundMe’s.
I cannot watch videos or look at photos of dead, dying, starving, grieving humans. Because then my hyper-empathy (which I’ve generously passed down to my son) means I literally can’t function for the rest of the day.
But who am I (I can hear the pushback from people I love and respect) to opt out of their suffering? How privileged must I be to be able to ignore it? How can I ignore it?
For 2 reasons:
My business keeps us afloat.
I am the main breadwinner in our household. For quite a while I was the only one. So many of the people I know in the online space have a partner with a steady income, or savings they can fall back on when they make decisions about who to work with. It’s not true of all of us, and I wish this was talked about more.
The money my business makes feeds and clothes and educates and houses my family.
I’ve weathered Silicon Valley funding crises, AI, recessions, tariffs, global wars, and insecurity. Countless days when my pipeline has dried up as clients pull back due to uncertainty or having to pay 160% to import their goods before they sell them.
I don’t have the luxury of being able to switch my Stories to 24/7 condemnation of any government. I HAVE to find work. Or we don’t eat either.
Nuance is underused
I firmly believe something. Rarely (if ever) is something as cut and dried/black and white/no-brainer as it appears.
Labour is not evil. Nor is it our Saviour. Governments are cowardly, but they’re also responsible for navigating global circumstances 1000x more complicated and interconnected than they’ve ever been.
Republicans have some views I don’t agree with, and some of them need a pretty comprehensive education on a lot of stuff (and to spend some time in deep conversation with the poor and vulnerable). But they’re also not evil people.
Trump…well, Trump is the exception to my nuance rule. The only nuance I’ll allow with him is the same one I did with all the troubled young people I worked with when I was a youth worker – no behaviour happens in a vacuum, he is the result of the things done to him, and the things he did because of the things done to him.
Maybe the Christian tenet of “every human was made in the image of God and is redeemable” never really left me…
I’m a hypocrite
Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about how I struggle to do all the things I encourage you all to do. That I help my clients to do – to weave your values and social conscience into your messaging.
Because the fiscal reality within our current capitalist system weights heavy on me every day.
Because there are simply too many things I care about that are being torn apart right now. I can’t talk about all the things I’m against, or worried about, or want to shine a light on, because there is not enough time in my day. Or in my brain. I can’t do it.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up.
I don’t have to pick between being “all in” 24/7 and doing nothing at all.
And neither do you.
It’s tempting to see the discourse online and think that you only have a say, or can be considered a “good little activist”, if you hit all the whack a moles all the time. And that you can’t post about the offer you need to sell – that will really help someone’s life/business/family – because “how can you be talking about money at a time like this?!”
I heard Ray Dodd, a money coach, say earlier this year: “Every time you sold something, there was a war going on.”
Honestly, that stopped me in my tracks. Because it’s true. We pick and choose what is considered to be “serious” enough to make selling insensitive. There is always pain and suffering and trauma. And we should consider it in our words and our actions.
But, and I know this will piss some people off, your mortgage company still wants payment when there’s a war in Sudan.
You do not owe some random, well-meaning person on the internet your potential revenue from that week’s sales.
Change is made on the ground
So, how do you balance your social conscience with the realities of being a human with responsibilities?
There is no one right answer (sorry). But I have some thoughts. (And I also have a bunch of things to help you, whichever route you decide to take – I’ll list them all at the end).
Change is made on the ground, not in the algorithm.
Change is made through the conversations you have in the school playground, the connections you make in the doctor’s waiting room, and the communication lines you open with people who disagree with you (and yes, this can happen online as well as in real life. I’m not a fan of algorithms, but I’m also not willing to throw out the biggest communication channel the world has ever seen).
If you feel helpless, and guilty, and that visceral need to just DO something, then start here. Build your community.
You can do this purely by talking to those around you, finding out about your neighbours and offering support (whether that’s a listening ear as they moan about an unhelpful mother in law, or sharing school pickups).
You can do this by tapping into community groups, or starting your own. Is there a food bank you can help at? Is your Town Council looking for new blood (probably not as sinister as it sounds!)? If you’re in the US and there are mutual aid opportunities, or Signal groups giving people heads up about ICE raids, can you join those?
And, if you’re at the stage of life where there is no time after childcare and other caring responsibilities and work and everything else, then concentrate on having conversations with the people you meet every day, about things that matter.
Build links, because those links are how real community happens. The kind of community that comes together when the shit hits the fan. The kind of community that makes everyone’s lives better.
Make time to dream
A Milton Friedman quote popped up on a podcast I listened to the other week: “At times of crisis, the solutions will be chosen from the ideas lying around at the time.” I’m not a Friedman fan, but he was a smart guy. And this struck me. When crises happen, societies can’t take years to come up with new ideas of how to fix them or rebuild. They need ideas that are almost ready to go, that have been incubated and are ready to be born.
This is a task that lots of us are neglecting in favour of running on the reactive media treadmill.
And it’s a task that, in its undertaking, builds joy, hope, and community.
So, yes – use your platform to speak up for the things that matter to you. To showcase and shine a light on issues you think deserve more attention. Protest and campaign and fundraise and volunteer. All this is vital – especially as the collateral damage of our economic and social policies piles up further.
AND.
Join groups where you can talk about ideas. Where you can share stories and read books and explore different ways of building communities and societies. Learn about poltics and civics and advertising and propaganda. Debate and dream.
So that these ideas are ready when we need them.
It all matters. So find the things that work for you. And continue building your business. Rather than feeling guilty because you can’t perform the social media activism that ideological purists demand of you.
Some resources to help you reach out
I’ve been talking about this kind of thing for a while, so I have some great resources to help you, whichever road you go down:
There are now over 50 episodes of the Soap Box Podcast out in the world, all of them inspiring chats with business owners about their own personal soap boxes and how they talk about them in their business and life. Worth a dive!
Here’s a blog post on how to have better conversations, especially with people who disagree with you. As we approach holiday season (with its inevitable awkward family conversations), this might be a big help.
If you’re looking for a simple framework for talking about this kind of stuff in your business without sounding like you’ve turned into a charity, then read this post on how to talk about politics without pissing people off.
Particularly relevant to this topic of how we build movements and communicate in the social media age is this podcast episode with Evante Daniels and his book “Power, Beats, and Rhymes”.
And, if this has inspired you, then please check out The Portal Collective, a platform for course creation, community building, and conversation away from the broligarchy and algorithms, where movements and new ideas are already being born.
Comments Off on Stop waving case studies at terrified clients: A better approach to B2B marketing during a recession
by allwordsbypeta
The bottom line: When business owners are terrified about economic uncertainty, waving case studies at them and shouting “just invest in marketing!” is tone-deaf. Here’s why that approach fails – and three empathetic strategies that actually work for purpose-driven brands.
There have been tears, and recriminations, and a general accusatory tone.
The swimming pool in our local leisure centre is closed. Because the boiler is broken. So that means that all children’s swimming lessons have been cancelled.
It’s been two weeks, and Erica is cross with me. (Because, obviously, it’s completely my fault. I snuck in with an oversized spanner and undid some pipe that was integral to the whole engine. Just so I didn’t have to wrestle her still wet, wriggly, 5-year-old body out of a swimming costume and into her clothes…
I didn’t, I promise….)
But, it’s refreshing, honestly. Because for the first 5 years of her life, I’ve been trying to convince her that letting go of me in a swimming pool wouldn’t, in fact, kill her. And that, if she did, she’d find the whole experience much more enjoyable.
Being proved right is quite nice sometimes. And also exasperating. (Bit like parenting in general, really)
I knew, because I’ve already been through it with one terminally anxious child, and because I’ve learnt to swim myself, that she would be perfectly safe. That the water could be fun, and relaxing, and that she’d enjoy splashing around playing games. Once she took the (metaphorical and actual) leap away from being a limpet around my neck.
But, from her perspective, I was talking bollocks.
How could I possibly know that it would be ok? How could it possibly be ok when she was terrified? When everything around her looked uncertain and strange, and she didn’t know whether there was anywhere steady to put her feet?
Sound familiar?
The problem: marketing during a recession has become tone-deaf
LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, Facebook (anyone still there?!), podcasts, webinars – all the marketers everywhere are trying to get you to close your eyes and make the leap into investing in their services. To trust them that clinging on to as much of your revenue as possible is self-defeating, and will never result in growth.
Telling you that yes, it does look scary, but you’ve been here before, and you know that letting go – making an investment in your Facebook ads, brand messaging, email strategy, PR plan – will mean you can swim more easily towards your goals (is the metaphor getting tortured yet? Answers on a postcard, please).
And you know what? They’re right.
There are buckets of case studies, stats, research articles, and real-life evidence to back them up. To show you that pulling back on marketing in a downturn, recession, or time of uncertainty, can stunt your business growth. And that investing in strategic marketing can supercharge it (or whatever verb we’re not currently avoiding because ChatGPT is obsessed with it).
But all you can see is no solid ground, tariffs, global insecurity, constantly changing waves. And all you can feel is the terror that letting go, taking even a gentle leap – will ruin everything.
Why the “just invest in marketing!” approach isn’t working
Marketers telling you that you should invest in marketing even though the market is so unpredictable/perhaps there’s a recession coming/blah blah blah, doesn’t have the effect they think it does.
It comes off as self-serving.
“I know you’re confused and stressed, and the immediate response is to pull back on all costs, but you shouldn’t. Because I need work.”
Yes, that’s what it sounds like.
Even though there are facts and stats, and they can show you the McDonald’s case study that backs up investing in marketing in a downturn. Even though they mean well (most of them), and they’re right.
It’s tone deaf.
And it’s beginning to sound a little like the B2B version of those coaches who tell you that you’ll never grow if you don’t invest before you’re ready. Leaving you with massive credit card bills, a group call where you get 5 minutes of “advice” a month, and a side order of regret.
It’s also the opposite of good, effective, empathetic marketing. Disregarding the anxiety your audience is going through is a terrible strategy (ethically, and in terms of effectiveness).
What the data actually says about marketing during a recession
Here’s the thing: the research really does show that maintaining marketing spend during economic uncertainty pays off. But how you present that information matters.
The stats everyone quotes:
A McGraw-Hill study of 600 companies found that firms maintaining or increasing ad spend during the 1981-82 recession saw 275% sales growth over five years, compared to just 19% for those who cut advertising
Companies that kept marketing during the 2008 recession achieved a 17% compound growth rate, while competitors who pulled back struggled to recover
Nielsen research shows brands going “dark” for six months lose 2% of long-term revenue each quarter, and it takes 3-5 years to recover that lost brand equity
The McDonald’s story everyone loves: During the 2008 recession, McDonald’s increased their advertising investment while competitors like Burger King pulled back. And, as a result, McDonald’s stock rose 18% while Burger King’s dropped 31%. They invested 3.2 times more than Burger King in advertising and positioned themselves as the value option with their Dollar Menu strategy.
These numbers are real. The strategy works.
But you know what else is real? The absolute terror that business owners feel right now about making any investment when everything feels uncertain.
It might be time to invest in marketing. Or it might not.
Here’s what I’m not going to do: tell you that NOW is definitely the time you need to invest in strategic brand messaging or marketing strategy.
It might be time for you to invest in being more strategic with your marketing and messaging.
It might not.
I can’t unilaterally decide that for everyone in my audience. I’m not scrolling through your accounting software or sitting next to you as you weigh up cancelling that Patreon subscription.
(If we jump on a call, you lay out your struggles and goals, and I know working with me can help, then I’ll absolutely make a recommendation. Based on your circumstances.)
Like with Erica and her swimming fears, it’s time to be a little less tough love, and a little more “let’s have a hug while you tell me how you’re feeling, and maybe then we’ll go have a paddle in the baby pool.”
3 ways to market empathetically during economic uncertainty (without sounding self-serving)
If you find yourself in the position of trying to convince business owners to part with their hard-earned cash (because you know in your heart of hearts that it will make their business stronger – not because you’ve got a quiet diary), then there are other ways than waving the McDonald’s in 2008 case study at them.
1. Pay attention to what they’re actually afraid of
It’s time to move beyond dismissing their concerns with a “but the data says…” Instead, think about sitting down next to them and really understanding what’s keeping them up at night.
What this looks like in practice:
Instead of “Companies that cut marketing lose market share,” start with “I know you’re looking at your cash flow and wondering which expenses are truly necessary right now. That’s a completely valid concern.”
Ask questions like:
What specific financial pressures are you facing right now?
What would need to be true for you to feel confident investing in marketing?
What’s your biggest fear about maintaining your marketing spend?
Then – and only then – can you address those specific concerns with relevant solutions.
Why this works: Your potential clients aren’t arguing with the data. They’re paralyzed by fear. When you acknowledge their fear as valid rather than something to overcome with statistics, you build trust. And trust is what drives decisions during uncertain times, not case studies.
Yes, the bigger strategic project will bring them brilliant results. But right now they need the quick and tangible wins. How could you repackage your genius in a way that gives them those?
What this looks like in practice:
If you’re a web designer, instead of only offering full website redesigns:
Offer a conversion-focused homepage audit with actionable fixes
Create a landing page package for one specific service
Provide a “quick win” package that updates their three highest-traffic pages
If you’re a business coach, instead of only six-month programmes:
Offer a one-off strategy session with a written action plan
Create a “sprint” intensive focused on one specific challenge
Provide quarterly check-ins rather than ongoing monthly commitment
If you’re a photographer, instead of full-day shoots:
Offer a headshot refresh session for updated LinkedIn profiles
Create a “content bank” mini-shoot for social media
Provide brand photography specifically for their highest-converting sales page
The psychology behind it: During economic uncertainty, businesses look for what researchers call “branded affordability” (the same strategy McDonald’s used with their Dollar Menu). They maintained quality but made it accessible to budget-conscious customers.
Your services probably already create strong ROI. But if the upfront cost feels prohibitive when someone’s anxious, they’ll never get to experience that ROI. A smaller entry point with clear, measurable outcomes reduces the perceived risk.
Real example from my business: When I noticed purpose-driven startups and small businesses saying “Your Brand Messaging Guide looks great, but it’s beyond my budget right now,” I created the Mini Guide at roughly half the price. Same quality, focused scope, tangible results. These clients used them to plan content strategies, brief designers, and tighten messaging (all the things they really needed without the full bells and whistles they weren’t ready for yet). I practiced what I’m preaching to you.
Don’t expect them to be convinced by what a global behemoth did when they’re running their business from a desk in a coworking space in Coventry.
What this looks like in practice:
That McDonald’s case study is brilliant for context. But your actual clients need to see businesses like theirs succeeding with your approach.
Instead of “Companies maintaining marketing during the 2008 recession saw X% growth,” try:
“I worked with a three-person consultancy last year who were terrified about investing in brand messaging during a slow quarter. We created a focused messaging framework for £1,595 that they used to update their website, pitch deck, and LinkedIn content. Within two months, they closed a client worth 10x that investment – specifically because their new messaging resonated.”
Why this works: Research on marketing during downturns shows that traditional buyer personas become less relevant during recessions. Psychological segmentation that considers emotional reactions becomes more important. Which basically means you need to show your audience – “people like me buy things like this.”
Your prospective clients aren’t emotionally connected to McDonald’s success in 2008. But they are emotionally connected to businesses that mirror their own size, stage, and challenges.
Where to find these examples:
Case studies from businesses at similar revenue levels
Stories about customers who were initially hesitant but saw results
Your own journey investing in your business during uncertain times
The value-based marketing approach for purpose-driven brands
Here’s what ethical B2B marketing during a recession actually looks like: You’re focus should be on helping the right people make informed decisions for their specific circumstances. For example, in my business:
Some businesses genuinely shouldn’t invest in comprehensive brand messaging right now. Maybe they’re in survival mode. Maybe they need to focus on cash flow. Maybe their resources are better spent elsewhere.
And some businesses absolutely should invest – because clear, strategic messaging is exactly what will help them stand out when competitors go quiet, or because muddled messaging is actively costing them deals.
My job, and yours, is to help people figure out which category they’re in, not pressure everyone into buying.
Creating flexible options that meet people where they are
Focusing on customer retention as much as acquisition
Beyond being ethically sound (and making you a pretty cool person), this approach makes good business sense. The clients who do work with you will be the right fit, not people you pressured into something they weren’t ready for.
What purpose-driven businesses should actually do about marketing right now
If you’re a purpose-driven startup, coach, or service provider wondering whether to maintain your marketing efforts, here’s my actual advice:
Audit your current marketing spend:
What’s driving revenue versus what’s just creating noise?
Where are you getting the best ROI?
What could you trim without impacting your ability to attract and convert clients?
Double down on what works:
If your website converts well but traffic is low, focus on driving qualified traffic
If you’re getting traffic but poor conversions, fix your messaging (that’s where I come in)
Get crystal clear on your value proposition: During uncertain times, B2B buyers are going to prioritie solutions that promise clear wins. Can someone understand exactly how you help within 10 seconds of landing on your website?
If not, fixing that messaging is probably worth more than any new marketing channel you could add.
Make it easy to say yes:
Clear pricing (or at least pricing structure)
Low-risk entry points
Proof that you understand their current challenges
Trust signals (testimonials from businesses like theirs)
Whether you’re the one scared of the leap, or the one coaxing others into the pool
Whether you’re the business owner terrified to invest, or the marketer trying to convince others, empathy wins every time.
For business owners: The data really does show that strategic marketing investment during downturns pays off. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore your gut feelings about your specific situation. Find an expert who will help you figure out the right path for you, not just sell you their solution regardless of fit.
For marketers and service providers: Stop leading with the McDonald’s case study. Start leading with empathy. Understand that your potential clients aren’t irrational for being scared. They’re being human. Your job is to help them make the right decision for their circumstances, not to pressure them into any decision.
Start there. And if you’d like a hand turning that empathy into strategy that actually converts, let’s talk.
You’ve got questions about marketing during a recession? (Or while everyone is panicking about there maybe being one?) I’ve got answers:
Should I cut my marketing budget during a recession?
No, cutting your marketing budget during a recession usually backfires. I know that sounds counterintuitive when you’re trying to preserve cash, but companies that maintain their marketing during downturns recover faster and steal market share from competitors who go quiet. The research across multiple recessions is pretty clear on this. That said, I’m not telling you to keep spending money on stuff that doesn’t work. Be strategic about where you invest, not just slashing everything because you’re scared.
How do I know if I should invest in marketing right now?
Ask yourself: is unclear messaging currently costing me deals? If potential clients are confused about what you do or why they should pick you, then yes, you should invest in fixing that. It’ll pay for itself quickly. But if you’re genuinely in survival mode and worried about making payroll next month, then no. Sort out the immediate crisis first. Marketing can wait until you’ve caught your breath.
What’s the difference between maintaining marketing spend and being tone-deaf?
The difference is empathy, honestly. Being tone-deaf means waving case studies in people’s faces while ignoring that they’re genuinely terrified about their business. Empathetic marketing means saying “I know you’re scared, here’s what might actually help you right now” instead of “just trust me and spend money you don’t have.” One acknowledges reality, the other pretends fear isn’t valid.
Why do so many businesses cut marketing first during downturns?
Because marketing feels like the easy thing to cut when you panic. It’s often seen as “nice to have” rather than essential (spoiler: it’s not). When cash gets tight, business owners look for things that won’t immediately break the company if they stop. Marketing seems like one of those things. Except it’s not, because cutting it means you lose visibility, brand equity, and market share. And then you’re really struggling when things improve.
What type of marketing works best during a recession?
Marketing that works best during a recession is the stuff that clearly shows value. Focus on how you solve problems or save people money. Show ROI. Share testimonials from businesses similar to your prospects. Make it really easy to say yes with clear pricing and low-risk options. And honestly? Digital channels often win here because you can measure what’s working and they don’t cost a fortune.
How can small businesses compete with larger competitors during economic uncertainty?
This is actually when small businesses have the advantage. You can be faster, more personal, and more empathetic than the big corporations who are busy cutting budgets and laying people off. While they’re going dark, you stay visible with strategic content. While they’re hiding behind automated systems, you build real relationships with clients. You become the trusted alternative to the faceless corporation that stopped returning calls.
Ready to get your messaging right?
If you’re ready to stop guessing what your audience wants to hear and start communicating with clarity and empathy, let’s talk about whether brand messaging support makes sense for your specific situation right now.
I offer strategy calls where we’ll dig into your current challenges, what you’re trying to achieve, and whether working together would actually help.
Because whatever the economy decides to do, one thing remains true: clear, empathetic messaging that resonates with your audience will always outperform confused, generic copy that makes people work too hard to understand your value.
And unlike forcing a terrified five-year-old into the deep end, we’ll start exactly where you are and build from there.
Each one sounds slightly different, but overlaps just enough to be confusing. And when your brand’s at that messy middle stage (scaling, pivoting, second-guessing itself), you’re left wondering:
👉 Who do I actually need? 👉 What’s the difference between all these roles? 👉 And at what stage of growth does a brand consultant make sense?
That’s what this post is here to answer.
I’ll break down what a brand consultant does (and yes, it’s more than frameworks and moodboards), how I’m different from a coach, strategist, or designer, and when it’s the right time to bring one in.
“I don’t want to call myself a coach! I don’t do all those things a ‘life coach’ does. I’m so much more!”
And they’re right – they are.
But if their perfect clients are searching for life coach, and they’ve decided to go with “Transformational Soul Alchemist”. Then no one’s finding them.
Messaging isn’t for you. It’s for your audience. Which means your words need to be recognisable to them.
So, as I was working on sharpening my own messaging, I looked at my own title (the rather wordy Brand Messaging Strategist and Conversion Copywriter). And I realised it worked brilliantly in the echo chamber of marketers and copywriters. But outside that, all I got were blank stares.
That’s why I made the shift.
Hi. I’m Peta. And I’m a Brand Consultant.
What is a Brand Consultant?
(Here’s the short answer, for those of you who want to get straight to the point)
A Brand Consultant helps businesses clarify how they talk about themselves – and then makes sure that strategy comes to life everywhere your brand shows up.
That means:
Researching your audience and market.
Defining your positioning so you stand apart.
Crafting your brand voice and messaging.
Creating (or overseeing) the copy and content that carries it into the world.
Coordinating trusted creative partners (design, SEO, video, socials) so your brand feels consistent everywhere.
What does a Brand Consultant actually do?
Ok, so bringing your strategy to life sounds fabulous – Disney-esque, even. But what does that actually mean in practice? Let’s break it down in terms of what I actually deliver:
Brand messaging & brand voice strategy – frameworks, guidelines, and playbooks so you and your team know exactly what works with your audience and how to make your content sound like you (on a good day)
Website copywriting – homepages, about pages, service pages, sales pages that are strategically crafted to bring that messaging and voice to life. So that your online home turns visitors into clients.
Full sales funnels – landing pages, email sequences, sales pages, upsells, even ads (all built around your strategy, not someone else’s templates).
Email strategy & copy – nurture sequences, newsletters, audits, re-engagement campaigns, webinar show-up sequences, launches. Whatever your goal, strategic email can help you hit it.
Consulting sessions – those “Get My Brain On Your Business” hours where you bring the thorny problem, and I help untangle it. The perfect dip-your-toe-in offer with high ROI.
And because no consultant can (or should) do it all:
I coordinate with website designers and developers, brand designers, videographers, photographers, SEO specialists, and social content creators to bring the strategy to life across every touchpoint.
So if you’ve ever wondered, “Do I need a Brand Consultant or a Copywriter?” the answer is yes – you need me, to deliver strategy and execution.
How is a Brand Consultant different from a coach, strategist, or designer?
Let’s clear this up, because I know the waters are muddy, partly because of what I mentioned earlier – people like to play with what they call themselves. And yes, this is top-level. And also yes, I know that each of these people have incredibly valuable skills and are incredibly helpful for your business in different ways.
Brand Consultant vs Coach A coach will help you work through your mindset, set goals, and stay accountable. A good business coach will help you work out what you want and get out of your own way. Which is super important. But you do the work. I’ll give you the words, strategy, and structure you need so your marketing lands.
Brand Consultant vs Brand Strategist Strategists give you the frameworks and positioning. I do that too, but I also implement that strategy – writing the copy, mapping the funnels, and making sure your team can use it to grow your business.
Brand Consultant vs Designer Designers make you look gorgeous, and they also create a visual world around your brand that increases the connection with your ideal audience. Visuals are important – we’re visual creatures. And, visuals are only part of the story when it comes to your brand. I work on the overall strategy and messaging, so that the whole package resonates. And then you can hand that off to your designer so everything is aligned.
Brand Consultant vs Copywriter A good copywriter can give you strong words for a campaign or launch, anchored in conversion-focused techniques, and proven frameworks. I zoom out to make sure every single piece of copy – across emails, ads, web, socials – fits into your brand’s cohesive strategy.
When should you hire a Brand Consultant?
Usually, it’s at one of those messy inflection points:
A launch that feels heavier than anything you’ve carried before.
A pivot that makes your old copy sound like it belongs to someone else.
A scaling push where your team’s messaging starts to splinter.
When you’re tired of explaining what you do every time someone asks.
It’s at these points that you need a critical friend: someone outside the business who can reflect, guide, and give you clarity without sanding off what makes you unique.
What’s it like to work with me?
Clients have described it as part therapy, part strategy, part clarity bomb.
I listen without judgement.
I ask the questions you didn’t know you needed.
I translate your tangle of ideas into words that feel like you and work for your audience.
And yes, I’ll gently call you out if you’re hiding behind jargon or clever-but-obscure titles.
The end resullt is more than a shiny pdf (although you can have one of those, too!). You get clarity, confidence, and a brand voice you can actually use.
Or as one client put it: “I finally feel like I can breathe when I talk about my business.”
Results from working with a Brand Consultant
A few highlights from recent projects:
A coach doubled her discovery calls in less than a month – simply by switching from a niche, clever title to a term her ideal clients actually searched for (which we worked out through my in depth audience research).
A SaaS company saw stronger SEO performance and conversions after we reworked 65+ website pages around clearer messaging and voice-of-customer insights.
An e-commerce start-up went from having a great product but struggling to stand out, to a fully-formed brand, with consistent messaging across ads, packaging, and web. And the confidence they needed to hit the ground running. The product lead said, “I finally know who we are as a brand!”
A dating coach went from struggling to explain her unique community idea to having clarity on exactly what made it special and how it could completely change the dating game.
A course and community platform went from 3 years of struggling to bring in investment, to filling their first funding round after we worked on messaging and rewrote their pitch deck.
That’s the power of getting your words, voice, and positioning lined up with what your audience needs to hear.
Quick self-check: do you need a Brand Consultant?
Your audience isn’t responding like they used to
Your team’s messaging feels inconsistent
You’re second-guessing every piece of copy
Your sales calls feel like uphill battles
You’re making a pivot in your offer, audience, or messaging
You’re not sure whether you need a coach, strategist, designer, or something else entirely, and you don’t want to waste money on the wrong fit.
If you ticked even two of those, you’re probably at an inflection point. And that’s where I come in.
Ready to grow without losing yourself?
If your brand feels like it’s outgrown its old story, or if you’re simply tired of explaining what you do every time you meet someone new, it might be time to talk.
Together, we can uncover exactly how your audience talks about what you do – so you can meet them where they are, connect faster, and grow with intention.
👉 Book a call and I’ll give you an honest idea of whether I’m the right person to help you.
FAQs about Brand Consultants
Is a brand consultant the same as a brand strategist? Not quite. A brand strategist focuses on frameworks and positioning. A brand consultant does that and then helps you action it – writing the copy, shaping the funnels, and making sure your whole brand story hangs together. I’m not stuck on one framework or process, I grab whatever I need from my toolbox to get you where you need to be.
Do brand consultants actually write copy? This one does. Websites, funnels, emails, ads – all underpinned by strategy. Because beautiful frameworks and shiny pdfs don’t mean much if they never make it into words your customers actually read.
Do I need a brand consultant or a coach? If you need accountability and mindset support, hire a coach. If you need clarity on your message, copy that works, and consistency across your brand, you need a consultant.
What industries do you work with? Coaches, SaaS and tech platforms, e-commerce brands, B2B startups, SexTech and FemTech brands – anyone in that adolescent brand stage where things are scaling, evolving, and getting messy.
When’s the right time to hire a brand consultant? At an inflection point: when what used to work isn’t working anymore. That might be before a big launch, during a pivot, or when your scaling feels chaotic.
(My exceptional VA helps me edit my podcast so it actually goes out, and puts my copy into carousels that don’t look like a colour-blind 3-year-old made them)
Like so many others, I’m doing the work of 7 people. And yet, we’re told we’re cheating if we let AI lend a hand.
I’m in charge of sales, marketing, growth, finances, delivery, client relations, quality control, network building, capacity planning, and everything else.
I also have 2 children (1 with additional needs), a cat, a husband, laundry, cooking, meal planning, shopping, cleaning, school runs, exercise, and a million pieces of life admin that pop up out of nowhere (you know the ones).
Business for a lot of people doesn’t mean renting an office, growing by word of mouth and investing in wider marketing when you’ve grown to a certain size and can afford to hire someone to do it for you.
Now you have to plan and organise and create daily (or more) content for at least 4 different channels, battling myriad algorithms, understand SEO, and work out funnel automation from the very beginning.
You have to be your own full-sized marketing department before you even fill your books (or pay yourself a salary).
So yes, more people are using AI to take the pressure off. Because, let’s not beat around the bush, it is too much pressure. For this new breed of business owners, who are more likely to be balancing caring responsibilities around their brand, these pressures are unreasonable. However much shiny content by people like Amy Porterfield tells you it isn’t.
Which is why I think the gatekeeping and shaming around using AI is unfair, and unreasonable.
Yes, there are ethical issues around AI – its development, regulation, use (uncompensated) of art and content made by humans, environmental impact, the fact that Sam Altman is obviously part of the Silicon Valley “I’m smart so I can do whatever I want”, and “isn’t this interesting I’m going to see where it leads, even if it might hurt people” mindset.
For example, I can’t stick around on LinkedIn or threads for more than 5 minutes these days without reading that asking ChatGPT a question is like pouring a bottle of water down the sink.
Which, fine. But have you stopped and checked what the environmental impact of doomscrolling for 3 hours is? Or your latest “it’s for the content” Amazon purchase? Honestly, the problem is less saying “thank you” to the robot living in your computer, and more all those millionaires flying around in private jets… just saying.
If you have an online element to your business, then you rely in some way on the algorithms of the various social media sites. These algorithms reward profiles that put out frequent and regular content. And, yes – even if you’ve got an email list – you need some way to drive leads to that list. If you’re at the point in your business growth when you can’t afford to outsource to a marketing team, then you are the marketing team. And, in order to be seen amongst the noise on social media, you need to come up with a ridiculous amount of content. The overriding feeling is that it’s about volume.
And I’m sorry, but the average (often female) service-based business owner cannot produce this volume in an organic, considered, handcrafted way, without burning out or neglecting the client work that pays their bills.
You telling them that they’re personally melting the ice caps and ripping off every single author out there isn’t making them reconsider using AI. It’s just layering on another coat of shame, overwhelm, and the feeling of not being enough.
Look, I’m a copywriter. I’m aware that AI has knocked out a large portion of my industry. I’m aware that it has made it harder to convince people of the value of what I do. I have lost clients who decided (sometimes correctly, and sometimes not) that they could take the work we’d done together so far, pair it with ChatGPT, and cut their marketing investment to $20 a month.
Would I prefer everyone to adopt their very own pet copywriter to handcraft every single piece of marketing and sales material they put out into the world?
Sure.
But that was unrealistic before AI, and it’s even more unrealistic now.
We laud the lowering of barriers to entry to business. How the internet has opened up opportunities, made being an entrepreneur more accessible.
This is part of it.
Why punish and browbeat the self-belief coach who can now help more clients? Or the ADHD mentor who can now find more people to support because she can use AI to organise her thoughts and combat procrastination?
Do I think that people could be creating more effective AI content?
100% yes.
Do I roll my eyes as I see brands and individuals who I rate putting out emoji-strewn captions that could be talking about any industry or offer?
100% yes.
Do I offer services for clients who want nothing to do with AI and are happy to invest in human-crafted words and strategy?
Obviously.
Am I going to continue to suggest to these brands that investing in messaging strategy and brand voice work that they then train their AI with will make ongoing content creation easier AND more effective?
Damn right I am.
But what I’m not going to do is write 53 LinkedIn posts about how I can spot when you’re using AI because of em dashes, or rocket emojis, or contrast structure, or because you mentioned cheese.
The majority of these brands aren’t putting out this content because they think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. They’re doing it because they’re fucking overwhelmed. They feel like the algorithm is against them (because it is), and they’re just trying to build a business that pays their bills and makes life worth living.
Why are we shaming people for using the tools at their disposal to make their lives easier?
I’d rather help people build sustainable businesses (with whatever tools help them do that) than add to the pile-on.
