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Method Work with me About Findings The Proof Study Get my free audit

The method

Most marketing starts with you. Ours starts with the customer. Start with the problem.

We don't start with your company, your product, or your talking points. We start with your customer.

What are they trying to solve? What do they need to believe? And what can you actually prove? Once we know that, we build the marketing around it.

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The usual order

A kickoff asks you five questions. Your customer asks two.

Most engagements open by interviewing the business about itself. Strengths, weaknesses, values, vision, competitors. Useful internally. None of it is what a buyer is doing when they land on your page.

What the kickoff asks you
  • What are your strengths?
  • What makes you different?
  • Who are your competitors?
  • What are your values?
  • Where do you want to be in five years?
What your customer asks
  • How can you solve my problem?
  • Why should I trust you?

Two questions. Say what you solve, show why it's true.

Where we start

With your customer. Always.

If you are not sure who that is yet, that is a normal place to start. Working it out is the first part of the job, not something you should have to finish before hiring anyone.

01

Where they talk.

Search, reviews, forums, sales calls, support tickets. The places people describe a problem before anyone has sold them anything.

02

What they say.

The words buyers use, which are rarely the words the category uses. The gap between the two is usually where the opening is.

03

What they need solved.

The part that matters most. Problems people act on, separated from the ones a room full of stakeholders assumes they care about.

Want to see this run on your own homepage first? One URL. Every claim marked Proven, Supported or Empty, plus the proof you already own and are not using.

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Why behavior, not opinion

Positioning is a bet on how people decide.

So it gets built on what is known about how people take in a message, what makes a claim land, and where belief actually comes from.

1–2 sec

Time a person actually spends looking at an ad dentsu and JCDecaux, Captivating on the GO, June 2026. 56% of passers-by fixated at all.

88%

Call trust an important or critical purchase criterion 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report. 17,688 respondents, 15 countries, fielded April 23 to May 11, 2026.

63%

Rate reviews the most authentic content, because a stranger can check them Emplifi, Consumer Survey: Digital Authenticity in the Age of AI.

Read together: you get about two seconds, trust is priced into the decision alongside quality and value, and the content people believe is the content they can check themselves. None of that argues for better copy. It argues for finding out what a buyer can confirm before you spend money saying it.

The framework

Pain. Claim. Proof. Solve.

Four steps, in that order. The order is the whole point. Most marketing decides what to say before anyone has established what the business has earned the right to say.

  1. 01

    Pain

    What problem is worth solving?

    Find what actually matters to the person making the decision. If nobody changes their behavior over it, it is not a pain.

  2. 02

    Claim

    What can you credibly own?

    Say something worth hearing, and something nobody else in the category has planted a flag on. If a claim does not solve a pain, it does not make the cut.

  3. 03

    Proof

    Why should anyone believe it?

    Give them something they can check without taking your word for it. No proof, no claim.

  4. 04

    Solve

    How does it reach the customer?

    Build it into the site, the messaging, the campaigns and the sales tools, then measure it. If it cannot be measured against something, it cannot be scaled.

Sometimes the finding is that you do not have a messaging problem. You have a proof problem, and the fix is making something true rather than describing it better.

Start here

Run it on your own homepage.

Send one URL. You get every claim on the page marked Proven, Supported or Empty, the proof you already own and are not using, and a fix list ranked by what it costs to leave it.

Get my free audit Let's talk about it
  • Free
  • No call
  • Fixes, not a pitch

Not sure the audit is the right starting point? See how the work is scoped, or tell me what is not working and I will say where I would start.