You’ve probably noticed that everyone seems to have an AI answer for marketing right now. Create more content, faster. Automate your posts. Build campaigns in seconds. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re wondering whether you should be doing the same.
Maybe you’ve already tried some of it. Run a few prompts, generated some captions, fed a tool your brand description and hoped for the best.
The output looked like marketing. But something about it felt off.
That feeling is important.
Because the problem was never the tool.
It was what was underneath it.
I almost built Eventbrite in 2003.
Let me take you back a bit, because this year has become a full-circle moment for me, and the story explains a lot about why I think the way I do.
I started my career in marketing operations at two global investment banks in London. Long before tools like Eventbrite existed, I spent 18 months working alongside an IT team to build a proprietary event management platform from scratch. One of the first of its kind, complete with measurement frameworks nobody else in the industry was thinking about at the time. Marketing ROI tools. Event delegate management. The unglamorous machinery that makes marketing measurable.
When the build was done, someone floated the question: should we sell this?
The answer was no. We kept it in-house.
Not long after, Eventbrite launched and changed the industry.
For years, I simply wondered what impact that chapter had on my marketing career. I learned a lot about technology, and I’ve been CMO for tech start-ups since. But I haven’t built tech since then. I’ve been marketing.
This year, that changed. We’re building Collective Source: a strategy-first AI marketing engine, created exclusively for our Mentorship members, that turns the brand strategy you’ve built into campaign outlines, messaging and content that sound like you. And the build has shown me that chapter in London went much deeper than a career lesson.
I like to believe everything happens for a reason. The painstaking detail that platform demanded prepared me to see what’s now possible with AI, and to build a solution that draws on that depth of knowledge. It gave me the discipline to build this well. Twenty years on, with a clear purpose, a trusted partner, and a model the market doesn’t yet have, this feels like returning to that moment and finally saying yes.
One belief has followed me through all of it: a tool is only as good as the thinking underneath it. The small businesses that are going to win with AI are the ones with the clearest thinking. The ones who know who they are, who they serve, what makes them different, and how their customers actually make decisions.
In this post, I want to walk you through:
- Why most marketing advice starts in the middle, and what it skips
- The part of strategy nobody talks about: the part that comes from your heart, not just your head
- What getting Collective Source pilot-ready has asked of me, and what each of those things means for you
- Why now is the perfect time for our clients
Here’s how it all connects.
Most businesses start in the middle.
When most small business owners think about marketing, they think about the visible stuff. The social posts. The website. The ads. The email newsletter. The things they can see other businesses doing and measure themselves against.
They build a website before they’re clear on their positioning. They start posting before they know what they want to be known for. They run ads before they understand how their customers actually make decisions.
That’s what they’ve been shown to do. Most marketing strategy advice for small business leads with tactics, because tactics are tangible: easier to teach, easier to sell, easier to execute.
The problem is that tactics without strategy is a very busy way of going nowhere.
Inside The Marketing Collective Mentorship, we’ve always started from the foundations. Brand identity. Positioning. Customer psychology. Messaging. The customer journey. Everything that comes after depends on getting this right first.
Through The Source Method, we work through these foundations in sequence: brand strategy first, customer experience second, visibility and content third. In that order. Every time. When those foundations are clear, marketing becomes intentional. When they’re not, you end up endlessly tweaking the surface and wondering why nothing’s quite landing.
And when AI enters the picture, the stakes rise. Without clear foundations, AI just produces faster noise. More content that sounds like everyone else, moves quickly past, and converts no one. With them, AI becomes a delivery mechanism for thinking you’ve already done: executed consistently, at pace, without burning yourself out in the process.
Strategy from the heart, not just the head.
There’s a version of marketing strategy that lives entirely in the head. Market analysis, competitor reviews, segmentation models and market sizing. All of it useful. None of it enough.
The strategies that actually hold, the ones that survive a slow month, a pricing wobble, an algorithm change, are built from somewhere deeper. Your purpose. Your values. The reason you started this business when a job would have been easier. When your strategy is anchored there, you stop chasing what everyone else is doing and start building something only you can build. Your marketing stops feeling like a performance and starts feeling like a conversation.
I’ve watched this play out in my own business this year.
When the idea for Collective Source arrived, my head had plenty of objections. I’ve always been strategy-first, and adding a tech layer felt like a significant departure from what TMC is built on. I had real concerns about AI’s environmental footprint. And I didn’t want to build something that contradicted everything we’d been teaching about depth, foundations, and doing the thinking before the doing.
What changed was a conversation I hadn’t planned for. Earlier this year, I met Lian Passmore through a networking session. Our first meeting was supposed to be about websites. Within minutes, we were deep in a conversation about ethical AI and what it means to build technology that stays genuinely human. She’s now our AI for Marketing Coach, and the person building this alongside us.
That’s what operating from purpose and alignment looks like in practice: the right people arrive at exactly the right time. My head needed convincing. My heart recognised the alignment straight away. Both mattered, and both belong in your strategy too.
What getting pilot-ready has really required of me.
I’m loving geeking out on this build. Twenty years after that first platform, I’m back in the machinery, and this time the machinery starts with strategy. Getting Collective Source ready for next month’s pilot has asked three big things of me, and each one carries something worth borrowing.
- A revisit of my own brand and marketing strategy
The engine needs gold-standard examples, so my own strategy had to be current first. If yours is in place, consider this your nudge to dust it off and do the same. If it doesn’t exist yet, the Mentorship is where you start, because Collective Source only unlocks once your strategy is solid. Otherwise it’s crap in, crap out, and that’s not our style. - Hours of deconstruction
Yapping, Reels, hooks, carousels, blogs, LinkedIn articles. I’ve pulled apart what’s working right now and what isn’t, and built that knowledge into the engine itself. We do this so our clients never have to. No skill building, no prompt writing. The tool asks the questions, you answer them, and your campaign outline, messaging and asset inventory come back done. - Attending other people’s challenges
Our twice-annual challenges are already a strong lead generation engine for us (the waitlist for the next one is here). I’ve been joining others’ challenges too, watching how they run them, so the version we build into Collective Source gives you a real range of options for your own lead generation challenge.
Why now is the perfect time for our clients.
The tech is finally good enough to do this with integrity. And our members are ready for it.
We restructured and relaunched The Marketing Collective Mentorship in September last year: three phases, built around The Source Method, in sequence. What we didn’t fully anticipate was what would happen when the first cohort reached the end. They’d built their foundations. They had clarity on their brand, their messaging, their customer journey. And then they looked at the execution ahead of them, and it felt enormous.
And here’s the part that moved me: they didn’t want to leave. The support inside the programme, the coaching, the community, the collective of senior specialists, had become a genuine container for their business building. They wanted to stay in it while they made the leap from strategy to delivery.
So the timing chose itself. The foundations our members have built are exactly what make Collective Source different from every other AI marketing product out there. The strategy exists. The execution layer is ready to meet it.
We’ve done the investing so you don’t have to.
Everything I’ve described, the strategy revisit, the hours of deconstruction, the challenge research, we’ve done deliberately, so our members never have to.
The strategic support came first, and it’s what nobody else has built. That’s where we hold your hand, because it’s what we do best. Now Collective Source connects that work to the execution of your marketing, so you never leave with a strategy that goes nowhere. You leave with the skills and the tools to deliver it in the real world. With everything moving this fast, we’ve embedded the knowledge and expertise into the engine, so you don’t have to keep chasing it.
Phase one is a pilot launching in August, available exclusively to Marketing Collective Mentorship members who’ve completed their brand strategy. It’s a build we’re doing with real members, real strategy, and real feedback shaping every iteration. We’ll be learning. There will be things that don’t work. We’ll be honest about all of it.
The place to start is The Marketing Collective Mentorship. It’s where the strategic foundations get built, and right now, for members who are ready, it’s also the pathway into the Collective Source pilot.
Come and find out more, or get in touch directly. We’d love to talk about where you are and whether the Mentorship is the right fit for you.