Half your enquiries leave you flat. You quote them, you deliver, you never hear from them again — and somewhere in the back of your mind you suspect you’re spending your marketing budget attracting exactly the wrong people. This is a story about someone who wants more customers, but the obstacle isn’t reach. It’s that your marketing is built to appeal to everyone, which is precisely why it resonates with almost no one.

If you can’t say, in one sentence, which customers actually fund your business and which ones drain it, you’re not alone — most owners can’t, until someone sits down and asks them the right questions. The fix costs nothing but an hour of honesty.

You don’t need a bigger ad budget. You need to be impossible to ignore for the right dozen people, not mildly acceptable to everyone.

Trying to appeal to everyone is the most expensive mistake in small-business marketing, and almost nobody notices they’re making it. A website that says “quality service, competitive prices, family owned” could belong to any one of ten thousand businesses. It attracts anyone with a pulse and a credit card — including the price-shoppers, the drainers, the ones who will haggle you to the bone and never refer a soul.

The villain isn’t your product. It’s the belief that broader messaging means more customers. In practice, broader messaging means blander messaging, and blander messaging is invisible — and you’re probably not the best judge of your own message anyway. A 2026 UK survey found 88% of SME owners don’t fully trust their own branding to represent them accurately (Adobe, reported by IT Brief, October 2026). If you don’t trust it, your customers won’t either.

Seth Godin made the case plainly: in a market this noisy, a brown cow in a field gets no attention at all, no matter how good it is. A purple cow stops the car. Godin’s point isn’t to be weird for its own sake — it’s that remarkable, specific positioning does the job a bigger ad spend can’t.

Being remarkable starts with knowing exactly who you’re remarkable to, which means talking to the customers you actually want more of, not guessing from your own head. I’ve watched this play out with businesses like PhysioAction, Millie’s and Ellis Co — the positioning that finally worked for each of them didn’t come from a brainstorm in a boardroom. It came from a round of real customer interviews that surfaced the one sentence their best clients used, unprompted, to describe why they came back. That sentence became the whole campaign.

"Kevin assists businesses to understand their ‘Secret Sauce’ and implements a strategy to grow the company’s brand and in turn, business opportunities. His guidance and strategic advice is always well thought through and gets fantastic outcomes."

— Gareth Bayliss, Sales Manager, The Icehouse

You already suspect your messaging is too broad. The reason it stays that way is fear — narrowing your audience feels like turning customers away, when it’s actually the only way to be chosen on purpose instead of by accident. Figuring out which sentence is genuinely yours, and not a guess, usually needs someone outside the business asking your best customers the blunt questions you’re too close to ask.

This isn’t for you if you’d rather keep the message vague so nobody can disagree with it. A Purple Cow only works if it’s specific enough that some people will say it’s not for them.

If your marketing is polite, professional, and completely forgettable, that’s the first thing we’d change together.

Register Your Interest To Work With Kevin  |  Find Out More About Simple-Growth’s Online Programmes