Better Eight than Never: what I’ve learnt from building The Unmistakables

Last week marked eight years since I registered The Unmistakables on Companies House and embarked on a journey to build a business grounded in a simple idea: helping brands stay relevant by better understanding society as it is, not how they’d like it to be. 

It was never about inclusivity for the sake of it. It was always about unlocking the untapped potential of different audiences and the types of people who wouldn’t necessarily work in marketing and communications, or be in the rooms I found myself in. The rooms where decisions were made about audience segments, what shaped consumer taste, and what appeared in the advertising and communications we see around us.

Over time, what’s become clear is this: inclusion isn’t the end goal. Relevance is. Increasingly, those two things are being confused in the market. Many marketers will say they care about relevance but what the industry often rewards is something closer to trendiness. The ability to react quickly, to mirror culture, to participate in the moment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s not the same as truly understanding people, and it doesn’t build lasting, authentic and meaningful connections and trust.

Eight years in, that gap is still there and if anything, it’s widening.

The model we’ve built at The Unmistakables has always tried to hold a different line. It centres the customer view - helping marketers and their agencies stay ahead of shifts in demographics and behaviour - while also navigating the colleague view, creating the conditions where inclusive, high-performing teams can do their best work. One without the other doesn’t hold for long.

Or, as I found myself saying to someone this week: we put the humanity into marketing. This isn’t about yet another strapline; it’s more about a discipline. A commitment to moving beyond surface signals into something deeper, more real, and ultimately more effective.

I’m only now getting round to writing this because on the actual anniversary, I was on stage at the World Federation of Advertisers Global Marketer Week conference. Invited to their Better Marketing Plenary, it was my job to convince a room full of the world’s top global CMOs that if there’s just one thing they should invest in for growth, it’s inclusive marketing.

Not creative excellence, which won the preliminary vote. Not technology and AI, despite the scale of disruption across an industry I’ve been part of for over 16 years. Inclusive marketing.

I don’t see this as a simplistic moral imperative. It’s one of the most underutilised ways to build genuine relevance in a world where audiences are more diverse, more fragmented, and more discerning than ever. It’s one of the most powerful levers for growth around the world as shapes and shares of wallets change. 

Speaking events have become one of my favourite parts of the job. I’ve been told I should add “Global Speaker” to my LinkedIn profile and having finally done that, I’ve found myself reflecting back to 2019 when I was invited to Canada in our first year of business with a talk entitled “Are we woke enough yet?”

At the time, I certainly couldn’t have predicted what was to come in 2020 - what my colleague Chloe affectionately terms “Black Square Summer” - and the way the social narrative around inclusion would accelerate, expand, and in some cases, oversimplify.

I’ve been able to see progress but given the algorithms and platform dependency, nuance has become flattened. In some cases progress has become more about language and language guides than action and behavioural change. It’s become more about signalling than substance, which makes it easy for inclusion to be treated as a campaign moment, rather than a route to sustained relevance and growth. Over the years, I’ve been on stages in Cannes, in London and even in St Albans, consistently making the case that when done well, inclusion drives relevance, and relevance drives growth. 

One of the most powerful lines I’ve learnt in my work came from Esi Eggleston Bracey, former Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Unilever, who said that in marketing, “everything changes, but nothing changes.” It’s striking, now realising that half of my career has been spent building The Unmistakables, just how true that is.

Everything changes. Brands shift spend to content creators. AI reshapes how work gets done. COVID altered the rhythms and patterns of work and opened up talent pipelines in ways we hadn’t previously accessed. And yet, nothing changes. Today’s content creator campaigns are just multimedia versions of 2016’s blogger campaigns. The fundamentals of understanding people, building trust, and creating work that resonates remain the same. Oh, and it seems like the commute is well and truly back. 

The same can be said for building a business. There are moments where it feels like everything changes, and others where progress is quieter, more incremental. As Peter Gandy taught me, it’s about taking small steps, slowly, every single day. Or as Daniel Priestley puts it, building a combination of luck, reputation and vitality over time.

More recently, I’ve been making more space to reflect. Encouraging restorative practice within our leadership team has meant doing more of that myself. Alongside the external shifts of the pandemic, social movements, geopolitical uncertainty - for five of these eight years, I was also navigating something deeply personal: the decline and eventual loss of a parent.

That experience has brought a different kind of clarity. A quieter, but more persistent question: what really matters?

Impact. 

Whether it’s seeing millions more people from different backgrounds feel encouraged and inspired by activity through something like the London Marathon, or seeing an individual shift their perspective in a session on the multigenerational workforce for a global FMCG company, the aim is the same - to leave people and things better than we found them.

That’s what being unmistakable is all about. Creating experiences that stay with people. Moments where clients, colleagues, partners and the industry walk away thinking, “I’ve not experienced something like that before.”

We deliver that most of the time - but not always. That gap is what keeps the work interesting and what keeps me motivated. Eight years in, it still feels like we’re only scratching the surface - not just of what we can do, but of what the industry is capable of when it moves beyond chasing trends and starts doing the harder, more valuable work of building real relevance.

The best is still to come.