Strategy · Go-to-market · Customer experience
Your marketing spend has grown with the business. The leadership directing it hasn’t. You’ve got a team, an agency, campaigns — and no one senior enough to say whether it’s the right activity.
When you’d call
If you recognise your own situation here, the first conversation is usually short.
Who you’d be dealing with
Twenty years in senior marketing roles, most of it in-house rather than in an agency — which means I’ve had to live with my own recommendations.
CMO of Integrated Research, an ASX-listed technology company. Head of Marketing at Monash IVF Group. Work across technology, healthcare, transport and logistics, government, telco and not-for-profit. Enough different industries to know which problems are actually industry-specific and which ones just look it.
Summatt is the consulting side of that. I work with businesses that already have a marketing function and no senior strategist above it — usually $20–100M revenue, usually somewhere between “this used to work” and “we’re not sure what to do next”.
I’m direct, I show the working, and I’ll tell you when something’s rubbish. Nicely.
What I do
What the evidence says about your category, which segment is actually worth winning, and what to stop doing. Written so the board can read it and the team can run it.
One message, the channels that earn their place, and a sequence with dates against it. The test is whether your existing team can execute it on Monday without me in the room.
Journey mapping that finds the two or three points where people quietly give up. Usually cheaper to fix than the channel spend that was meant to compensate for it.
Standing in as the senior marketer while you recruit, restructure, or decide what the role should be. Includes running the team, the budget and the agency relationships.
A structured read of what’s working, what isn’t, and what the numbers can and can’t tell you. Often the right first engagement, because it settles the argument before anyone spends money on it.
Whether the structure fits the work, where the gaps are, and what to hire next. Sometimes the answer is fewer people and a clearer brief.
How it works
Senior time, a minority of capacity, and a clear end point.
Two to three weeks reading the data, the market and the team. You get the evidence base, not an opinion.
The segment worth winning, the message, and the two or three moves that matter. Everything else gets named and set aside.
A plan the existing team runs, with the reasoning attached so it survives the first time something changes.
Recent work
One product, three different buyers, one message — and no internal agreement on which buyer mattered most.
The positioning wasn’t the problem. It was the evidence that nobody had made the choice.
The CRM was fine. What wasn’t fine was that nobody had written down what a qualified lead looks like.
The system was faithfully recording a definition that didn’t exist.
How I think
Most growth comes from people who barely know you. Not your loyal customers, not your database, not the segment your last agency built a persona for.
That one idea — grounded in the Ehrenberg-Bass work on mental and physical availability — changes almost every decision underneath it. Where the budget goes. What the brand has to do. Which metrics are worth arguing about.
Master of Business Administration.
Graduate, Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Certified Practising Marketer.
If any of this sounds like your situation, a short conversation will tell you whether there’s anything here worth paying for.
Start a conversationGet in touch
I read these myself and reply within a day. If it’s obvious from your message that I’m not the right person, I’ll tell you that too — and usually point you at who is.
Your details go into my CRM so I can reply, and nowhere else. I don’t sell data or add people to lists they didn’t ask for. The privacy policy has the detail.