CONSULTANCY / FRACTIONAL / STUDIO
STORY
PROPERLY TOLD.
Strategic marketing consultancy for businesses built on provenance and the kind of standard that isn’t supposed to need explaining.
From the positioning, and everything that carries it afterwards.
MORE THAN JUST WORDS:
Every business worth its reputation is built on something specific. A way of making, a way of hosting, a way of setting a stone that took years to get right and would be obvious to anyone who knew what they were looking at.
Most of that never makes it into words. It sits in the hands of the people doing the work, understood but unsaid, while the website and the emails and the room itself say something far more generic instead.
It’s the specific, particular, thing a business actually is, said with enough precision that a stranger feels it on first contact. Then makes sure that sentence turns up everywhere the business does, not once, in a strategy document nobody reopens, but consistently, in the site, the photography, the emails, the room a launch happens in.
That’s the whole discipline. Not decoration. Not noise. The truth of a business, put into a form other people can recognise.
94%
OF CONSUMERS RECOMMEND BRANDS
THEY EMOTIONALLY CONNECT WITH
Emotional connection isn’t a nice-to-have sitting on top of good marketing. It’s most of what makes marketing work at all, and it comes from specificity, not volume.
Somewhere between four and ten thousand marketing messages reach your customer daily. In this world, a good number of them are beautifully shot, decently written, nothing wrong with any of it. What makes one stop someone mid-scroll is rarely louder. It’s more precise, about a person who’s easy to picture and impossible to mistake for anyone else.
Precision is the mechanism. The story is the strategy. Everything else, the website, the photography, the emails, the room a launch happens in, is where that precision either shows up or quietly doesn’t.
I’ve been obsessed with stories since I was a child.
The kind of obsession that meant reading with a torch under the duvet long after I was meant to be asleep, and a proper mourning period once a book was finished, before the next one could start.
That habit is essentially the whole business now. Years spent watching companies try to tell their story and noticing that the ones people actually remember are never the loudest. They knew exactly what they were, said it plainly, and said it the same way everywhere anyone might come across them.
Most of the people I work with have done this before, with someone else, and know precisely what they’re looking for the second time. What they’re usually looking for is a foundation that holds, and the follow-through to carry it into everything built on top of it.
Seven years in, it’s still the only thing I want to be doing.
SPEAK SOON, LUCY X
Rebecca came to Ibali with a business she was genuinely proud of and marketing that no longer reflected it. Six months later: the right clients were finding her, her prices had gone up, and her marketing finally said what her business had always been.
‘The best investment I’ve made in my business.’
Rebecca Clissett
TWO WAYS TO WORK WITH IBALI
Both start in the same place: the story, the positioning, the foundation. Where they differ is how deep in we go, and whether the work is a defined project or an ongoing leadership relationship.
FRACTIONAL CMO SERVICES
Senior marketing leadership. Embedded.
For businesses at the stage where they need a serious marketing mind in the room: in the decisions, in the leadership meetings, accountable to the commercial results. Not just a consultant who submits a report.
MARKETING CONSULTANCY
Rebuild the story. Reposition the business.
For growing businesses where the story has stopped keeping pace. We rebuild from the ground up: positioning, audience clarity, messaging architecture, commercial strategy. A brief the team can actually work from.
‘Lucy has a knack for anticipating the needs of
both my business and my clients.’
Robert Harris
I only work with four businesses at a time.
Not because I can’t take on more. Because this work requires depth; knowing your business well enough to see the story it should be telling, and the gap between that and what it’s telling now.
If something on this page sounds like your business: I’d like to hear about it.
lucy@ibali.co.uk - Subject: Let’s talk