FAMILIES WITH A P&L

Family businesses tend to work - and not work - in the ways they do because they sit much closer to how humans are actually wired to behave than other businesses. Modern corporations, for all their scale and sophistication, are largely artificial constructions. They rely on rules, incentives, and structures designed to manage our instincts. Family firms, in contrast, lean into them.

They operate more like our ‘native setting’ - where trust is inherited, identity is shared, and decisions are filtered through relationships as much as reason.

You get commitment that can’t be bought, speed that doesn’t require layers of approval, and a long-term view that isn’t dependent on this quarter’s results. But you also inherit the other side of human nature - bias, conflict, over-attachment, resistance to change, and the unpredictability of who comes next. We’ve all seen Succession.

The same forces that make family businesses powerful are the ones that make them fragile, and that’s not a contradiction, it’s how the system works.

Most ad agencies will look at your business and see a set of numbers that need improving. Revenue curves to lift, margins to optimise, channels to unlock, stuff like that. They’ll arrive with frameworks and leave behind slide decks, as if what sits in front of them is a problem-to-be-solved rather than something that has been built, over years, by people who had much more at stake than a quarterly report and skin in the game needs protecting.

That’s what this pitch is about.

What you, family business custodian, are running isn’t just a company. It’s a continuation of something older than that. An arrangement that, whether you use this language or not, sits very close to how human beings have always organised themselves - around kinship, trust, shared identity, and the understanding that what we are building  is not just for us, but for those who come after.

Family businesses feel different because they are.

They draw their strength from things most modern organisations try to engineer artificially. Loyalty that isn’t contractual, commitment that isn’t incentivised, decisions that aren’t made purely on short-term gain but on what preserves and strengthens the whole over time. There’s a reason for that. Humans are wired to favour their own, to invest in what carries their nameand to protect what can be passed on. That instinct shows up in the way you think about risk, about quality, about reputation. It’s why you’ll take a longer view when others chase the quick win, and why certain decisions simply don’t feel right, even if they look good on paper.

And yet those same instincts come with their own tensions.

Because the forces that bind families together also pull them apart. The desire to protect can become resistance to change. The expectation of loyalty can blur into obligation. Different generations will see the world differently, one shaped by what built the business, another by what might be needed to keep it relevant. Even within the same family, people are not cut from the same cloth. Anyone who’s worked alongside siblings or children knows that ability, temperament, and ambition don’t pass down in a straight line. What you get instead is a mix - sometimes a strength, sometimes a challenge - that has to be worked with.

Most outside advice ignores all of this.

It assumes that all businesses behave like machines and  that if you adjust the inputs, the outputs will follow. It assumes decisions are made cleanly, rationally, without the weight of history or the complexity of relationships. And so it often misses the point, not because the advice is wrong or bad, but because it doesn’t fit the reality of how your business actually works.

Family businesses don’t run on pure logic. They run on a combination of instinct, experience, trust, and negotiated alignment between people who are tied together in ways that go beyond the job description.

Which is also where their advantage lies.

Because when it works, it creates something difficult to replicate. A level of cohesion, speed, and shared purpose that most organisations spend years trying to manufacture. A culture that extends beyond employees into partners, suppliers, and customers. A sense, that this is not just another business, but a group of people who stand behind what they do.

The challenge is not to replace that with something more “modern” it’s to make it legible.

To take what already exists,  the identity, the standards, the way you operate, and ensure it is recognised, remembered, and chosen by people who are currently walking past it, not because it lacks value, but because it lacks signal.

That means working with the grain of the business and the grain of human nature, not against it. Understanding where trust is an asset and where it becomes insularity. Where loyalty creates strength and where it creates blind spots. Where the long-term view is a competitive advantage, and where it risks becoming hesitation.

It also means recognising that growth, in a business like yours, isn’t just about doing more. It’s about doing what you already do in a way that travels further beyond the immediate network, beyond the people who already know you, into the wider market where most choices are made quickly, instinctively, and often with very little information.

Because that’s the other part most people miss.

Your customers are not making perfectly rational decisions either. They are relying on signals -  familiarity, recognition, cues that tell them this is for people like me. The same instincts that shape how families operate internally are at play externally in how people choose between brands.

So the job isn’t to reinvent what you are. It’s to make sure the right signals are being sent, and received. So that what has been built carefully, over time, by people who cared enough to get it right, doesn’t remain invisible to the majority of the market.

Because in the end, the businesses that endure are not the ones that change the most.

They’re the ones that understand what must stay the same, and make sure the world can see it clearly.

You’re not just companies, you’re families with a P&L.

CRAFT HAS A SIGNAL PROBLEM

Craft distillers tend to believe their biggest advantage is what’s in the bottle. Better ingredients, more care, real people, real places. A level of attention the big players simply can’t replicate at scale. And, yes, what’s in the bottle, in many cases, IS superior.

But in the moments that actually matter - at the shelf, the back bar or the rushed gift purchase - not much of that is visible to the majority of consumers.

This is where many craft brands are missing an opportunity. Not because they lack quality, but because they lack mental availability. They are hard to notice, hard to recognise, and easy to screen out.

And when that happens, all the marketing effort goes into depth instead of breadth. It goes into telling richer stories to the same small group of enthusiasts, rather than making it easier for many more people to choose you in the first place.

Walk down any whisky aisle, and you can see the problem immediately. A sea of browns, creams, serif fonts, and origin stories. Each one meaningful, for sure. But all of them blending together.

Craft distillers don’t have a product problem.
They have a signal problem.

The opportunity is not to abandon craft, or to chase mass-market sameness. It’s to translate what makes you special into something that works under real-world conditions. Low attention, low involvement, and imperfect memory.
That means thinking a little less like a producer, and a little more like a brand.

What do you look like from three metres away?
What do people remember after seeing you once?
In what situations do you come to mind?

Because growth doesn’t come just from being the most admired whisky in the room.
It comes from being the one that’s easiest to reach for.

And the distilleries that crack that balance between authenticity and availability are the ones that don’t just get respected, they get bought by more people.

The irony?
The most “craft” thing you can do…
is make your brand easier to buy.

So, if you’re a distillery trying to grow without becoming generic, that’s exactly the tension worth solving.

THEY DIDN'T COVER US. GOOD.

There’s an expectation that follows any new agency around. That until the trade press or business media acknowledge you, you’re not quite real. You can be doing the work, having the conversations, even getting results, but without that external validation it can feel like you’re operating a wee bit outside the official version of the industry.

We’re aware of that. We’ve noticed TheSignalWorks hasn’t had much attention from those places. None, to be honest. No trade, no business press and no local news. They all got the PR releases (and we'll still send them, anyway).

We're pretty vacant. And we don’t care.

Because something else has been happening at the same time. Conversations have been starting in a different way. People are getting in touch because something we’ve said connects with a problem they recognise. Introductions are coming through from one person to another. It’s not dramatic or particularly visible in public, but it’s happening.

That kind of thing doesn’t announce itself. It builds gradually, as ideas move between people who find them useful. One conversation leads to another, not because it was designed to 'land', but because it makes sense of something that didn’t before.
It also changes how you think about coverage. The trade media tends to favour what’s already visible like scale, spend, the same familiar 'expert' names, work that’s easy to package or the homespun smallness thats not getting bigger. That’s just how the system works. But it means approaches built on slower, less obvious truths can sit outside that frame for a while.

We’re totally fine with that.

We’re building something useful, helping brands get noticed, get remembered and get bought. If that spreads through word of mouth, through people sharing things that work, then that’s exactly how it should happen.

Over time, that creates its own momentum. And when it does, attention usually follows. And then they'll come looking.
By then, it’s not really the point.

So we’re not particularly concerned about being overlooked by the rags, we’re more interested in whether what we’re building is useful, and it continues to find its way into the hands of people who can do something with it.

WHAT IS SIGNAL PHYSICS?

Signal Physics is the idea that brand growth behaves less like persuasion and more like signal transmission.

A lot of marketing theory often treats advertising as if it were a rational argument. The message is delivered, consumers evaluate it, and then decide to buy or not. But decades of evidence from marketing science, behavioural research, and evolutionary psychology suggest something quite different. 

Most buying decisions are not the result of deliberate persuasion. They emerge from the probability that a brand’s signal is activated in the consumer’s memory field when a category trigger occurs.

Signal Physics reframes marketing through this lens.

It treats the marketplace as a complex signal environment in which brands compete for attention, memory and recognition. In this model, marketing activity does not directly “convince” consumers. Instead, it emits signals that travel through media environments and consumer memory systems. The brands that grow are those whose signals are noticed, encoded in memory, and retrieved when a buying situation occurs.

The concept blends three strands of evidence.

First, market data and marketing science, particularly the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, which demonstrates that brand growth is primarily driven by increases in mental and physical availability rather than persuasion. Distinctive brand assets, broad reach, and consistent signals strengthen the likelihood that a brand will be remembered at the right moment.

Second, evolutionary consumer psychology. Human attention and memory systems evolved to detect signals that historically indicated opportunities or threats. Our brains prioritise stimuli that are emotionally salient, distinctive, and socially meaningful. Marketing that aligns with these evolved attention mechanisms travels further through the cognitive system.

Third, signal propagation dynamics. In any noisy environment - whether biological ecosystems, communication networks, or financial markets - signals must overcome interference to be detected and retained. In marketing, this interference takes the form of competing messages and fragmented media environments.

Signal Physics proposes that marketing effectiveness can be understood as the interaction of four core signal forces:

Emotion – signals that trigger instinctive attention and motivational relevance.
Attention – the ability of the signal to break through environmental noise.
Memory – the encoding and retention of the brand in long-term memory structures.
Reach – the breadth of signal exposure across the category buying population.

When these forces align, the signal strengthens and spreads through the market. When one of them weakens - for example, low reach or low memorability - the signal dissipates before it can influence behaviour.

This perspective also helps explain why many modern marketing strategies fail. Over-optimisation for short-term metrics, narrow targeting, or generic messaging often produces signals that are technically efficient but cognitively weak. They travel poorly through human attention and memory systems.

By contrast, strong brands emit signals that are simple, distinctive, emotionally resonant and widely distributed. Over time, these signals accumulate in consumer memory and increase the probability of brand retrieval in buying situations.

Signal Physics, shifts the focus of marketing strategy away from persuasion and toward signal strength. The question is no longer “Did we convince people?” but rather “Did our signal travel far enough, strongly enough, to become part of the market’s shared memory?”

Systems like TheSignalWorks AURA apply this framework by predicting how marketing influences these signal forces, using market data, behavioural science and AI modelling to simulate how marketing signals propagate through attention, memory and ultimately market behaviour.

In short, Signal Physics treats brand communications as the science of signal transmission in human minds and competitive markets.

CREATORS AREN’T PERSUADERS, THEY’RE MUTATION ENGINES

'Humans evolved in small social groups where copying others was an adaptive learning strategy.
Rather than figuring everything out from scratch, individuals relied on heuristics that allowed them to identify who was worth imitating.
Two of the most important of these ancient heuristics are prestige bias and success bias. People are naturally inclined to copy individuals who appear admired, competent, or socially successful. Creators occupy precisely this role in modern digital culture.'

Read the rest of the article in Eaon’s regular column for MediaCat UK

THINK SMALL. STAY SMALL.

We are hearing this lately
“All this Marketing science and consumer psych is interesting… but it’s not for us, we’re just a small brand. We’re not Coca-Cola.”
The thing is, the principles we use at TheSignalWorks aren’t designed for big brands. They’re designed for any brand that wants to grow more.
Coca-Cola didn’t start as Coca-Cola. It started as a small drink sold in a pharmacy in Atlanta. Just about every large brand you can think of began life as a small one. The difference is that some of them understood what it takes to grow.

Marketing science simply describes the laws of how brands grow in competitive markets.
You grow by reaching more buyers than you currently do.
You make the brand easy to notice and remember.
You build memory structures so people think of you at buying moments.
Those principles apply whether you sell 10 bottles a day or 10 million.

In fact, small brands arguably need this knowledge more, not less. When budgets are tight, you can’t afford to waste time chasing fashionable tactics, vanity metrics, or the latest algorithmic fad. You need to focus on the few things that reliably work.

TheSignalWorks itself is a small brand.
But we don’t think like a small brand.
We built this agency around the best evidence in marketing because we have no intention of staying small. Thinking small is how brands stay small. The companies that break out - even in places without much advertising culture - are the ones that decide to operate with a bigger view of their market.

Marketing science isn’t about being Coca-Cola.
It’s about behaving like a brand that intends to become one of the big players in its category.
If a brand is happy to remain small forever, then none of this matters.

But if the ambition is to grow - even modestly - then the fundamentals suddenly become very relevant.
Because the laws of brand growth don’t change depending on the size of the company.
They apply to everyone.

SORRY ABERDEEN, BUT PLAYING SAFE IS TOO RISKY

There’s a concept in Ronald Heifetz’s Harvard tome ‘Adaptive Leadership’, that I’ve paraphrased as ‘the illusion of the broken system’.

The idea is simple. When something looks dysfunctional from the outside, it’s because you’re probably judging it against the wrong goal. The system isn’t failing. It’s succeeding, but just not at what you think it’s supposed to do.

What you’re seeing in Aberdeen’s ‘advertising’ ‘culture’ isn’t a failure of talent. It’s a system working exactly as designed.

The easy explanation is that local advertising is just a bit rubbish. That agencies don’t try hard enough, or that clients don’t ‘get it.’ But that’s lazy.

The more interesting truth is that most of the work you see isn’t trying to do what you think it’s trying to do. It looks like advertising and it uses the language of advertising.
But its real function is something else.

The dominant question is not ‘will this grow the clients' business?’
It’s ‘will anyone complain about this?’

Work becomes polite. to the point of invisibility. Not because people lack imagination, but because imagination carries risk. And risk, in a tightly networked community, is reputational before it is commercial.
So, it’s the ‘safest’ work that wins. And the safest work is the kind that disappears the moment you stop looking at it.

From there, a second dynamic plays out.
Markets get the advertising they deserve, as the saying goes.
Or, more precisely, they get the advertising they demand.
If clients don’t understand how brands grow, if they don’t value memory structures, or distinctive assets, or long-term mental availability, then agencies just adapt.
They optimise for approval.
They become suppliers rather than partners. Order takers.
I once had a local creative tell me that a ‘good idea’ is one that ‘the client approves’.
And so you get a long trail of competent, well-intentioned invisibility.
It’s not just poor creative. It’s a structural misunderstanding of how growth actually works.

Layered on top of this is something more cultural.
Creative advertising feels all a bit… ‘London’. Not done round here.
So edges are filed down so it won’t get anyone into trouble.
It won’t get anyone noticed either.
The result is a kind of equilibrium.
Clients don’t demand better because they’ve rarely seen it. Agencies don’t push harder because there’s no reward for doing so.

From the outside, it looks like mediocrity.
From the inside, it’s stability.

The bar isn’t just low it’s structurally held down.

So the problem with local advertising isn’t that it’s bad.
It’s that, on its own terms, it’s working perfectly.

And those terms are the problem.

The irony, of course, is that the opportunity is enormous. Because in a system optimised for safety, anything genuinely distinctive has an unfair advantage.

BUILD IT AND THEY (WON’T) COME

(Or Aberdeen’s Retail Recovery Strategy fixes the map, but the other problem lives in the minds of shoppers).

I sat in on the presentation of the Aberdeen Retail & Property Strategy with a mix of recognition and unease.
Recognition, because the diagnosis is sound. There's too much space, too fragmented, not enough coherence. The proposed fixes, consolidation, re-anchoring, improving the flow etc are all correct.
But a slight unease, because this is really only half the problem.
This is a strategy that fixes the map.
But the real issue isn’t the map, it’s in the mind.
Improve the place, and people will come back? I dunno.
People’s habits have rewired. The default is no longer 'I’ll go into town.' It’s retail parks, online, or not bothering at all and hang around Inverurie. Aberdeen city centre has slipped from being the obvious choice to just one option, and often not the easiest (or best) one.
And there’s a harder truth. The city centre hasn’t just declined, it’s been struggling for so long that many people can’t remember when it was good. For some, especially younger audiences, there’s no positive memory to return to at all.

So you’re not just asking people to come back.
You’re asking them to reconsider something they’ve already written off.
THAT’S A BEHAVIOURAL CHALLENGE, NOT A PROPERTY ONE.

One stat from the report says it all. Union Square accounts for a minority of space but the majority of sales. People already have a mental shortcut for where to go.
You don’t break that with better paving or a slightly improved tenant mix.
At the same time, leisure is filling space but not driving proportional value. We’re replacing retail with activity and calling it recovery.
The missing piece is how people actually decide to come into Aberdeen in the first place.
When does it come to mind?
For what reasons?
In which situations does it feel like the obvious choice?
This is about mental availability.
Category Entry Points. The cues that make something easy to think of at the moment a decision is made.
Without that, even a well-designed place struggles. (With it, even imperfect places can thrive.)
Right now, the strategy tells us how Aberdeen should function.
It doesn’t yet tell us how Aberdeen should be remembered.
And that’s the difference between improving a place and making people choose it. Aberdeen city centre isn’t competing with other places on a map.
It’s competing with whatever comes to mind first.

IN OTHER WORDS, TO TREAT ABERDEEN CITY CENTRE NOT JUST AS A PLACE, BUT AS A BRAND.
Because when it all comes down, that’s what it is competing as.

And in that competition, the rule is simple.
If it doesn’t come to mind, it doesn’t exist.

The good news is, we are here to help.