Mark Evans MBA, CMgr FCMi

Every business is essentially making a marriage proposal to the market. Yet most do so blindly through building products, burning capital, and wondering why customers don’t say “yes.” The fundamental error isn’t in execution; it’s in assuming you can propose without courtship, without truly knowing the person you’re asking to commit.

Picture a colleague who never tires of questions. Who welcomes rough sketches and half-formed thoughts. Who helps you think rather than simply handing you answers. This is not about replacing human judgment. It is about collapsing the time between not knowing and doing. For Scottish SMEs running lean, that efficiency is not a luxury. It is survival. You need capability without the overhead of specialist hires or lengthy training programmes.

The Newtonian age of marketing - the age of the funnel, the persona, and the "is" - may be over. We are living in a world of Potentia, where consumers exist in superposition, where influence operates through resonance and entanglement, and where friction destroys value faster than advertising can create it.