The Long Read
Thinking in the Long Term
This is an extract from our Studio Dispatch from 17th April 2026.
A few weeks ago I gave a talk about marketing for the Business Design Trust. I had been asked to explain how we think about marketing in our business, which forced me to do something I have never really done before: sit down and articulate the principles behind the decisions we make. I wanted to find the 5 underlying principles that broadly cover every decision we make.
Most of the time the business moves too quickly for that kind of reflection. There is always something practical to do. A newsletter to write, designs to review, orders to pack, a launch to prepare for. Decisions get made quickly and instinctively and you move straight on to the next task.
Preparing the talk gave me the opportunity to slow down and explain why we do things the way we do. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that a surprising number of our decisions come back to the same thing: our product is really rather slow.
That might sound like an odd place to start when talking about marketing, but it turns out to shape almost everything about how the business works.
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