So much marketing has lost its way.
The fundamentals have not changed - human nature doesn’t move as fast as technology does.
Awareness still matters and it gives the incumbents and the bigger brands an advantage. After all, you can’t be chosen by people who don’t know you exist.
But somewhere between the rise of digital channels, the content treadmill, and the paid search trap, a huge number of businesses stopped asking the question that makes any of it work.
What are you promising? To whom? And why should they believe you?
Chasing clicks is easy. Building something meaningful is harder. A business that spends its entire marketing budget on paid search is buying attention - temporarily. The moment the budget stops, so does the visibility. Nothing has been built. No preference created. No reason established for anyone to choose you over the next result on the page.
I’ve spent thirty years working with businesses that had the opposite problem. Not too little marketing activity - too little clarity underneath it. Good businesses, doing genuinely valuable work, that couldn’t articulate why the right customers should choose them over anyone else. The words came out flat. The message sounded like everyone else in the sector. The proposition - if there was one - had been written for the website and forgotten about.
Most of those businesses had never had a strategy written down. What they had was a logo, a website, and a sales conversation refined through trial and error. The proposition - if it existed at all - was in the founder’s head.
That’s the gap The Chosen One was built to close.
It’s a structured process. Not a workshop you attend and leave with a document nobody opens. A sequence of steps designed to surface what’s actually true about your business - from the outside in, starting with the customers who already get it and working back to the words that make more people like them feel the same pull.
I start with customer intelligence. What do your best clients say about why they chose you - unprompted, in their own words? That language is almost always sharper and more useful than anything in your current marketing. I look at where you sit in your sector and where the genuine white space is. I interrogate what you do best and who values it most. And then we work together in a focused session to find the proposition that’s uniquely yours - not borrowed from category convention, not built around what competitors are saying, but grounded in what makes you the right choice for exactly the right people.
What you leave with is specific to you. A proposition your team can use, your sales conversations can reflect, and your marketing can build from. Something that makes it easy for the right people to choose you - because they can clearly see why they should.
Awareness without clarity is noise. Clarity without awareness is a secret. The Chosen One gives you the clarity. What you do with it is up to you.
About Garrett Reil
Garrett Reil has spent thirty years helping businesses find their difference and put it into words. Ideas that make customers choose them.
He has worked with some of the world’s leading brand consultancies - Landor, FutureBrand, Brand Union - building brand strategy for global businesses across Europe and beyond. What he noticed, repeatedly, was that sound strategic thinking often failed to become anything useful in the market. The strategy was right. The words weren’t. The proposition existed in a document but not in the room where it needed to work - the pitch, the sales conversation, the moment a prospect decided whether to go further or move on.
That gap - between what a business knows about itself and what it can say clearly to the right people - became the focus of his practice. He moved upstream into the strategy development process specifically to close it. Not to produce better documents, but to produce thinking that could be expressed simply enough to actually work.
He now works independently, as a senior strategic partner to some of Ireland and the UK’s leading brand and design agencies, and directly with enterprise and scaling businesses. His clients have included Bosch, Heineken, NatWest, Virgin Media, Glenisk and King’s Inns. He holds multiple Transform Europe Awards - the benchmark for effectiveness in brand strategy.
The Chosen One is built from that experience. A process designed to do what thirty years of practice taught him matters most - find the proposition that’s genuinely true, and say it in a way that makes the right people feel the pull.