Editorial notes · Munich
UrbanPeak Marketing GmbH is a marketing strategy and communications consultancy. We develop and implement marketing and communications strategies — and these pages record what the practice taught us, corrections included.
These are short editorial notes on communications strategy as we see it in the German market. They are written for practitioners, not for search engines, and they are revised when we change our minds.
Each note names the practice it came from, and none of them contain a number we cannot point at. New notes appear when a project teaches us something we had not already written down.
Format
Short notes
Written for
Practitioners
Market
Germany
Practice
Strategy
Editorial notes
Each one comes out of a project. Read them in any order — the argument is in the whole set, not in one line.
Practitioners entering the German market often prepare a value argument first. In our experience the first questions from a German mid-market buyer are about where data is processed, who is liable, and whether the reference customers are reachable. Value lands second, after those three.
This changes the material order, not the material. Put the compliance answer on one page, early, in plain language. Then make the value argument to a reader who is no longer distracted.
The strongest signal that a message architecture has not been finished is its length. When every stakeholder group has been given its own set of four messages, the result is a document that nobody can recall and salespeople rewrite from memory.
The practical fix is ruthless subtraction in a room with the people who will have to say the words. Ask each group to name the one sentence they would repeat to a customer. If two groups give the same sentence, you have found a fixed point, and you can build the local variations around it.
Mergers, rebrands, and site changes are announced internally and externally within days of each other, and planning them as one sequence tends to fail. The internal audience is the only audience that can immediately check the message against reality.
Practically, this means the internal version needs to be drafted first, even when it is published second. Writing the press release before the employee message produces a document employees recognise as untrue within a week.
Clients often ask for measurable communication and expect a dashboard. What a dashboard measures is activity: impressions, mentions, reach. These are legitimate but they move immediately and prove very little.
The measurement that changes decisions is smaller and slower: whether the sales team stops rewriting the pitch, whether journalists call you for context instead of comment, whether a specific competitor appears in the same shortlist conversation you used to be excluded from. Agree those definitions with the people who will look at them monthly.
In practice, the model question is not about prestige. It is about who writes the second draft. Agencies generally produce at the client's direction; consultancies generally argue about the direction before production starts. Both are useful, and the failure pattern is buying one and expecting the other.
A simple test in the first meeting: describe a decision you have already made and see whether the provider pushes back. If nothing pushes back, you are buying production rather than advice, which may be exactly what you need.
How we work
GPRA membership and similar professional affiliations come up in directory coverage as credibility markers for consultancies. They are not proof of quality.
What they do offer is a filter on professional standards and a rough signal that the firm is not a one-person operation appearing and disappearing between projects. For a buyer, that is a reasonable tiebreaker when two providers look otherwise similar. Use it as a tiebreaker, not as a shortlist.
Every page on this site carries witness marks recording claims that were tested and changed between drafts. We deliberately do not show the original wording of the discarded claims.
The reason is simple. A discarded claim, read out of context, sounds like a claim that was made and then withdrawn. The count is the honest signal: this page was argued over, and here is how much. If you want a provider whose material has never been corrected, there are plenty available.
When a strategy workshop produces a complete plan by Friday, the completeness is usually inferred rather than earned. Two things are typically still unknown: what an important internal group believes, and what the first customer reaction will be.
Ending a first session with two open, named questions is a better output than a finished document. It gives the second session something to do, and it forces the missing interviews to happen rather than be skipped.
A forty-page proposal mostly protects the provider. It is a document that says "we considered every possibility" without saying which one applies. Procurement processes sometimes require the length, and in those cases we produce it.
But for the client's actual decision, two to four pages covering scope, sequence, assumptions, and what would change the plan is both cheaper to write and easier to disagree with. A proposal nobody disagrees with is usually a proposal nobody read.
One drawn figure
The bars below are the shape of a measurement conversation we have often: the activity chart on the left moves fast and proves little, and the decision variable beside it is smaller, slower, and the one that actually changes the plan. We draw this on a briefing wall before a workshop, because the argument is easier to see than to say.
We agree the definitions with the people who will look at them monthly — sales, comms, and one person from the leadership team. If a number cannot be pointed at a decision it informed, it does not belong on the shared page.
Where the notes come from
The stack is real: each note is short, written for a practitioner, and dated only by the project it came out of. We keep them on the desk while a strategy is running, add to them when a client conversation contradicts a line we had written earlier, and only then decide whether the note belongs on this page.
If you are running a marketing or communications strategy of your own and one of these notes has an equivalent in your business, tell us which one — the useful conversation is usually about the disagreement, not the agreement.
Next dispatch
New notes appear when a project teaches us something we did not already write down. If you want the next one by email, the contact form works for that too, and you can say "notes" in the message.
We send them when there is one, not on a schedule. There is no list to join and nothing to opt out of — every note is written because a strategy said something we had not expected it to.
Elsewhere on the wall
UrbanPeak Marketing GmbH
Landsberger Straße 302
80687 München, Deutschland
Monday to Friday, 9:00 – 18:00
