I go into calls and I don’t want to be perceived as a data nerd. No offence data nerds. I am a marketer. Creativity leads the way in thinking and doing. And to do your most creative work you need a foundation of customer awareness ( I hate it when folks talk about ‘obsessing over customers’ … that’s just weird).

Usually just after I've walked through how a small lift in conversion rate, from 2.25% to 2.5%, can add over £100k a year to a £1m store. The numbers land. Heads nod. Then someone asks, a little warily, whether it's all just testing button colours from here on.

I understand the worry. Optimisation has a reputation problem. Say the word and people picture spreadsheets, heatmaps and analysts nudging things by fractions of a percent until every store on Shopify looks exactly the same.

My answer? Done properly, optimisation is the most creative work in your business. It should push you away from best practice and towards a way of doing things that belongs to you and nobody else.

Best practice is brilliant when you're starting out. It's the collected wisdom of thousands of brands that went before you. You’re not reinventing the wheel here. A free shipping threshold. Reviews under the add to cart button. A welcome flow with 10% off. Abandoned basket emails at one hour, 24 hours and 72 hours. Do these things and you'll have a store that works.

The catch is that everyone else read the same blog posts. They installed the same themes, the same apps, and hired agencies running the same playbooks. Best practice is, by definition, average practice. It's what works for the middle of the bell curve. Follow it to the letter and the best you can hope for is to look like everyone else, slightly more efficiently.

This is the ceiling founders hit again and again. The routine stuff got them to £1m, £2m, £3m. Then growth stalls. CAC creeps up on Meta and Google, margins thin out, and the only lever anyone can see is more budget. They're doing everything "right", and that's exactly where the trouble starts.

When every brand in a category optimises towards the same benchmarks, they all converge. Same layouts, same offers, same ad formats, same copy. Your customers? They can't tell you apart, so they choose on price. And a race to the bottom on price is one nobody wins profitably. And yet… it’s what we end up doing.

I think a lot of the industry has optimisation backwards. It gets sold as a way to close the gap between you and best practice. Run the audit, tick off the checklist, hit the benchmark conversion rate for your vertical.

Done properly, it works the other way round. Optimisation is a process of learning what persuades your customers to buy from you. Your data, your customers' own words, your shopping experience. And the more you learn about your own customers, the less the benchmarks matter.

Every test you run, every post-purchase survey you read, every customer call you sit in on teaches you something about why people buy from you specifically. Over time those learnings stack up into something no competitor can copy: a way of selling built around your customer, rather than borrowed from somebody else's.

That's what I mean when I talk about moving from best practice to your own practice. Optimisation is the route out of the template.

This is where creativity earns its seat at the table. Data is brilliant at showing you where something's going wrong. The product page everyone bounces off? Nailed it. The email nobody opens? Subject line a/b-ed to success. The checkout step where baskets get left behind? The review added.

What data can't do is tell you what to do about it. A heatmap won't write your headline. A cohort report won't come up with the bundle that lifts your AOV. A survey response won't turn a customer's throwaway comment into the positioning line your whole brand hangs on. Your AI buddy might though…. but it’s built on best practice too. Horribly so.

That's the creative leap. And the better your data, the braver that leap can be. You're no longer guessing in the dark or copying what a competitor did. You're making a bold call, informed by what your customers have actually told you, then measuring whether it worked.

I think of it as the optimisation loop:

Three of the four steps are data. The one that makes the difference and where you spend MOST of your time is creative, and every lap through the loop gives the next idea more to work with.

This is untemplating. Think of best practice as scaffolding. You need it to get the building up, but nobody leaves the scaffolding on once the walls can stand on their own. At some point you start taking pieces down and replacing them with things that only make sense for your brand. Nice analogy, I know.

Your own practice is the specific set of things that work for your brand, your product and your customers. It's built from what you've learned, so it can't be lifted from a course or copied from a competitor's store. It's also why two brands selling near enough the same product can grow in completely different ways.

If you want a starting point, ask yourself three questions:

The answers are rarely comfortable. They usually mean letting go of something that "works" well enough. But that discomfort is the sign you're moving off the template and towards something worth building.

Go back to that £1m store. The lift from 2.25% to 2.5% conversion, the extra 10% of quality traffic, the AOV moving from £50 to £55. None of that comes from a template. Every one of those gains comes from learning how those customers buy, then having the nerve to act on it.

A few examples from brands I work with right now:

A homewares brand could have posted lifestyle shots like everyone else in its category. Instead it makes daily videos helping people choose the right piece for their home. Nobody else in the market does that, and it's turned them into the most helpful voice their customers can find.

A wellness brand was being pulled towards discount-led acquisition, the default for the category. It went the other way and built an education series around the questions customers kept asking. That content now does the persuading a discount code used to do, without eating the margin.

A lifestyle brand selling a big, considered purchase grows organically by teaching people how to buy well. Best practice would say lead with the offer. Their customers told us they wanted confidence first, so that's what the brand leads with.

The same thinking runs through the less glamorous stuff too. Post-purchase survey answers get rewritten into email flows in the customer's own language. Product page headlines start from the buyer's situation, before the product's features. Every one of those is a creative decision. The data just tells you where to aim it.

So where does creativity sit? Right in the middle. Optimisation without creativity just makes you a more efficient copy of your competitors. Creativity without optimisation is a guess with a nice logo on it. Put them together and you get a brand that learns faster than everyone else and acts on what it learns.

The routine stuff only gets you so far. The question I put to every founder who has hit that ceiling is this: how do we thrive, how do we build a brand less ordinary, when it's the routine that got us this far?

That's where the real work starts. Break convention. Find your own practice. Then keep optimising it.

Ian