Author: Clint Griffin
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What Should Marketing Actually Cost a NZ Small Business in 2026?
Everyone has woken up to the world of marketing. Everyone is an expert. No one is talking about marketing budgets though. It’s the elephant in the room. If you’re a small-to-medium business in New Zealand, the question about ‘what to spend’ and ‘how much should it cost’ must have crossed your mind. Another thing to…
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From Fragmented to Focused: Consolidating 5 Brands in 17 Days
The Challenge Digital Overwhelm. Most businesses struggle to manage one website. A national property management group came to us trying to juggle five separate brands across five different websites. It was exhausting for their internal team to maintain and, worse, confusing for their customers. They needed to combine everything into one clear, unified platform that…
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What is Zero-Click Marketing?
Zero-click marketing is how NZ businesses build authority in an era where AI answers questions before anyone clicks. Here’s what it means and how to win
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The Shift from “Posting” to “Helping”: A Case Study in Meaningful Growth
In a world where everyone is shouting for attention, most business owners feel they have to keep up by posting constantly. The common logic is: if you aren’t visible on social media every day, you don’t exist. At Refinery23, we recently took a different path with a client in the construction sector. We stopped focusing…
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The “Age of the Answer”: Why Your Website is Just Training Data (And How to Survive It)
The Quick Version: Stop building websites for humans to click, and start building them for AI to learn from. To win the “Zero Moment of Truth” in 2026, you must escape the “Blandscape” by leading with human conviction and treating your site as authoritative training data. Marketing isn’t hard; but it can be complicated. And…
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Podcast: Unselling Philosophy Episode 8: The “Old Friend” Philosophy – Turning Email Into Your Best Asset
Have you ever wondered why, in an age of TikTok and AI, the most successful brands still obsess over a technology from the 1970s? In this episode, Clint from the Unselling Philosophy breaks down why email remains the undisputed engine of the entire e-commerce lifecycle. It is time to strip away the cheap “hacks” and…
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Podcast: Unselling Philosophy Episode 7: Alignment Surgery, Shifting the Protagonist
Stripping Away the Marketing Mystique: How to Stop Paying for Jargon and Start Solving Problems Have you ever felt like your marketing team or agency is speaking a language designed to keep you confused rather than making you money? At Refinery23, we often say that marketing isn’t hard, but it is complicated. However, much of…
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Search has changed
We use our little buddy to find things now, and we rely on them finding the right sources and giving us feedback that works for us. So how so you get on that list?
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You get what you pay for
Not because of my hourly rate, but because of the cost of being wrong. Most people hire “yes-men.” They want a mirror that tells them their ideas are brilliant. I am not a mirror. I am a filter.