Swimming Downstream.
The home of the thinking that drives Planner At Large.
What it is.
Swimming Downstream is the intellectual territory behind our work.
It began with the book of the same name. Now it’s becoming the place for the broader argument about how markets and marketing actually work.
It brings together several bodies of thinking that are rarely applied together: mental and physical availability, strategy under constraint, Jobs to Be Done, behavioral economics, and organizational psychology.
The point is to work where marketing decisions stop looking like campaign choices and start looking like what they actually are: enterprise commitments.
That’s the territory Swimming Downstream explores: how brands become easier to buy, how timing changes what marketing can achieve, and how organizations can see the implications of action early enough to choose more wisely.
The result isn’t a framework — it’s a way of seeing.
Why it matters here.
Planner At Large applies the thinking commercially.
Our consultancy works in live commercial situations: widening the frame, testing implications, and helping companies choose paths that make their brands easier to buy.
Swimming Downstream develops the argument more fully.
It gives the underlying ideas more space: mental and physical availability, timing, category entry, organizational misdiagnosis, and the difference between what people think of a brand and when they think of that brand at all.
What lives there.
The book.
A clearer way to think about markets and marketing, and what it really means to compete. The title reveals the book’s central idea: that markets already move in patterns and directions of their own — and that growth depends less on forcing change onto these patterns than on understanding these conditions more clearly.
The school.
Courses and deeper study.
For people who want to actively engage with the ideas and apply them more deliberately.
The argument.
Essays, sources and extensions.
For people who want to spend more time with and reflect on the ideas that sit behind the practice.
Two states of the same mind.
One is where the thinking slows down.
The other is where it goes to work.
Swimming Downstream asks what happens when we rethink how markets and marketing work.
Planner At Large asks what that means for your brand, your business, your decisions, now.