[ABOUT MARTIN]
Fifteen years in strategy.
Now I do it differently.
I'm Martin Galton, founder of Limbic. Fifteen years running strategy, most of it at the UK's largest advertising agency outside London. I work with pharma teams on the process behind the strategy. Because that's usually what needs fixing.
[THE STORY]
From agency strategy to behavioural science.
I have spent 15 years in strategy. Most of it at the Europe's biggest healthcare agency. I worked across many launch brands in multiple therapy areas Long enough to spot a pattern: the quality of thinking in the room determines the quality of strategy that emerges.
At the agency, we were good at forcing this. You build a process that surfaces assumptions, brings uncomfortable questions to the table, and doesn't let groupthink settle. You get better ideas. But what I kept watching was this: we'd build brilliant strategies, deliver them to clients, and then the same friction would happen. Implementation faltered. Local markets didn't execute.
The real killer: we'd built strategies based on how we thought people should behave, not how they actually did. So I started reading the behavioural science. Not the popular stuff. The real research. How people actually make decisions under uncertainty. What drives adoption. Why environments shift behaviour more than arguments do.
And I realised we'd been missing something fundamental in strategy work: a genuine lens on behaviour, built into the process from the start.
That's what Limbic does now. I work exclusively with pharma teams running Behavioural Design Thinking workshops. Workshops that fix the process. Bring the right people into the room. Surface what's actually driving behaviour. Build strategies that don't just make sense in the boardroom. They work.
Better process. Better behaviour. Better strategy. That's what I build now.
[BACKGROUND]
Fifteen years helping brands think sharper and ditch the obvious.
15
Years in strategy across pharma, health, retail and tech.
1
Former Head of Strategy at the UK's largest advertising agency outside London.
∞
Workshops watching groupthink produce the expected answer. Enough to start doing it differently.
[WORK WITH MARTIN]