We’re a remote team, which means we don’t have a wall to hang our core values on. This is probably a good thing, because in our experience, values on a wall get read exactly once, during the office tour, and then they’re forgotten and not enacted in the actual work of the company.
But ours have to live somewhere. In the Slack message that goes out with a proactive update, the meeting where we push back on a tactic that doesn’t connect to anything real, and the moment someone catches a mistake and shows up with the fix already moving before the client ever has to worry.
We wrote them down as commitments rather than expectations, because that distinction is kind of the whole point, isn’t it? Expectations are unspoken ideas you have about what someone else will do, but agreements are commitments made out loud between two people. We prefer the latter. And since we help businesses tell their unique story, it felt a little overdue to tell ours.
Plum Core Values
We are Reliable.
We do what we say. If we commit to a deadline, we hit it. If something goes sideways, we own it fast and bring a plan. Clients don’t have to chase us. They trust us because we’ve earned it, and we protect that trust like it’s the most valuable thing we have. Because it is.
Here’s a real life example: We implemented a much needed post-purchase review flow in Klaviyo for a client, timed appropriately and set up correctly. Then reviews started coming in from customers saying they hadn’t received their order yet. We dug into it and figured out that international orders were getting stuck in customs, which was completely outside anyone’s control, but was creating a real customer service problem. We adjusted the send criteria to exclude those orders, flagged the shipping pattern to the client, and gave them the information they needed to recover service with affected customers and address the ops issue on their end. They didn’t have to find it. They didn’t have to ask. We were already on it.
That same instinct shows up even when nothing goes wrong. We hold our meetings, we don’t cancel them, and we flag what’s coming before it arrives. Reliability for us isn’t only about how we respond when something breaks, it’s about never giving someone a reason to wonder where things stand.
We are Strategic.
We reject random acts of marketing. (Would make a great bumper sticker, honestly, but it’s also genuinely how we operate at Plum.) Every tactic we recommend ties to a business outcome, and if it doesn’t, we don’t do it. We sell strategy first, we ask why before we ask how, and we protect our clients (and ourselves) from busywork disguised as “progress.”
Recently a client came to us mid-project and mentioned they had been running every deliverable we produced through an AI tool for a second opinion (we knew, but we were glad they admitted it). The tool kept coming back with an entirely different approach, which was creating confusion, extra revision rounds, and frankly a fair amount of unnecessary stress (for both of us). We had a direct conversation about it. AI is predisposed to generate feedback and take a contrary position, that’s essentially what it’s built to do, and using it as a final filter on creative and strategic work means you’re constantly second-guessing decisions that were already made thoughtfully. We encouraged them to trust their human brain, their gut, and their perspective on their own business. Nobody knows their story better than they do.
That conversation is a pretty good (plum good… if you will) example of what strategic partnership looks like. Sometimes it’s building the plan. Sometimes it’s talking a client out of a workflow that’s making everyone’s life harder, including theirs.
We are Experts.
We know our stuff, and we stay curious about what we don’t. We’ve held our own in big rooms with smart people and we belong there (not because we have all the answers) because we ask the right questions and give direct advice even when it’s uncomfortable. We don’t gatekeep and we don’t guess. When we know something, we say it with conviction. When we don’t, we find someone who does.
That also means educating our clients rather than hoarding knowledge. The Advice Hub exists because we’d rather make you smarter about your own marketing than keep you dependent on us for answers you should have access to. And, we offer a service called team mentorship where we train your junior marketing employees and help them grow into senior marketing employees.
We are Thoughtful.
We don’t rush to publish, pitch, or send. We think about the whole business, beyond the task in front of us, which means anticipating what a client needs before they ask and pushing back when something isn’t in their best interest. We’ve written before about how marketing cannot outrun operational truth, and that applies to us too. We pause when nuance matters, we question processes that have stopped making sense, and we push back on ourselves when going above and beyond has started to come at our own expense. Good work requires margin. We protect it.
We have EQ.
Behind every frustrated client is a business owner who has poured everything into what they’ve built. We try to remember that before we respond to anything.
It’s also why we bring in specialists rather than generalists. For brand voice work specifically, we work with a copywriter who does nothing but brand voice, which sounds like a niche specialty until you’re six revisions deep into a project with a lot of stakeholders and you realize you need someone who is equal parts writer and psychic. (We’re still not quite sure how she does it, honestly.)
Take a manufacturing client we recently started working with. They have a lot of people who care deeply about getting the brand right. That’s a beautiful thing and also a recipe for a longer revision process than usual, because when a brand carries that much history and that many opinions, you don’t just write the copy, you listen. A lot. You have to figure out which voices are saying the same thing in different ways and which concerns are pointing at something meaningful.
For second generation business owners, those questions run even deeper. The question shifts from “what do we want to say?” to “what do we keep?” What still feels true. What messaging carried the company for decades but doesn’t resonate the same way anymore with where the business is going or with what clients need from you now. You’re not reinventing the wheel, you’re figuring out which parts of the wheel still matter, which requires deep listening (and maybe some psychic intuition).
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, a client preparing for a major event who has gotten deep into AI-generated drafts and needs someone to find the human voice underneath all of it before the event arrives. That’s a very specific job. Less about writing from scratch and more about excavating what was already there, pulling out the perspective and personality that got buried somewhere in the AI revision process.
We posted recently about the value of having a human copywriter on the team. (It’s me. I’m the copywriter. Hello. 👋 And I am, in fact, very humble about it.) The point we were making is that EQ isn’t just about how you treat clients. It’s about who you bring in to do the work.
We are Integrative.
We get in there. We connect marketing to sales, strategy to execution, and channels to outcomes. We work inside our clients’ systems, sit on leadership teams, and align marketing with the bigger business picture rather than letting it float alongside it. For our EOS clients, that means joining L10s, owning marketing Rocks, and making sure marketing operates with the same rhythm and accountability as every other part of the business. We make sure everything talks to each other, including the parts nobody wants to touch. (I know you know the ones.)
We are Worth It.
Plum (adj): very good, worth having.
It’s our tagline, our standard, and the thing we hold ourselves to every time we ship something with our name on it.
We don’t send work we’re not proud of. We don’t overextend until we can’t think straight and then wonder why the quality slips. We say no when we need to, we maintain enough margin to show up when something exciting happens for a client, and we include a QA pass in every single deliverable because catching something before it goes out is always better than explaining it after.
These aren’t the stupid breakroom posters everyone ignores on their way to get coffee. They’re the commitments we hold each other to, and they’re the reason we can genuinely say the work is worth your time, your attention, and your investment.
Very good. Worth having.
If any of this resonates, whether you’re a potential client, a referral partner, or someone who just wants to work somewhere that takes this stuff seriously, we’d love to hear from you. Let’s chat.
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