About

I’m Natacha Cunningham - most people call me Peggy.

I run Thought Rebel, a consultancy that goes into service-led businesses, finds where the marketing has come apart from results and tells you what's actually going on.

I started with a degree in Journalism, then spent several years in advertising. What I took from both wasn't just how to communicate clearly - it was how to spot when communication is doing the wrong job. A well-written brief built on the wrong assumptions. A campaign that lands beautifully and converts no one. Messaging that sounds completely right to the people inside the business and means nothing to the people outside it. That instinct has shaped everything I've done since.

I moved into consulting because I was more interested in the decisions behind the work than the work itself. I've led marketing inside businesses at every scale - from founder-led companies finding their footing to a scaling technology business I helped navigate through a complete strategic pivot, changing not just how we marketed but what we sold and to whom. I've worked across creative agencies, law firms, hospitality, travel and tech - and spent enough time inside businesses at that level to know what it looks like when the commercial logic and the marketing logic aren't speaking to each other. That gap is expensive. It's also almost never talked about honestly by anyone in the room.

The sectors vary. The gaps don't.

I hold a specialist award in AI Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing and completed the MAD//Fest Masters programme in Behavioural Science - the thinking that underpins most of what I do.

What I actually do is go in and find the gaps - between what the marketing is set up to do and what the business actually needs it to do right now. I find them by listening for the frustrations first, because frustrations are honest. They tell you where to look.

People tend to say things in those conversations that haven't made it into any report. That's usually where the most useful information lives.

I don't decide what I'm looking for before I start. I follow the evidence - whether it leads to the strategy, the systems, the follow-up process, the way the marketing function is resourced or a brief that was never quite clear enough for anyone to succeed with.

I'm not an agency. I don't run campaigns, manage your social media or take over your team. And I'm not the kind of consultant who gets so embedded in a business that they start seeing it from the inside out rather than the outside in. That distance - between close enough to understand and far enough to see clearly - is deliberate. It's where the useful work happens.

Some engagements run longer than others and that's fine - as long as the work remains strategic, purposeful and genuinely useful. The moment it stops being that, I'll tell you.

I work alongside the people already in the business, as a peer. I tell them what I find - clearly, without jargon and without making anyone feel they should have spotted it sooner.

Most engagements start with a conversation. Everything else follows from what I find.

If you want a sense of where you stand before we speak, the free scorecard takes three minutes and tells you something useful.