The CEO's pep talk was not going the way he'd planned it.
Rowan Morrison had just handed in her notice. Her boss was trying to make the case for why she should stay. She was the best performing managing director he had, he said. And then: the issue with her was that she didn't fit in.
"I actually felt quite proud of that."
She was wearing Dr. Martens to board meetings. She was challenging people's thinking. She was not taking the bonus and staying quiet. And he was right — she didn't fit in. She didn't want to.
A few months later she and her co-founder Sven Clouston set up We Are Rationale.
That was seven years ago. Six months before the pandemic.
In this episode of Scale HER Up, Rowan — co-MD of Rationale, Women's Enterprise Scotland ambassador, and member of the 93% Club — talks about what she's built, what she's learned, and what she believes.
What Rationale does
Rationale is a brand agency. Rowan describes them as a strategic and creative partner to their clients, specialising in regulated markets: financial services, healthcare, health tech, med tech. They're also a B Corp — values-driven impact built into the model, not bolted on.
The type of work they do sits at the intersection of complexity and communication. They work with a dental practice indemnity insurer, a sector so niche the first job is persuading the market that this type of product exists and is needed in the first place. They work with health tech founders — often academics spinning out of universities — who are so immersed in the technical capability of their product that they've lost sight of the human being at the end of it.
"They forget about the people affected by their product. They're just obsessed with what it can do."
Rationale's job is to bring the audience back to the centre. Not the product. Not the mechanism. The person. And it's that emotional connection — even in B2B, even in insurance, even when the audience is a specialist professional — that creates the impact.
Everything comes from insight. The name Rationale says it. And a lot of what they do is helping clients see that the complicated, multilayered, product-led message they want to put out is not the way. That actually, at the end of the day, regardless of audience sophistication, we're all human beings who make decisions based on how we feel.
She didn't plan any of this
Rowan dropped out of school. She went to college for her Highers. She was the first in her family to go to university. Entrepreneurship wasn't something she saw people like her do.
She ended up in marketing not by design. Financial services specifically — not by design either. She drifted into an agency that worked in that sector, found she was good at the problem-solving, good at the client relationships, good at the winning of work. And then a mentor saw something in her that she didn't see in herself.
"She had to drag me kicking and screaming into that role."
She went in as a part-time copywriter with a young son at home. Her mentor put her into MD. She resisted. I'm a creative, she said. I don't do spreadsheets. I don't understand numbers. And her mentor told her: there are other people who can do that for you. If you're good at client relationships and ideas, the growth will come.
It came. And when the parent company sold the agency, and when the new CEO told her she didn't fit in, she knew it was time.
The co-founder question
When Rowan set up Rationale with Sven Clouston, she was doing something she'd learned the hard way to value: choosing someone with a different brain.
Sven came from sports journalism, then a content agency in London. He came into her previous agency in a managing editor role and they clicked immediately — as people first, as colleagues second. They shared a view that work shouldn't be somewhere you hate to be.
His strengths and hers overlap in places and diverge in others. Where she's a doer and an ideas person running 75 things at once, he's a thinker and a planner. He drives her slightly crazy. She probably returns the favour.
"We have this weird thing where if one of us is having a bad day or stuck on a problem, the other one will step up, and we do that now almost instinctively."
She ran her previous agency as MD without a true equal. She describes it as feeling like a matchstick with pressure from above and below. Not sustainable. The partnership changed that.
The 93% Club
93% of the UK population went to state school. Yet only a small percentage of those people own the wealth, run the businesses, sit in the senior roles. The 93% Club exists to name that gap and start closing it.
In Edinburgh, Rowan says, the private school culture is pervasive. She has been in meetings where people have asked her co-founder what school he went to and not asked her. Because of her accent, she says, they could already tell.
"I've felt more discriminated against because I have a regional accent than because I'm a woman."
It's not an argument against private education. Sven is privately educated. Many of her team are. Some of her closest friends are. It's an argument about representation in leadership — about making sure that when you look around the room, you're not just looking at one kind of background, one kind of path, one kind of voice.
And in a creative agency, this isn't just an ethics conversation. It's a performance conversation. Diversity of thought is what produces better ideas.
"If you want a true cross-section, especially in a role like marketing where you're appealing to a public that is diverse, it just gives you an extra string to your bow."
On AI
Rowan has views.
She sees the use cases. AI as an operational tool that frees people up from the processes that hold back creativity — yes, there's value there. Sven has a phrase for what else it is: a confidence engine. It tells you what you want to hear. It sanitises the edges. It goes to the lowest common denominator because it's drawing from a generic pool.
"We as a marketing industry use AI to do our work, we are literally feeding the lion that will eat us."
The deeper concern isn't just about the output. It's about the process. When you struggle through a problem — when you're staring at a blank slide and tearing your hair out because it's hard — you're going somewhere. You're taking yourself through seven possible directions. Even the wrong ones teach you something. When you shortcut that, you don't just save time. You lose the thinking.
"What you gain from conflict and friction and the process of working out a problem — you can't replace that."
She quotes David Bowie: when you start to feel like your feet aren't touching the ground, that's the place where you should be. The uncomfortable place. The unsanitised edge.
That's where things come from.
About Rowan Morrison
Rowan Morrison is co-MD and co-founder of We Are Rationale, a B Corp brand agency based in Edinburgh specialising in regulated markets including financial services, healthcare, and health tech. She is a Women's Enterprise Scotland ambassador and a member of the 93% Club. She mentors CMOs and team members across the marketing industry and runs group sessions for women in creative roles.
