Marketing

A collection of 33 posts

Marketing

Poetry Doesn't Pay

You have 3 seconds. That's how long your prospect gives your message before their brain decides: stay or scroll. In those 3 seconds, poetry loses to clarity. Every. Single. Time. Gillette spent decades perfecting sophisticated campaigns. "The Best a Man Can Get." Beautiful. Poetic. Dead. Then

Marketing

Selling Air Time

Picture this: It's 1962, and someone at Rolls-Royce is about to propose the stupidest idea in aerospace history. Rolls-Royce has a great business model. Sell jet engines. Sell maintenance contracts. Sell spare parts. The math is perfect: the worse their engines perform, the more money they make fixing

Marketing

Check Your Tower

Every tower that fell started with smart people being right in different directions. Three questions reveal everything... 1. Can your newest hire explain what each channel does for customers? (Not for marketing—for customers.) 2. When you say "growth," does everyone picture the same customer moment? 3. When

Marketing

Too Simple?

Here's what happens when you introduce customer language to a marketing team... The junior folks immediately get it. The seniors start explaining why their metrics are customer metrics. (They're not.) Why? Because speaking customer means admitting you've been speaking something else. Twenty years of

Marketing

One True North

Plot twist... The Rosetta Stone didn't contain new information. It had the same message in three languages. Everyone suddenly understood everything. Your customer journey? That's your Rosetta Stone. (But your CMO's using it as a slide template.) Watch this translation happen... * Performance says, "

Marketing

Five Right Answers

At Babel, God's intervention was instant and obvious. Nobody pretended to understand each other. The project died immediately. Modern marketing teams? We nod through meetings, update the same dashboards, say "aligned" constantly... then build five different towers in the same office. The divine confusion of Babel

Marketing

The Tower Nobody Finished

Here's what they don't tell you about Babel... Nobody woke up speaking Mandarin. They had the same words. "Brick" meant structure to builders, speed to taskmasters, and burden to laborers. Same vocabulary. Different conversations. (Sound like your last team standup?) Ancient Babylon's

Marketing

The Survivor Lens

During WWII, bombers returned riddled with bullet holes… wings, fuselage, tail. Military brass wanted to reinforce those spots. Then, statistician Abraham Wald noticed something. (I think about this way too often.) "You're looking at the wrong data," he said. "These planes survived. The ones that

Marketing

The Messy Middle

Consider this: 95% of your marketing "leads" will never buy from you. Not because you failed. Because they were never shopping—they were learning. Or killing time. Or avoiding their boss. Or playing a complex game of "what if I had money." Google calls it the

Marketing

Colorblind Metrics

It's wild that we've been making the same mistake for years. Ancient Greek philosophers had a word: techne—the art of making things. They knew something we've forgotten: knowing HOW to count isn't the same as knowing WHAT counts. Stay with me…

Marketing

Manual Override

I've been in digital marketing since the early 2000s, and I've seen this movie before. (Spoiler alert: we're watching it happen again.) The future of advertising changes again in 2026. ByteDance's virtual influencers are already here. Google's bringing ads into

Analytics

Data Driven vs Data Inspired [Part 5 of 5]

Breaking Free Your team can escape. But not how you think. The answer isn't better data. It's better questions. Data driven asks, "What should we do?" Data inspired asks, "What's happening here?" That second question changes everything. Here's

Innovation

Data Driven vs Data Inspired [Part 4 of 5]

Why Smart Teams Stay Stuck Smart teams choose data-driven thinking. Even when they know better. It's not because they're dumb. It's because of how we reward teams. Here's what I mean. Two team members keep fighting about everything. Creative direction. Deadlines. Who

Analytics

Data Driven vs Data Inspired [Part 3 of 5]

Being Data Inspired Data inspired is different. Let me show you. Data driven sees: "Sales dropped last month. Run Campaign X again." Data inspired sees: "Sales drop every time we launch without testing messaging first." Notice the difference? Data-driven copy solutions. Data-inspired find principles. You look

Analytics

Data Driven vs Data Inspired [Part 2 of 5]

Analytics as Performance Theater Your team is sophisticated. They have dashboards. They track everything. But watch what they do. Sales drop. They review last quarter’s tactics. User traffic falls. They copy last year’s actions. Customer complaints rise. They use the same fix. This is data-driven thinking. "I&

Analytics

Data Driven vs Data Inspired [Part 1 of 5]

The Data Driven Trap Your team is underperforming. It might be because you're too focused on data. That sounds crazy. We've been told data-driven decisions are better, smarter, and more scientific. But watch what happens in most teams. The sales lead sees leads drop. They review

Marketing

You Can't Control Emergence

There's a marketing campaign running right now that's about to backfire spectacularly... and the team who created it has no idea. Complex systems produce behaviors none of their parts intended.  Your campaigns interact in ways you never designed.  Messages combine, recombine and impact your customers in

Marketing

Pain First, Solutions Second

The more comfortable someone is, the less they'll hear you… Not because they're difficult, but because comfort makes your message invisible to their attention system. Evolution wired us this way: ancestors who noticed predators survived, while those distracted by comfort didn't. This creates a

Marketing

Numbers vs Stories

The best insights hide between the data points Data tells a story, but not the whole story. True pattern recognition goes beyond spreadsheets and dashboards. It lives in: * The subtle currents of customer feedback * The recurring themes in team conversations * The unspoken dynamics in meetings Numbers show what happened. But

Marketing

The Elastic Truth

In digital marketing, explanations wobble all the time. "Our metrics are down because of the algorithm change." "The campaign underperformed due to seasonal factors." "Engagement dropped because users are platform-fatigued." The best agencies have rigid explanations — the mediocre ones have elastic ones that stretch

Marketing

The Handoff Myth

Your company has departments. Marketing. Sales. Operations. Each with its own goals. Its own metrics. Its own leaders. But here's the thing: your customer doesn't see departments. They see one journey. When someone buys from you, they don't think: "Now I'm

Marketing

Ask About the Weather

Great questions don't always sound important. Why do the best salespeople ask about the weather? It seems random. Meaningless small talk. A waste of time. But it's not. When someone tells you they bought something "because it was convenient," they're not telling

Marketing

The Price of Performance

Most businesses try to hide their work behind closed doors. Here's what they miss: Visible craftsmanship commands premium prices. Watch a master sushi chef shape rice with practiced precision. Each careful gesture tells customers: This is worth more. They'll gladly pay ten times the price of

Marketing

The Anti-Library Effect

I read every day. How many books did I finish last year? Zero. For years, my unfinished books felt like accusations. Until I discovered their hidden power: the spaces between them held more wisdom than their endings ever could. Picture this: Three unfinished books on my iPad, each a different

Marketing

The Lighthouse Strategy

The lighthouse keeper stood at the rocky coast, adjusting the beam's direction by three degrees west. Night after night, he did this to ensure the right ships could find their way home. The hidden pattern of effective marketing: It's not about being seen by everyone — it&