At some point, every marketer hits a wall. I did too. Early on, I thought the job was to be clever:Better headlines. Better campaigns. Better hooks. Sometimes it worked. Then Iâd watch a âless cleverâ brand win anyway. Why? Because customers werenât choosing the cleverest message.They were choosing the brand that...
Marketing loves neat diagrams. Awareness â Consideration â Conversion. But real buying behavior is messier: pause compare forget re-enter ask a friend get distracted come back weeks later That âmessy middleâ is where brands win or lose. This is why long-term brand building matters: It creates memory structures that make it easier to choose later. And itâs...
Most companies say theyâre customer centered organisations. Then they measure: internal efficiency short-term sales campaign ROAS quarterly targets And customers feel the gap. Customers First came from watching this happen over and over. Customer-first isn't the intention. Itâs behavior. Itâs what your team does when: a policy collides with a person a process creates friction service is inconvenient ânobody...
A lot of brands try to âbuild loyaltyâ with rewards. Points. Discounts. Perks. Those can help, but theyâre not a sense of belonging. Theyâre incentives. Loyalty, the real kind, is closer to what you see in Cult Brands: Customers donât just buy.They identify. They feel belonging. They feel seen. They feel...
Hereâs a question that reveals whether a brand is playing checkers or chess: Why do the biggest brands in the world still spend hundreds of millions on advertising they canât track? Nike doesnât buy billboards, Olympic sponsorships, or global TV expecting a direct conversion tomorrow. Apple doesnât run...
In the year 2000, I was standing in the middle of F.A.O. Schwarz in New York City. The famous toy store. The Tom Hanks piano. The magic. And yet, something felt off. There were plenty of people⊠but not enough buyers. It looked like a brand with a full...
Most brands donât fail because their strategy is wrong. They fail because they are boring. Boring brands get ignored, and in a world where attention is the most expensive currency, âignoredâ is the most dangerous position you can occupy. According to System1âs Cost of Dull report,...
Somewhere along the way, âreachâ became a bad word. Marketers started saying it with hesitation, as if being broad or inclusive meant being wasteful or unfocused. I donât see it that way. After years of helping brands grow, Iâve learned that reach is the foundation of relevance. Too often,...
The travel and hospitality industry lives inside a trillion-dollar illusion: the belief that loyalty is something you can buy with points, perks, and programs. It isnât. After decades and millions of miles, Iâve learned something that every brand, hospitality or otherwise, needs to hear: Loyalty doesnât come from...
Business decisions have always balanced three ingredients: gut, guesswork, and a little hope that the data you pulled from five different places is still relevant. Thatâs starting to change. With Googleâs new location intelligence tools, we can finally bridge the gap between intuition and insight, turning what...