June 19, 2024 A quick hate take on American Gothic in Béziers This ad campaign featuring American Gothic with a few words pasted on, like edited on the fly with WhatsApp or Canva, is all over…
June 18, 2024 Ambiguity and brand strategy utopia By definition, developing a strategy for a brand involves thinking about the future: ideal results, possible problems to solve, and also ambiguous outcomes. I…
June 13, 2024 Explaining the job of a brand strategist Figuring out what to say in a few words about what I do for a living is such a recurrent topic for brand strategists,…
June 6, 2024 Making sure your marketing is grounded in business Sometimes working on big, broad brand strategy work I risk losing the view of the business at a simple level: make more money than…
June 5, 2024 What’s the best compliment you ever received? People are people, and it’s mystifying to figure there are 8 billion of us around. And yet, we all have our own unique combination…
June 4, 2024 Alleviating feelings of uncertainty As an independent consultant, I tend to have quite a bit of uncertainty over the frequency of my work and income; those famed feast and…
June 3, 2024 Asymmetric strategy challenges I like thinking of analogies and parallels between brands, marketing, game design, and developing successful strategies. Most tabletop board games are played as a…
May 14, 2024 Details layers of a strategy highway I had the pleasure of attending Will Humphrey’s APG online conference yesterday, set to Talking Heads’ song Once in a Lifetime questions. The talk…
March 1, 2024 Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber [book review] I don’t rave about non-fiction books as ‘absolutely riveting’ to my friends and family all that often, though I’ll admit it’s kind of more…
September 26, 2023 Social media followers aren’t equal to audience I read Stephen King’s 1977 paper titled “Improving Advertising Decisions” again and talked about it with students today (that’s the marketer by the way,…
