Field notes
What actually works. What's hype. What's just absurd.
Battle-tested marketing advice, unfiltered thought leadership and the occasional reality check, pulled straight from years in the trenches. Grab a cup of coffee and stay a while.
There’s a dangerous shift that happens when strong corporate culture turns into blind devotion.
It starts subtly. A shared vision morphs into dogma. Healthy alignment turns into forced compliance. Before long, team members stop thinking critically and start sipping the Kool-Aid—and an organizational "cult" is born.
When a company reaches this point, it doesn't just stall; it begins a slow, self-inflicted implosion.
Half of what holds people back in business and leadership isn't a lack of talent, resources, or vision. It’s waiting for everything to be "100% perfect" before hitting send, launching the product, or making the move.
Too many companies are confusing activity with accomplishment. They're churning out sanitized, committee-approved noise and wondering why nobody cares.
Trust is truly the new currency.
If you look at the average digital marketing dashboard, you’ll see an endless array of metrics: impressions, click-through rates, likes, shares, and engagement percentages. While these data points are helpful for tracking reach, they often distract from the single most important asset any modern organization can possess: Trust.
Most companies treat competitive research like a blueprint to copy. They spend weeks analyzing what the "industry leaders" are doing, only to mirror their playbook word for word, feature for feature, and discount for discount.
That isn't strategy. That's just blending into the background noise.
A tidal wave of polished ad campaigns, outrage bait, and corporate gobbledygook preaching "disruption" while saying absolutely nothing. We’ve trained an entire generation of marketers to play on fear, FOMO, and endless interruption. We call it "engagement."
Most brands are playing it so safe they are practically invisible.
They pump out slick, high-gloss campaigns packed with corporate gobbledygook and expect people to care. But today's consumers have a finely tuned B.S. detector. They don't want another sanitized echo in their feed. They want something real. They want something remarkable.
Every single day, LinkedIn feeds are flooded with blogs, videos, graphics, and hot takes that do absolutely nothing for a business’s bottom line.
Your rockstar, the person who consistently crushes deadlines, solves the sticky problems before you even know they exist, and keeps the engine running—walks into your office, sits down, and quietly delivers the news: “I’m putting in my two weeks.”
A while back, I was looking at a company with a stunning, high-gloss brand. Beautiful website, slick ad campaigns, and a mission statement packed with corporate gobbledygook about "empathy," "innovation," and "putting people first."
Many moons ago, I was visiting a classmate's dorm at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology and he had this quote attached to his wall:
"To Thine Own Self be True."
For years, digital marketers have been obsessed with the "click." We built our entire empires on Click-Through Rates (CTR). We optimized every headline, every button, and every meta-description to get that one, sweet, dopamine-inducing tap.
If your brand is super duper excited to get to work with a new agency on that razzle-dazzle #marketingcampaign, it's always a really good idea to hit the pause button and take a deep look at the inside reality of your company.
This ridiculously simple quote would save so many small businesses so much time, aggravation, and money if they just digested it and took it to heart. As a small business owner, sometimes the tendency is to get that product or service in front of EVERYONE.
With a barrage of constantly churned out content splattering all over the interwebs on the daily, it's becoming more and more challenging to garner attention for brands.
"Let's make sure that every social media post that we put out has our logo on it, so it's on brand." - One of my previous clients
Attention all non-profit organizations! Have you ever considered the power of content marketing in achieving your mission and goals? Content marketing is a highly effective strategy for reaching and engaging with your target audience, and it can make a significant impact on your organization's success.
We all have a lens that we look at things through. Things like philosophies, convictions, religion, politics, ethics, etc. and that’s what makes the well-rounded world go ’round. It’s the hodge-podge of thought, the situations that have brought us to how we think and see the sun that help shape the world.
Many moons ago I spent a lot of time with monks. Benedictine monks to be exact. I went to a 4 year college seminary at a VERY remote monastery in Southern Indiana. The view from my dorm (or cell) was corn fields and soybeans. It was indeed a very peaceful place.
No one loves to be interrupted. At work, school, sleep, play, wherever, interrupting people while they are doing them is just plain rude, so why would anyone employ interruption as a marketing tactic?
I've been listening to a great book lately, The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib. Allan is basically laying out his approach to how businesses can create a remarkable easy to follow marketing plan that actually does something for your bottom line. One of my favorite analogies that he used to describe people who don't take the time to perform market research and profile out their target consumer is an Archer In The Fog.
Communication is an art form. If your brand is spewing out corporate gobbledygook and not evoking an emotion in your intended recipients, you're probably not growing, thriving, or kicking ass. Words can move mountains.
Something here save you from a terrible branding mistake?
Pass it along to the colleague who needs a marketing reality check. Or come argue with me about it on LinkedIn. I promise to be nice. Mostly.
I accidentally ran a pretty great customer experience experiment. The only variable that changed was whether I got treated like a human being.
Spoiler alert: that one variable changed everything.