This week was a master class for every brand that's been substituting vibes and tactics for an actual market position. Let’s get into it.

Someone stole 413,793 KitKat bars

Twelve tons of KitKat’s F1 collection were stolen from a truck somewhere between Italy and Poland last week. The truck is still missing.

So KitKat did whatever any insanely incredible brand would: turned it into an experiential campaign.

They launched a Stolen KitKat Tracker where you punch in the batch code on the back of your bar and find out if you’re holding stolen chocolate. They posted an evidence board like it was a scene from Taken. KitKat Canada started escorting delivery trucks with black SUVs like a presidential motorcade and they put out a job listing for a “Chief Chocolate Protection Officer.” They made a fake movie poster with Tubi.

And other brands piled on all issuing their own fake “official statements” about the heist. The whole internet played along.

This matters because KitKat didn’t scramble, or convene a 72-hour crisis meeting to figure out whether they should be funny or serious. They didn’t hire a consultant to tell them their tone. Their CORE CENTRAL POSITIOINING “Have a break” is so specific and so embedded that when an actual crime happened, the creative wrote itself. The whole response was just the brand being itself louder.

Consider the last brand crisis you watched unfold where the statement read like it was word salad with no voice and nothing substantiative (cough, ahem Hootsuite, cough). Brands who turn crisis into opportunities to reinforce their brand turn positioning into a crisis playbook, a campaign platform, a creative brief, a reason to get up and do the damn thing…without a month’s worth of approvals because everyone “gets it.”

Your buyer’s next purchase might be made by a robot

Shoptalk just wrapped in Vegas and the word on everyone’s lips was “agentic commerce” which is the kind of jargon that makes me want to find out if my computer melts under a creme brûlée torch, but the concept underneath it is kinda wild: AI agents that don’t just recommend products anymore they are complete the entire purchase from discovery to checkout. Lord help my wallet, save me Tom Cruise! AMEX loves to see me coming.

Google launched something called the Universal Commerce Protocol. OpenAI, Shopify, Walmart, Stripe are all in. This is not a beta, folks it is LIVE infrastructure for machines to buy things on behalf of humans. OpenAI said that more than half the searches on ChatGPT are discovery-based, and 70% of those include situational constraints. Meaning people aren’t typing “blue shirt” anymore. They’re typing “a blue aesthetic to wear to a bridal shower in San Francisco, the dress code is formal, it’s April 5 research weather reports and pull options.”

The agent shopping on my your customer’s behalf is trying to understand what your brand means.. think less “product skus” and more contextual POV like you’d explain the vibe of your favorite store to a friend.

If your positioning is vague across digital sources (especially owned!), agentic commerce robots will skip your brand entirely in consumer searches.

This is, by the way, exactly what Jenna Hannon has been telling us about AI search visibility—that substance can’t be gamed. Turns out it also can’t be faked when the shopper is literally a machine.

(Meanwhile, at the same conference, Victoria’s Secret CEO Hillary Super coined “the soothing economy” which is the idea that customers are now drawn to brand experiences that feel comforting and confidence-building. Which is interesting when you put it next to the agentic commerce conversation, because it suggests the brands that will win the robot filter are the same ones winning the emotional one: the ones that are specific enough to make someone feel something. What a mindfuck. What a time to be alive.)

April Fools’ as a positioning litmus test

Normally I’d scroll past April 1st brand content (not because I don’t love the holiday but come on guys, we can do better) but this year Ad Age made the whole theme “the line between fake and real” and they were right.

Dyson announced premium hair tools for pets—the Airwrap Fur and the Airstrait Mane+Tail. IKEA Singapore turned its Allen key into wearable jewelry. Yahoo listed a “Scroll Stoppr” on TikTok Shop for $4.99 and no one could tell if it was a joke. Snapchat briefly rebranded as “Reals.”

The brands that won April Fools’ this year were the ones whose parody could have been a real product extension because as consumers, would anything really shock us anymore? Dyson doing pet grooming is funny precisely because it’s almost plausible because of how insane pet owners are (myself included). Dyson’s positioning is so specific (obsessive engineering of air flow technology) that stretching it to dogs is one boardroom vote from GTM.

So what’s the actual point?

Every one of these stories is a different lens on the same phenomenon: the tactics that used to cover for not having a real position have stopped providing cover.

The era of tactic-first brand marketing is ending and this was the week where it became blood-leaving-face-wtf scary.

Media spend still matters, performance metrics are alive and well, three cheers for your SEO playbook. You still need these things. But for a long time you could run them without a real platform or position underneath, and the ecosystem didn’t care because traditional digital platforms reward things like time and clicks, not POV. So everybody was all “brand doesn’t scale, it’s a waste of money” because the numbers were hot.

What changed is that machines are now surfacing substance at scale and they don’t care about your performance metrics. at. all. An AI agent doesn’t see your media spend or your analytics, it sees whether your brand can clearly answer a specific human question, and if it can’t, it skips you.

If you’re a leader sitting with all of this right now, feeling like the ground shifted and you’re not sure what to do, I think the uncomfortable truth is that the answer isn’t to optimize what you have to within an inch of its life. The answer is to commit to a real and polarizing and strategic POV that the right people, inside and out, can get behind.

✌️ Kara

Behind this week’s paywall: prompts for your Claude agent to test your brand’s AEO.

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The results were wild. And, ahem, specific. (Apparently, I’m “not universally liked.”) When I clicked the sources, some of them were articles and podcasts I’ve been on, my own website..but most of them were my own LinkedIn. Turns out people arguing with me had become part of my AI-generated brand summary.

That’s when I called .

Jenna is the former CMO of Uber turned founder of Hatter, an answer engine optimization agency that helps brands show up (and show up well) in AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. Her background is in marketing (she was the first marketing hire on Uber Eats), and she went on to work as a fractional CMO before building Hatter.

I brought Jenna on for a LinkedIn Live because I wanted to understand something that’s been nagging me: if AI is now narrating brands to potential customers, what does that mean for the people who’ve been doing the positioning work all along?

(Turns out it means a whole heck of a lot).

Kara: SEO vs. AEO, let’s do it. When someone searches in an AI tool instead of Google, what’s different about what they see?

Jenna: The biggest difference is that you don’t get a list of links anymore. You get a summary. The AI reads everything it can find about you—your website, your LinkedIn, your press, reviews, even conversations happening about you online—and then it assembles a narrative. It tells the person a story about your brand.

So instead of a user clicking through ten results and forming their own opinion, the AI is forming that opinion for them and presenting it as a neat little package.

Kara: That’s what scared me about my own results. I didn’t write that narrative. It assembled itself.

Jenna: Exactly. And the good news is you actually have more influence over that narrative than you might think. The AI pulls heavily from your owned content—your website, your social media, the things you create and publish. But it’s also looking at what other people are saying about you: reviews, conversations, press mentions…it’s stitching all of that together.

So the question really becomes:

Have you been intentional enough about your story that AI has something coherent to summarize about you?

Kara: This is where I think brand positioning stops being a “nice to have” and starts being infrastructure. If the positioning is clear—here’s what we do, here’s who it’s for, here’s why it matters—the AI has a clean story to tell. If it’s scattered, the summary will be too.

Jenna: That’s exactly right. And I’d go even further: the brands we see showing up strongest in AI search aren’t the ones gaming the system., they’re the ones that were already doing good marketing. Clear position. Specific audience. Consistent message.

If you’re doing marketing right, it’s going to work in traditional search and it’s going to work in AI search. You’ll see the benefits. But if you’re just chasing tactics without a strategy underneath—that’s where things fall apart.

Kara: I say this to my clients constantly. Tactics without strategy is just expensive experimentation.

Jenna: Classic marketing problem, right? Except now there’s a new twist. The tactics people are chasing in this space are often wrong. I saw a LinkedIn post the other day where someone was trying to sell two different AEO-related services for what is literally the same thing under two different acronyms. There’s a lot of snake oil right now because this space is hot and most people don’t know enough yet to tell the difference.

Kara: So if I’m a brand or a founder and I want to show up well when someone asks an AI tool about my industry—what should I actually be doing?

Jenna: First, the AI needs to know you exist. So your content foundation matters. Your website needs to clearly communicate who you are, what you do, and why you’re relevant. Think of it as training the AI on your brand. You’re educating it.

Then it’s looking at authority. Not authority the way traditional search measured it—where a mention in USA Today was worth more than anything else because of the publication’s domain score. AI search has actually flipped that. It’s surprisingly good at understanding what industry you’re in, and it weights industry-specific sources more heavily than broad press.

So a mention in a niche publication or a guest spot on a podcast that serves your exact audience? That can actually matter more than a feature in a general outlet.

Kara: That tracks with my own experience. Two or three years ago, I started saying yes to basically every podcast invitation I got. Some of them were big, some were a dudes in their basements. But when I searched myself in AI tools, a lot of my results came from those episodes and told a consistent story because, hey—all I talk about is brand strategy.

Jenna: That makes total sense. The AI is good at understanding that you’re a credible voice within a specific domain. What it hasn’t fully figured out yet is credibility scoring the way Google has after twenty years. So right now there’s a window where showing up consistently in your niche carries a lot of weight.

My hypothesis is that window will eventually close and the algorithms will get more sophisticated. But for now, the opportunity is to be deeply visible in your specific space.

Kara: My take is that none of this—AI search, LinkedIn, paid media, press—none of it works if you don’t have something worth saying. We have incredible tools at our disposal, but if you don’t have a point of view, you’re just using those tools to scale a bunch of noise.

Jenna: This is what I tell clients all the time. It’s actually what’s underhyped in this whole conversation. Everyone’s talking about technical hacks and platform tricks. What’s underhyped is content—specifically, what you choose to create. It’s not about volume, it’s about having a core point of view and knowing that it matters to the person you’re communicating with. That content is going to perform so much better than just producing more stuff.

Kara: I think what makes this different from previous platform shifts is that AI search is essentially a brand channel. It’s not like buying ads where you can throw money at it and get instant leads.

Jenna: Exactly. Think of it like out-of-home advertising. You’re using this distribution method to communicate your story, your brand, your point of view. It’s shaping how people perceive you. And it’s not going to be quick.

A lot of folks are treating this like a performance channel—invest money, get leads tomorrow. That’s not how it works. It’s the distribution of your brand. And the foundation of that has to be a story worth telling.

Kara: There’s one more angle that I think makes this really interesting from a positioning standpoint. In traditional search, we controlled our narrative pretty tightly—we wrote the page titles, the descriptions, the meta tags. In AI search, the tool is writing a description of you based on everything it found…including the stuff you didn’t put out there.

Jenna: Right. So you still control a lot—your website, your content, your social presence. Those are heavily weighted. But there’s also a component of what others are saying about you. Reviews, social conversations, press coverage. The AI is pulling all of that in.

What I like about this is that it rewards substance. You can’t fake your way through it. If your product is great and your customers are talking about it positively, that becomes part of your AI brand story. If your Glassdoor reviews are terrible, that shows up too. You can’t just hire someone to optimize that away. You have to actually be the thing you say you are.

Kara: That’s the part that excites me. It applies real pressure to be authentic—not the overused LinkedIn version of “authentic,” but genuinely substantive. Your brand’s digital fingerprint is everything you put out there and everything others say about you. And AI is reading all of it.

Jenna: Be thoughtful about what you’re putting out there. Be a good actor. Because it’s all becoming part of your permanent record.

Kara: Last question. Where does this sit inside a marketing team? Who owns it?

Jenna: Honestly, this hasn’t been fully worked out yet. A strong AI search strategy touches content, PR, social—and those are often different teams. My personal opinion is that it should sit with content marketing, ideally in close collaboration with whoever is handling traditional search. The strategy is cross-functional, but the foundation is content.

Kara: Which brings us right back to the beginning. The content has to say something. The positioning has to be clear. And the story has to be worth telling.

Jenna: Every time.

✌️ Kara

Jenna Hannon is the founder of Hatter (gethatter.ai), an agency specializing in AI search visibility. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length from a LinkedIn Live on Brands Under Pressure.

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Then he walked away from it.

In 2020, he launched People vs. Algorithms, a newsletter and podcast exploring the reinvention of media, culture, and technology. No newsroom. No staff of 35, just a point of view intended for a curated audience, and a bet that the future of media belongs to individuals, not institutions.

He was right. And the implications go way beyond publishing.

Because if the people who built legacy media brands are saying the old playbook is dead, what does that mean for the brands still running it?

Let’s talk about it.

KB: You’ve said that the competitive set for attention has gone from a narrow group to literally everyone. Where does that leave brands trying to stand out?

BM: They need to stand for something, but they also need to at least give the appearance of being real. I was struck by that whole thing with CEOs eating their own food. The McDonald’s CEO looked like he’d never had a burger in his life. He was biting into that Big Arch and called it a “product.” Incredibly awkward.

But I think it resonated with people because it spoke to this enshittification that’s happening right now. We financialize everything in this society, and it leads to more money but worse products, worse experiences. People are already seeing this with AI where it’s about creating more stuff, not better stuff. And we’re told it’s just inevitable.

Throughout the media ecosystem, institutions are losing to individuals. A lot of that comes down to individuals being perceived as more real where a faceless brand is not.

KB: Everyone pointed at that McDonald’s moment and said, “This is what happens when it goes wrong. This is why we don’t put our CEO out there.” But his follower count grew 30% from that post. We have this perception that bad attention hurts the brand, but does visibility have to mean perfect image?

BM: I think it’s more about being approachable and being perceived as real. We’re surrounded by fake. Corporations have always created fake images—the food never looked in reality the way it appeared on TV. That’s why Hollywood had whole teams of people whose job was making food look great. Spray the burger, whatever.

But now you open up the Big Arch and you’re like, whoa, this is not real.

We live in a world where everything feels manufactured. A lot of encounters feel fake. AI is clearly going to make that worse, so being presented as real (or even just approachable) gives you leverage in the market.

KB: You built Digiday over a decade into a huge brand. Then you started from scratch on your own. Where did you see the brand equity actually living—in the Digiday masthead or in your name?

BM: I don’t know if I knew. What I saw in 2020 was that the pendulum was swinging from institutional brands to individual brands, and the business models were rewarding tighter relationships with the audience and making the audience more of a community.

Building Digiday was kind of artificial in some ways. You’re getting a collection of different individuals to all be going in the same direction and almost have similar points of view. That’s artificial, because everyone has different points of view. I just saw that as being less important because people were gravitating to individuals. And it’s easier to be consistent by just being yourself.

On the business model side, a lot of the business now is getting the right people in the room. You don’t need a newsroom of 35 people if you put yourself in the middle of the community and consistently provide value.

KB: Everyone says they’re “building community,” but what they usually mean is there’s a comment section. How do you actually do it?

BM: If you get people to take actions—particularly in real life—and if they want to connect with each other under your curation, that’s increasingly the test of a brand.

We did a mixer last night for media executives. About 60 people. We invited a very curated group, and they all came to a spot in Gramercy. People had a great time. Some had to wait outside for a bit, which wasn’t intentional, but scarcity is important.

Getting 60 of the right people to take action in media is incredibly valuable. Whereas before it would be like, “Oh, that got 60,000 page views.” Well, that’s not really valuable, to be honest.

Content serves a different purpose now. It’s there to build a habit, a connection, and credibility with a particular group of people that you can then get to take action. If you can get a group of like-minded people together, your commercial partners like that. The people themselves like that. They want to connect with each other. AI is not going to do that.

KB: Taking action these days can be as simple as how many people are saving a post, sending it to a friend. Even within social algorithms, they’re now prioritizing how valuable content is to specific communities versus a post about someone’s vacation that gets a ton of impressions but creates no value.

BM: We’re getting a little more honest that a lot of these impressions were bullshit. A lot of publishers right now are dealing with far less traffic from Google. They already dealt with far less from Facebook. But the reality is that traffic wasn’t very valuable. Very few of those people consumed more than one page or stayed longer than 15 to 20 seconds.

This was always kind of a mirage. These brands were never as big as they claimed. All those companies claiming an audience of 200 million—they didn’t have that. And that’s why when these brands went into their death throes, people mourned for a few minutes on X and then went on with their lives. They didn’t have strong connections to anyone because they were chasing algorithms, looking at the same dashboards as everyone else, and making the same posts in response.

KB: LinkedIn is where I live professionally, and everyone’s complaining their reach is down. But the algorithm has been optimized for value over impressions, so the old “here’s me at x event” doesn’t get the same vanity metrics it used to. It’s looking for pattern recognition across topics that add value. Or so it says. add value.

BM: If I see another person who goes to a conference and posts a selfie in front of a sign, I’m like, man, I hope this is effective, because I would be so depressed holding that camera to take that photo. Are you doing this because your marketing person read some white paper about what the LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes? Photos not videos, one sentence then another paragraph so people click “more”?

Maybe I think about these things too deeply, but I look at that and I’m like—you’re fake.

When everyone is doing the same thing, I don’t understand how you gain any leverage by doing the same thing as everyone else.

KB: I think people don’t know what to post, so they default to the trade show booth. They skip the hard part—forming a POV by having inputs. People don’t value inputs anymore, they’re just trying to produce more. So they have nothing new to say.

BM: Algorithms are really good at giving you points of view. Spotify determines what music you listen to. YouTube determines what video you watch next. Netflix tells you what to watch. TikTok—you just open the app and it goes and goes and goes. I think that’s created a ton of learned helplessness when it comes to actually having what people are calling “taste.” I’d call it sensibility…or just an opinion on things you’re actually into.

My hope is that we’ve reached the point of perfect optimization where the only optimization that makes sense is to not optimize.

I run a lot—well, I used to—and when I was competitive about races, it was always training plans and numbers. But every now and again, you need to run without a watch just to remind yourself that you enjoy it.

AI is going to be amazing at optimization. It’ll do it better than everyone. So when the tools are available to everyone and your Claude instance is running through a million thumbnails while you sleep, figuring out the best “surprised face” for your YouTube thumbnail—well, at some point every single video will have the same freaking thumbnail. It has to lose its effectiveness.

KB: So…giving a shit is the new optimization for 2026.

BM: I think a lot of optimization has been driven by this growth-hacker personality type. And I think it’s a replacement for personality, actually. Being good at internet growth tactics is not a personality. I’m sorry to say.

KB: You’ve watched legacy media brands trying to reinvent under huge pressure. What separates the ones that evolve from the ones that hollow out and die?

BM: If there’s one characteristic, it’s not being nostalgic for the past. I worked for a magazine in perpetual crisis. We’d have meetings and the first question was always, “What about the magazine?” I’m thinking, what about us having a job? What does our audience actually want?

I also have this theory: just about everybody has one playbook. Most people have no playbooks. But even successful entrepreneurs—they’re good at one thing. They keep iterating on that one thing. You know what they do because it’s what they always do.

KB: So now that the old media playbook is broken—we’re not just sending out a press release to the wire and hoping for the best—what should brands actually do?

BM: It’s actually an exciting time in some ways. Brands are increasingly their own media companies. Every single company will have a media arm in some way. The old way of putting out a press release probably isn’t going to make it—although you’ll put it out anyway because it’ll get sucked up by AI engines.

But I would assume that most brands will screw this up. That’s where my money is. Everyone fights the last war. “We gotta create content, so let’s do SEO-optimized blog posts. Let’s turn this blog post into a podcast that nobody listens to.” Probably not the way.

It’s more about sharing real expertise versus hard sales content. And as AI and agents become more embedded in the economy, trust is going to become way more important.

When things happen in the background, people lose trust. I covered online advertising almost from its inception, and it always struggled with privacy because too many things were taking place behind the scenes. It’s like a restaurant taking your credit card away to run it. Where did they go? Why has it been 15 minutes?

Trust will be the thing.

✌️ Kara

Brian Morrissey is the co-host of People vs. Algorithms and the author of The Rebooting. You should subscribe to both.

If this conversation hit (or made you want to run without a watch) consider sharing it with someone who’s still posting conference selfies. And if you’re not subscribed yet, come on in.

• Richard van der Blom's analysis of 600,000+ posts

• Trust Insights' technical breakdown of LinkedIn's own engineering papers

• Saywhat's dataset of 329,000+ posts

• AuthoredUp's analysis of 3 million+ posts

• Ocean Labs' strategy report

• Socialinsider's study of 1 million posts.

I also went to the primary source: LinkedIn’s published arXiv research papers and their March 2026 Engineering Blog announcement confirming the new architecture.

Here’s what I found: LinkedIn didn’t tweak the algorithm. They tore it down and rebuilt it from scratch. In March 2026, they publicly confirmed it.

Most of the advice you’re seeing online about how LinkedIn works is either outdated or made up. So I did the annoying thing and compared what the reports actually say: where they agree, where they don’t, and what it means for all of us.

Here’s everything.

TL;DR

Your reach is down. 98% of LinkedIn users experienced a decline (AuthoredUp). Views dropped 50-66% depending on the source.

LinkedIn replaced its old algorithm with a two-stage AI system that reads your content for meaning and matches it to audiences by topic — not by who you’re connected to.

Your profile now directly determines whether your posts even enter the competition. Topic consistency matters more than timing. Saves matter more than likes. And if your content sounds like ChatGPT wrote it, the algorithm knows (thank god).

The old LinkedIn playbook—golden hour, hashtag stacking, engagement pods, “Comment YES if you agree”—is dead. What replaced it rewards niche expertrise and engagement that’s substantial (as opposed to “congrats!” comments)

What every report agrees on

Your reach has tanked (and it’s structural, not temporary). Views down 50% (van der Blom, 600K+ posts). Median impressions down 66% from the 2023 peak (Saywhat, 329K posts). AuthoredUp’s tracking of 3 million+ posts found 98% of users experienced a decline, with median impressions falling 47% between mid-2024 and mid-2025. Socialinsider’s analysis of 1 million posts confirms the same direction. If you have 50K+ followers, it’s worse: reach down 62%, engagement down 67%, follower growth down 83% (van der Blom). The 15K-25K follower tier is actually the sweet spot right now.

LinkedIn replaced its algorithm with AI that actually reads your content. This is the biggest change. Trust Insights’ technical analysis of LinkedIn’s own engineering papers documented the full architecture: a two-stage pipeline consisting of a Causal LLM (built on LLaMA-3) that acts as a retrieval gate—deciding if your content even enters competition — and a Generative Recommender that decides where it ranks. In March 2026, LinkedIn’s Engineering Blog publicly confirmed this architecture (authored by engineering lead Hristo Danchev, backed by two arXiv research papers). Van der Blom, Saywhat, and Ocean Labs all describe the behavioral shift this creates.

Content now spreads by topic, not by connections. The old system: your connections liked your post, it showed up in their connections’ feeds. The new system: LinkedIn groups people by professional interests and matches content to topics. Van der Blom calls it the shift from social graph to interest graph. Trust Insights explains the mechanism: a unified embedding system replaced five or more separate content retrieval systems. Saywhat confirms niche content is now being rewarded while broad content declines. Every source agrees on this one.

Your profile is now a direct input to the algorithm. Trust Insights documented that the Causal LLM reads your headline, About section, and Experience as text to decide your retrieval eligibility. A separate model (Qwen3 0.6B) converts your profile into embeddings for ranking—making profile quality doubly important, affecting both whether your content enters competition and how it ranks once it does. Van der Blom and Ocean Labs both confirm the practical implication: if your profile says “Healthcare CFO” and you’re posting about crypto, the algorithm doesn’t know what to do with you. 80%+ of your posts should match your stated expertise.

Topic consistency compounds over time. Sticking to 2-3 core topics for 90 days correlates with +27% reach and +41% topic-based follows (van der Blom). Trust Insights explains why: scattered content literally dilutes your position in the system’s understanding of who you are—you’re authoring the document that positions you at a specific coordinate in concept-space, and inconsistency weakens that signal. Saywhat’s data shows the same pattern from the content side: niche winners are emerging while generic career and leadership content loses ground. Ocean Labs recommends the same 2-3 topic discipline. Think in sequences, not standalone posts—a 2-3 post series on the same theme shows +38% profile visits (van der Blom).

Engagement bait is actively suppressed. “Comment YES if you agree” hurts your reach now. Van der Blom, Saywhat, Trust Insights, and Ocean Labs all confirm. Saywhat adds that posts ending with generic questions actually perform slightly worse than posts without questions—users are tired of fake conversation starters. What works instead: specific scenario questions, either/or debates, provocative statements. Van der Blom’s data shows open reflections (”Curious how others handle this?”) outperform direct CTAs (”What do you think?”).

Hashtags are dead. LinkedIn shifted to scanning the actual words in your post for topic classification. Hashtags are navigation at best, spam signals at worst. Posts with more than 3 hashtags performed 70% worse than posts with none (Saywhat). Van der Blom agrees. Ocean Labs caps it at 3 maximum, if any. Saywhat’s co-founder noted that AI-generated content tends to default to hashtags—which may be part of why it gets deranked.

Comments are the #1 engagement signal. Not all engagement is equal. Thoughtful comments (3+ sentences) are the most valuable signal. Top 1% creators leave 286 replies per week versus 34 for average creators—that’s 741% more (Saywhat). There’s a strong correlation (0.545) between commenting frequency and follower growth. Van der Blom ranks the full hierarchy: thoughtful comments first, then saves, shares with commentary, reposts, and reactions/likes last. Ocean Labs recommends the A3 framework for commenting: Add insight, Ask a specific question, Anchor with a takeaway. Comments of 35-120 words from 4-7 distinct profiles per day across different roles and industries is the pattern that moves the needle (van der Blom).

Saves are the new metric that matters. LinkedIn added Saves and Sends to post analytics in late 2025—they’re telling you what they value. AuthoredUp’s data is the most specific here: saves drive 5x more reach than a like and 2x more than a comment. Posts that receive saves and substantive comments 24-72 hours after publishing perform 4-6x better because the system interprets late engagement as a signal of lasting value. Van der Blom found a save-to-comment ratio of 0.4 or higher signals strong rediscovery potential, with each save increasing the chance of appearing in suggested feeds by over 60%. Carousels have the highest save rate (29.2%) of any format (van der Blom). The takeaway across every source: create content people want to come back to (frameworks, checklists, reference material).

AI-generated content gets punished. Praise be. 44% of LinkedIn content now shows AI signals (van der Blom). Fully AI-generated posts get 2.8x less reach and nearly 5x less engagement. Detection triggers: semantic duplication, synthetic tone, repetitive comment patterns. Saywhat independently confirms. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky told Bloomberg that even LinkedIn’s own AI writing features haven’t caught on because “the barrier is much higher” to post on LinkedIn—the professional stakes make authenticity critical. If you use AI to draft, fine. Rewrite it so it doesn’t sound like the rest of the AI slop on there.

Older posts can resurface (within limits). LinkedIn confirmed in mid-2025 that posts 2-3 weeks old can reappear if they’re relevant to someone’s interests. Trust Insights adds the hard constraint: FishDB enforces a 30-day window for connection-based content. Beyond 30 days, it can’t resurface through your network regardless of quality. The out-of-network retrieval path (via the Causal LLM) operates under different constraints. AuthoredUp’s data confirms the practical effect: posts that receive saves and comments days after publishing can see massive late surges in reach.

Daily posting hurts. 2-3x per week is the sweet spot. Daily posting shows a -45% reach penalty (van der Blom). Ocean Labs adds tactical detail: post at least 4 hours apart, don’t schedule on round hours (:00)—use :04 or :07 to avoid automation detection signals, and use LinkedIn’s native scheduler rather than third-party tools. Every source agrees: consistency matters more than frequency, and the algorithm now penalizes volume without quality.

Where the reports disagree

These are the data points I find most interesting because if you’re making strategy decisions based on one report, you might be getting it wrong.

External links: the great debate. This is the most contested data point across every source I read. Van der Blom’s data shows a modest 5% reach gain for posts with links—a reversal from years of penalty. Saywhat’s data is much more aggressive: posts with 1-3 links saw 43% higher reach, and posts with 3+ links saw 210% higher reach. AuthoredUp found the opposite: posts with a single link perform worst of all, but resource-heavy posts with multiple links do better. Meanwhile, other sources still claim a ~60% penalty. LinkedIn confirmed to Greg Isenberg that editing links in after posting doesn’t affect reach. Ocean Labs says lead with value, put links at the end. The “never post links” era appears to be over but nobody agrees on what replaced it.

Optimal post length. Van der Blom says 900-1,200 characters (about 150-200 words) is the sweet spot, and penalizes posts with more than 40% blank lines or fewer than 4 lines. Saywhat says longer wins: 1,250-3,000 characters performed 31% better than short posts, and posts with 14+ paragraphs outperformed posts with fewer than 7 paragraphs by 71%. AuthoredUp’s earlier data aligned closer to van der Blom (800-1,000 characters). All three agree longer beats shorter. They disagree on how long. My suspicion: Saywhat’s dataset skews toward creator and influencer accounts whose audiences expect depth, so your sweet spot depends on your niche.

When to post. Van der Blom says 8-9 AM and 2-3 PM in your audience’s local time zone, but emphasizes the real variable is whether you can engage for 90 minutes after posting. Saywhat’s data shows weekend posts outperform weekdays: Sunday gets 1,531 median impressions versus ~1,075 on weekdays. Less competition from corporate content and ads, more leisure browsing time. Ocean Labs focuses less on timing and more on the pre-and-post engagement window (15-45 minutes of commenting before you post, 90 minutes of active replies after). All sources agree timing matters less than it used to because relevance now outweighs recency in the ranking system.

Video performance. Van der Blom: reach down -35.57%, engagement down -23.13%. Only works under specific conditions—under 60 seconds, manual subtitles, visual hook in first 2 seconds. AuthoredUp reported video content fell 72% (the steepest decline of any format). But Saywhat found the opposite on the high end: video is the most likely format to go viral at 2.0% probability, beating infographics (1.4%) and carousels (1.1%). Saywhat also found horizontal video outperforms vertical by 36%—possibly because people use LinkedIn at work and watching vertical video at your desk isn’t socially acceptable. The consensus: video gets low average reach but has a high ceiling. Don’t use it for consistent impressions. instead use it for trust-building and demos.

Format rankings. The sources mostly agree on what works but rank them differently. Van der Blom: documents/carousels lead with +6.92% reach and +46.73% engagement, followed by articles/newsletters (+47.92% reach—the biggest surprise). Saywhat: carousels get 4.1x the reach of text posts, infographics 3.4x. Socialinsider confirms document posts at 6.6% engagement rate as the highest of any format, with 15-20 seconds of average dwell time. Where they split: van der Blom shows articles surging; Saywhat barely mentions them. Van der Blom shows text+image as the safest consistent format; Saywhat shows infographics dominating the top 1% of posts (27.4% of outliers are infographics). The takeaway: carousels and documents are the consensus workhorse, but the specific format that works best depends on your audience and what you can produce consistently.

The myths that need to die

I want to be super clear about what is NOT confirmed because people keep posting about these as fact.

• “A comment is worth 12x a like.” No confirmed weighting formula exists. LinkedIn has never published specific engagement multipliers. Every source I read either ignores this claim or debunks it.

• “The algorithm changed last Tuesday.” LinkedIn rolls changes gradually through testing waves. There’s no single switch-flip moment. Trust Insights estimates 360Brew is 40-100% deployed. LinkedIn hasn’t confirmed the exact percentage.

• “Post at exactly 8:07 AM on Tuesdays.” Your audience is not everyone else’s audience. And the data now shows timing is secondary to relevance anyway.

• “Depth Score” is an official LinkedIn metric. It’s industry shorthand that commentators started treating as a product feature. LinkedIn has not published this as a named metric.

• “Never post links.” Overstated and possibly wrong. The data is genuinely mixed (see above) but the blanket prohibition doesn’t hold up across any of the major studies.

• “Engagement pods still work.” LinkedIn detects artificial interaction patterns (van der Blom, Ocean Labs). Pods with similar phrasing, timing, and reciprocal patterns get flagged. The system now looks for meaningful engagement from diverse profiles, not coordinated reactions from the same 20 people.

Behind the paywall: what I'd actually change, a format cheat sheet with real numbers, and the uncomfortable truth the data reveals.

If you want the full breakdown, lemme upgrade ya.

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IYKYK, and if you don’t…. we get to this ^ by the end of this article.

“Brands Should Stay Out Of Politics”

“Brands should stay out of politics”

Under any post where a brand even mildly smells political, you’ll see a stream of variations on this comment.

But… should they? Do they? Do we even notice every time they do? Whether we want them to or not, brands do and always have influenced society.

Brands are among the top shapers of our social aesthetic. We use brands as a means to express our own identity. The clothes we wear, the music we listen to, the restaurants we frequent, even the neighborhoods we move into. When those brands align with certain ideologies, our association with them signals our own.

2026 has blessed us with two perfect case studies in what happens when brands touch politics — and they went in opposite directions:

1. Bad Bunny x NFL

Bad Bunny held up a football that said “Together We Are America” while listing every American country; Donald Trump called it an affront to America.

2. Hootsuite x ICE

In response to public outrage over Hootsuite’s contract to provide social media management and monitoring services to ICE, CEO Irina Novoselsky responded with a letter saying 2 conflicting things:

1. “Our use-case with ICE does not include tracking or surveillance of individuals using our tools.”

2. “Our technology…helps organizations understand…how people are feeling, and where trust is being earned or lost. Today more than ever, organizations need to hear more from the public, not less.”

The internet has responded by tearing her letter apart.

(Meanwhile, her bio:)

The contrast is the point:

1. Benito & the NFL made a statement and held it.

2. Hootsuite tried to have it both ways: condemning what ICE is doing while helping them do it.

One is a stance, held by principles; the other is dishonest and held by trying to perform values while cashing in.

This is not new

We like to assume brands getting political is a modern phenomenon. It’s not; we just see it more today because it’s amplified by social media.

Some of the most respected brands in the world have sat on distinct sides in history:

• Coco Chanel was a documented Nazi intelligence agent, code name “Westminster,” who used her aristocratic connections to try to broker peace between Britain and Germany. After the war, she fled to Switzerland for a decade and she came back to Paris, relaunched her brand, and died one of the most celebrated designers in history.

• IBM created a custom punch card technology to help the Third Reich identify and track Jews. Thomas Watson personally oversaw the relationship, received Hitler's medal in 1937, and IBM serviced machines on-site at concentration camps. (Market cap today: ~$232 billion.)

• During apartheid, over 350 American companies operated in South Africa (GM, IBM, Coca-Cola, Kodak, Exxon) profiting from an economy built on racial segregation. It took 30 years of sustained global pressure before they divested.

• Barclays Bank faced years of student sit-ins, customer boycotts, and mass account withdrawals throughout the 1970s and 80s for its ties to apartheid South Africa. The bank didn't fully exit until 1986.

Behind the paywall this week: How the "patriotic tradition" Bad Bunny was accused of disrespecting originated in a line item in a military marketing budget + the punchline to that meme.

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IYKYK, and if you don’t…. we get to this ^ by the end of this article.

Why Aren’t We More Embarrassed Online?

I recently found two LinkedIn posts (here and here) from women talking about their work. Both women happened to have cleavage visible in their photos. The comment sections had nothing to do with the original content. Despite the fact that the original post was business-related, the comments were full of stuff that any of us would be embarrassed to say at work. All with real names, real profile photos, one click away from their employer.

So why weren’t these people embarrassed to say them in the comments?

Science calls this the online disinhibition effect (ODE). Even when people reveal their identity online, they behave differently than they would face to face. The term comes from Dr. John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University, who published a landmark paper in 2004 identifying six psychological mechanisms that cause people to lose their social inhibitions online—even when they’re not anonymous. His framework has been cited thousands of times, and 20 years later, it explains what’s happening on LinkedIn.

Here’s how ODE works: LinkedIn’s asynchronous communication means you can comment whatever you want, then close the tab. There’s no social consequence in real time: no eye contact, no body language feedback, no watching someone’s face change when you say something inappropriate. The person on the other end becomes text on a screen, not a living human being sitting across from you.

This is compounded by what Suler identified as solipsistic introjection: without face-to-face cues, people stop engaging with the actual person on the other end and start engaging with a version of that person they’ve constructed in their own mind. They assign characteristics, assume intentions, build a narrative. So when someone posts a video about their business strategy, the viewer doesn’t process them as a founder sharing insights—they process them as a character in their feed, onto whom they can project whatever reaction they’re having (in these 2 cases, cleavage). The original content becomes irrelevant because the commenter is responding to the person they invented.

But Kara, on LinkedIn? It’s a work platform ffs.

Yep. And turns out the professional framing makes it worse.

What makes LinkedIn fundamentally different from other social platforms is that the professional context doesn’t prevent inappropriate behavior the way it would in a real live workplace. It gives people the framework to justify it to themselves.

Researchers call this plausible deniability, and it’s the engine behind the specific kind of inappropriate commenting that thrives on LinkedIn. On Instagram, if you leave a sexual comment under someone’s photo, you’re being a creep and everyone knows it, including you.

On LinkedIn, that same impulse gets laundered through professional language. It shows up as: “I’m just saying, if you want to be taken seriously...” or “Not trying to be rude, but this is a professional platform...” or “I’d focus more on the message and less on the presentation.” Gross gets dressed up in a poorly ironed oxford.

Harvard’s public health research team calls this concern trolling — the use of positive or constructive-sounding language to frame an antagonistic message. Every one of those comments is about the person’s body, but the language has been engineered so that, if challenged, the commenter can retreat to: “I was just giving feedback” or “I was trying to be helpful.”

(It is worth noting that this behavior is not gendered. Both men and women participated in these comment sections.)

Suler’s research focused on one-to-one dynamics, but LinkedIn adds a layer he didn’t fully account for: the public performance element. Comments on LinkedIn aren’t private messages—they’re performances for everyone else reading the thread. And hostile comments don’t emerge from individual impulse alone—they emerge when other people are already being hostile, where users match the tone of the existing thread.

This means the first inappropriate comment on a professional post sets a frame (the whole “just saying what everyone else is thinking” vibe). It signals to everyone else reading: “this is what we’re talking about now.” The second person matches that tone. The third feels even more permission, and by the time you scroll 3 times, the entire comments section has become a conversation about the poster’s body or appearance on a post that was never about either. It’s a sort of permission to all be gross together.

LinkedIn’s own architecture contributes to the problem because it shows your comment to the poster’s entire network. It rewards engagement velocity, meaning controversial, emotionally charged comments that generate replies get amplified by the algorithm. A thoughtful comment about someone’s business strategy and a degrading comment about their appearance are weighted the same way by the algo gods because they don’t distinguish between engagement and harassment unfortunately, they just see activity.

What we’re seeing is a platform with a veneer of professionalism that allows people to disconnect their online behavior from their professional identity. They’re not anonymous, they’ve just convinced themselves that the rules are different here.

This same phenomenon is why your CEO won’t post on LinkedIn.

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski just became a global meme for taking the tiniest bb bite of their new Big Arch and calling it a “product.” (If you didn’t get the meme at the top of this email… nowyado.

Chris has been making content for six years, has 168K followers, and literally won an award for authentic executive communications. One (so so super bad) awkward video and the internet turned him into a punchline…but his follower count grew 30% because of it.

Behind the paywall: the real cost of staying invisible, what actually went wrong (and right) with the McDonald’s video, and how to build a public presence that survives the comment section.

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Just for Fun

The POV Audit: A Framework for Figuring Out What You Think

I was on the AI Ready CMO podcast this week, where Peter Benei asked me how we are using AI as an agency to deliver more for our clients. And I did not gate keep, so listen in if you want to know what we’re doing over at Backroom with AI.

During our talk, I shared my belief that if you don’t have a point of view, AI can’t help you create anything meaningful. It just makes you a middleman between robots. Let’s talk about it.

Everyone’s talking about tools, efficiency, output — how much, how fast, how automated. And I get it, because the pressure to produce is absolutely relentless and has been for as long as most of us have been working.

But if you have no lens through which to look at the world (e.g. opinions, style, taste, a hard-won perspective that you’ve developed through years of actually living and paying attention and sometimes being wrong) then what exactly are you scaling? The answer is nothing. You’re scaling the absence of a thing.

You can’t really put your finger on it when you see it either, it’s similar to that feeling when someone in a meeting says a lot of things, uses the corporate words, but you don’t really know what they….actually said. It’s an undercurrent of disconnection from the whole point because, friends, there isn’t one.

There’s a term that went mainstream in 2021 thanks to psychologist Adam Grant: “languishing.” It described that pandemic feeling of showing up for your life but not actually being present in it. Not depressed, but not flourishing either. Just...kinda existing. Corey Keyes, the sociologist who originally coined it, described it as “the absence of feeling good about your life”, like emptiness and stagnation wrapped in a functional-looking package. You’re fine on paper but slowly dying inside.

And now, almost six years later, I think we’ve made it worse. We’ve given the productivity obsession a turbocharger called AI, and the result is a sea of sameness so vast and so beige that it’s become its own aesthetic category (think millennial greycore decor, now for brands!). Seventy-four percent of newly published web pages now contain AI-generated content. Usage of the term “AI slop” increased ninefold in 2025. Merriam-Webster made “slop” the word of the year. We are drowning in content that is the digital equivalent of a plain flavored oatmeal packet.

You cannot have a point of view if you have no inputs. A point of view isn’t something you manufacture. It’s something that forms through the accumulation of experiences and observations and thoughts that you’ve taken the time to have.

It requires rest, recovery, stillness (basically all the things that don’t feel like “productive work” but are mission critical to creating.

We’re on the era of the beige industrial complex. If you’ve been on the internet in the last five years you’ve seen that that millennial grey-into-sad-beige pipeline where every home, every brand, every Insta feed started to look like the same sterile, inoffensive, algorithm-optimized non-thing. Someone on Urban Dictionary described millennial grey as “the sad depressive hue which many millennials coat their life in” and…yeah. That.

This beige-ification isn’t about color, or aesthetic even. It’s about what happens when an entire generation optimizes for safety instead of expression. When we choose what either won’t offend or we know will be attractive (bc hey, it’s worked for 80,000 other brands) over something real and created from scratch.

This rant article is not an anti-AI argument. I use AI in my personal and professional life. But AI is a tool, and like every tool in human history, it is only as useful as the person wielding it.

Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma, said it directly: as AI commoditizes the act of creation, human taste becomes the ultimate differentiator.

So here’s the question:

When was the last time you had a genuine input? Not content consumption (e.g. scrolling, skimming, passively absorbing the algo stream). I mean a real input.

(If you’re like, oh shit no actually just the doomscrolls. Here are a few I’m reading/watching/listening to this week:

• Adam Grant’s 2021 NYT piece on languishing because it’s 4 years old and more relevant than ever

• The NPR episode “How AI Slop Is Clogging Your Brain”

• The concept of “enshittification” coined by Cory Doctorow: the degradation of internet platforms that prioritize profit over quality.)

  ---

Behind the paywall this week:

Everything above is the observation, what’s below is the work.

I built this framework for myself during medical leave when I realized that 12 years of running a brand consultancy had eroded some of my own point of view in the exact ways I’d been diagnosing in my clients. I was so busy helping other people clarify their positioning that I’d stopped interrogating my own.

(this is also the same reason I stopped teaching yoga - when I realized I was going in to teach each week when I hadn’t had my own practice or learned anything new, my well was dry to give)

I created what I’m calling a POV Audit: a structured process for identifying whether you (or your brand) actually have a point of view, or whether you’ve been running on borrowed opinions and industry consensus for so long that you’ve forgotten how you think and feel.

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Just for Fun

775,000 followers and 13 comments

You already know I preach that founders should build a personal brand before they exit, that fear of talking about ourselves stops us, and that templating our content will kill society as a whole. You may not know that over $1.8M of our revenue at Backroom has come from my LinkedIn account alone, and that does not include brand partnerships, speaking opportunities, or all the new friends I’ve made along the way (the real prize! jk it’s money. Money is the prize).

I built a social strategy for a client last year—a mid-market cybersecurity company that had just gone through a six-company rollup, new name, new brand, the whole thing, and part of the engagement was figuring out how they should show up on LinkedIn. Which meant I spent a frankly embarrassing number of hours looking at how the biggest brands in their space were doing it, what was working, and what was just expensive noise.

And I found something that should make every company currently paying a social media manager to post branded graphics three times a week want to throw their laptop into a river.

CrowdStrike, with 775,000 LinkedIn followers, massive marketing budget, legitimate best-in-class cybersecurity brand, posted their Q3 earnings on their company page. Beautiful graphic, strong numbers, $4 billion in ending ARR, chef’s kiss.

Their CEO, George Kurtz, posted the exact same content from his personal account the same day, and, well…:

The company page got about 700 reactions and 13 comments. George got over 3,000 reactions, 91 comments, and 368 reposts.

Sit with that for a second because the implications here are brutal. A company with three-quarters of a million followers posted the same thing as one guy with 90,000 and the guy got 4-5x engagement.

I’ve been building brands since Twitter had a Fail Whale and the last three years have fundamentally changed the math on the role social plays in brand equity. The company page used to be the center of gravity. You built the brand, you published from the brand, you measured the brand’s metrics, and the humans behind it were secondary characters in someone else’s story. That’s over. Not because company pages are useless (they still matter, please give them love), but because the algorithm, how we treat corporate culture, and the way people make purchasing and investment decisions have all pivoted toward people.

When I was building that client’s social strategy, I looked at brands in the B2B and cybersecurity space, and every single one that was actually growing follower count, driving engagement, and converting attention into pipeline had the same thing in common: they were investing in multi-dimensional executive-led content.

Palo Alto Networks has Nikesh Arora, and he isn’t just posting quarterly earnings from his account, he’s in and of the community. He engages with other founders’ posts, reposts his team’s content, riffs on industry trends in a way that sounds like a person. The corporate page does LinkedIn Lives in multiple languages (which is smart), but Nikesh is the reason anyone’s paying attention in the first place.

Aha! has Brian de Haaff, who’s been on LinkedIn for about a decade at this point, posting leadership content that sneakily creates use cases for their software without feeling pitch-slappy. He’s not selling, he’s just thinking out loud in public. And every time he does, it drives traffic to the product page without a single “link in the comments.”

Apollo.io went a different direction entirely and turned their employees into the content engine. Their team members take over the brand page, teach in videos, cross-promote with external creators including this 12/10 sales course with Samantha McKenna. They were one of the first brands to invest in EGC.

And then there are the companies spending real money on gorgeous, on-brand, strategically planned content that goes out to hundreds of thousands of followers and gets 13 comments.

I talk to execs, founders, and investors every week- who tell me some version of the same thing:

“I know I should be doing more on LinkedIn, but I don’t know what to say.” And then they go on to tell the most interesting story I’ve heard in my life.

Every time I hear it, I want to reach through the screen, because you already know what to say. You say it in board meetings. You say it in pitch decks. You say it in the group chat with your three closest peers when someone asks a dumb question and you go on a twelve-text rant about what’s actually happening in your industry. And clearly, you say it to me in a random call on a Tuesday.

You have opinions. You have a thesis. You say smart, specific shit in board meetings and pitch decks and the group chat with your peers all the time. The problem isn’t that you don’t have content, it’s that you haven’t built the infrastructure to get it out of your head and onto a platform on a regular basis.

When someone says “build a personal brand,” I know it sounds like they’re asking you to become a content creator. Pointing at text on a screen while a trending audio plays. (It’s not that. Please don’t do that. Don’t do a dance. Stop showing your NRF photos.)

What it actually looks like: figure out the three or four things you have a right to talk about. Record yourself talking about them like a normal person, pretend you’re talking to a friend. Then, someone turns those into posts and clips and carousels. You show up two to three times a week. Let the algorithm do what it was designed to do: amplify people over brands.

“Great, that works for CEOs with 90,000 followers. I have 800 and my last post got four likes, two of which were my employees.”

The math actually works better when you’re smaller. A founder with 5,000 followers posting something with a real point of view will get a higher engagement rate than a company page with 50,000 followers posting safe, approved-by-legal content that offends no one and inspires no one. The algorithm rewards engagement rate, not volume. And the people who matter to your business — your LPs, your clients, your future hires, your competitors — are already on the platform every day. They’re just not seeing your company page because the algorithm buried it under posts from humans who actually said something.

The people I work with who build real personal brands don’t do it by being “thought leaders” (please, we would never). They do it by being visible about what they believe and why it matters, in their own voice, on a regular basis. No growth hacks. No engagement pods. No “comment ‘FRAMEWORK’ and I’ll DM you my 47-slide deck.” (woof). Just a regular old person with a strong POV who cares about their mission and their audience.

Behind the paywall this week:

If you’ve been meaning to “get more active on LinkedIn” for the past year and a half and you keep pushing it to next quarter, I’m showing you exactly what it looks like to build a personal brand content engine from scratch.

Let’s get into it.

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@hrmanifestoDo you work with dreamers? 🥹 Well, tell them to wakey wakey pls and join us in our reality. Pro-tip: push out that deadline 🙂‍↕️ Always best to “under promise and over deliver” …especially if you’ve chronically never delivering and over promising! 🥴 Follow for more! #hr #HRManifesto #work #toxic #corporate

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The Brand Loyalty Delusion

We used to buy from brands because we liked them. Like, actually LIKE liked them. We’d argue about Apple vs. Android online like it mattered. We wore logos because we wanted to align our own identity with the brand. Outside of super niche cult-like brand communities, that’s mostly over.

Brand loyalty is at a five-year low. And the stat that should really bother people: most consumers would switch brands tomorrow for a discount code or a better rewards program. A literal coupon.

Brands still talk about loyalty like it’s a relationship but consumers have moved on, and are treating it like a transaction. What happened is pretty simple. Every company got access to the same loyalty infrastructure (points, tiers, cashback, personalized offers) and downgraded the experience and products customers received. As quality goes down, so does perceived value and then everything boils down to who has the best price.

I’ve been calling this the loyalty delusion: this idea that you can engineer devotion.

You can’t. You can engineer retention for a quarter, maybe two. But the moment a competitor offers better math, people leave. And they don’t feel bad about it because there was nothing to feel bad about leaving. The program was the relationship. When the program stops winning, the relationship is over.

This isn’t a dip; the tools that commoditized loyalty programs are getting cheaper every year. Today, every DTC brand, legacy retailer, and startup can run the same rewards infrastructure. Which means the infrastructure is absolutely worthless as a differentiator.

So who’s actually holding?

Behind the paywall this week: I’m tearing apart how Starbucks turned a premium brand into a coupon delivery system (their own CEO admitted it), why Costco has a 93% renewal rate with no loyalty program at all, and the one question that tells you whether your brand is building real loyalty or just buying time.

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Performative Brands & Promise Inflation

KFC Australia just tried to position fried chicken as health food.

Amazon and Pinterest attributed their massive layoffs, to “AI restructuring” to appease investors, while the real reasons involved overhiring during the pandemic and missed financial targets.

Federal prosecutors indicted the founder and former executive of First Brands (known for Autolite), accusing them of a long-term scheme to lie to lenders about massive hidden debt and faking invoices.

Despite "Join Life" collections and 2025 sustainability targets, Zara's core business model—releasing 500+ new designs weekly—drives overconsumption, high carbon emissions, and substantial waste.

AI-washing, green-rinsing, DEI theater, metric laundering…..the list of corporate lie categories goes on.

This keeps happening. Not the gap between announcement and reality (that’s always existed). What’s new is the size of the gap, the confidence with which it’s delivered, and how little anyone seems to give a f when it’s exposed.

It’s called promise inflation.

As leadership visibility increases and accountability dies, organizations expand what they publicly commit to without a proportional expansion in systems, incentives, or enforcement to support those commitments.

When signaling is rewarded faster than delivery, promises naturally grow larger while execution capacity remains constrained.

Pierre Bourdieu wrote about how elites use cultural capital to distinguish themselves: taste, references, subtle behaviors that signal belonging. But promise inflation operates differently. It’s not about distinguishing yourself through what you know or how you behave. It’s about distinguishing yourself through what you claim. The bolder the claim, the higher the status. Articulation has become its own currency.

And the market has learned to price it.

Stock prices jump on announcements. Follower counts grow on brand claims. Funding rounds close before proving product-market fit. I sat in a pitch meeting last year where a founder explicitly said “we need to 10x the language” - not the product, the language - to close their Series B.

The incentive structure is so clear it barely needs stating: get rewarded for what you say now, maybe get audited for what you do later. And “maybe” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

What’s stranger is that we’re living through this in a culture that supposedly prizes authenticity and accountability. We’re chronically online. Everything leaves a receipt. “Receipts culture” is a whole “gotcha” genre of content. And yet.

The promises keep getting bigger without any accountability on follow-through. Despite us catching brands and being horrified, the gap generates almost no friction.

Part of this is just numbness. We’ve been lied to so many times - by institutions, by platforms, by people we trusted, by sad orange men - that outrage doesn’t stick. The cycle moves too fast. By the time a promise is broken, there’s a new announcement to absorb, a new claim to evaluate, a new narrative demanding attention. The discourse moves on before consequences arrive.

But I think there’s something else happening too.

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I’ve been writing this newsletter for a while now. My paid tier is newer. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to get full access to my linked templates, real client stories, and post archive, I’m doing 20 spots at 20% off for a full year, expires Sunday night.

Just for Fun

Customer Obsession Is a Liability Now

My Observation

A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.

The companies that talk most about customers are usually the worst at serving them.

You’ve been on hold so long you’ve choreographed three dance routines to the music. Meanwhile, their homepage says “customer-obsessed” and their CEO just posted about “putting people first.”

In the early 2000s, Amazon made “customer obsession” famous. But Amazon built a system behind it—Working Backwards—where every decision started with the customer and required operational proof. It wasn’t a value. It was an operating model.

Most companies copied the trend and skipped the infrastructure.

By 2024, “customer obsessed” was on every brand deck, every careers page, every investor pitch. Forrester looked at how many companies actually operationalized it. The number was 3%.

The other 97% put it on the wall and called it strategy.

You can’t call yourself customer obsessed if you’re only obsessed with their money.

What This Signals

Why it matters, and where things are headed.

We’re in an era where brand language has outpaced organizational capability.

“Customer obsessed.” “People first.” “Find your why.” The phrases travel. The discipline doesn’t. Companies are adopting values as vocabulary—not as operating systems.

And customers feel the gap. Every time they’re transferred to a fourth person. Every time “we value your feedback” leads nowhere. Every time the brand voice is warm and the experience is cold.

@lalamilanMe every time I’m put on hold..😂

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They’re punishing it, too. The average company loses 17-30% of customers every year. Most of those customers told you they were leaving. You just weren’t set up to hear them. The problem isn’t the aspiration, it’s about the distance between what companies say and what their infrastructure is set up to deliver.

When pressure hits (a market shift, a leadership change, a crisis) that distance becomes visible and it’s sometimes fatal.

Your Decision Model

A simple framework to apply in your work.

So how do you know if you’re in the 3% or the 97%?

I built a 45-minute leadership workshop to stress-test it. Five exercises. Real evidence-gathering. A scoring system that tells you where your gaps are—before pressure exposes them for you.

Below is the full audit, plus the story of a company that named itself after its values and collapsed the moment pressure hit.

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I am gearing up for a snowstorm in Baltimore and may be the only person I know excited for it. The snowfall brings peace and quiet to an otherwise noisy city. Plus I just had a traditional sauna installed in my backyard and plan to basically move in full time, or at least watch the snow from the warm inside this weekend.

2026 for me is all about abundance and a health focus, so this is one investment I’m making toward my wellness. We are not compromising on sleep, energy, or wellness this year!

Just for Fun

Reader Request: How do I create a LinkedIn social strategy?

This week’s edition was reader-requested by Gary Thorn, who asked about setting up a social content strategy. Let’s talk about it.

I really don't use my socials as I should. Do you have any coursework or recommended places to help develop a content strategy? Because I don't have much of one, every post I make feels like shouting into the void, and it's very top-of-funnel, so I understand it's a long-tail strategy I'm just underskilled for.

Social selling matters because the way people evaluate credibility, expertise, and trust has changed faster than most teams realized. Reach is down across the board, but it’s intentional; what has changed is how reach is earned. Platforms like LinkedIn no longer distribute content primarily through who you know, or that “how many engagements do you get in the first 90 minutes” rule. They are now distributing your content based on what you’re consistently known for.

That means visibility now compounds around specific, repeated subject matter. So if you’re writing about multiple topics that don’t overlap, the algo kinda doesn’t know what to do with you. But when your voice is legible, your content becomes a powerful form of social selling: not pitching, not posting for vanity, but staying present in the moments people are deciding who they trust.

Here’s what I do with my clients:

1. Choose the reader or one, not the whole audience. Stop thinking in demographics or job titles. Pick one person in one moment of pressure and write directly them. Picture where they’re stuck or what decision they’re avoiding to get hyper specific, this is what gives that “oh this is so me” vibe to readers.

2. Define that reader’s recurring questions/tensions. Strong strategies rely on a small set of questions you’re willing to answer in public again and again. Different stories, same underlying tension but you have to repeat it like a hammer pounding on people’s brains. It will feel repetitive to you, not to them.

3. Define your point of view before your topics. Your POV isn’t “what you do.” It’s what you believe is being misunderstood, oversimplified, or mishandled in that moment. How are you addressing those tensions in ways that other solutions / creators can’t or haven’t? Think about an angle that feels truly you, that you can use to shake things up and stand behind. The spicier, the better.

4. Define your voice. Not your brand adjectives but your actual tone. Are you direct? Calm? Slightly contrarian? Observational? Do you use Gen Z slang or not? Voice consistency matters more than typos or grammar, especially when algorithms are scanning for expertise signals.

5. Decide what you are not going to talk about. Constraint creates authority. Pick two or three themes you’re willing to return to repeatedly and let everything else go. Know those amazing content creators that come to mind who have fun relatable content? Do you even know what they do for a living? Visibility without guardrails is useless.

6. Identify your percentages. Each piece of content should have a purpose: open doors (awareness/reach/visibility), signal authority (engagement, shares, saves, establish POV), or conversion (follow, DM, subscribe, click). Know how to create content for each, and how often to post.

Template

Here’s the playbook template I use with my clients:

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The “Can’t Be Wrong” Culture That’s Quietly Killing Brands

My Observation

A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.

Teams are afraid of doing the wrong thing, so they do what’s safe and the brand sucks.

If every time someone makes a decision, leadership rolls it back, people won’t make decisions anymore. What happens is:

• less bold ideas are presented

• timelines get delayed because we need to make SURE sure it’s approved

• bottlenecks happen waiting for boss man to get back in office for asset review

• everyone is sad

Bold, exciting, standout brands got that way because they took risks. And a lot of those risks made egg-on-face situations that they had to observe, respond to, and learn from. The whole point of all this *waves vaguely at everything* is to try things, see if we can entertain or delight people, cause some controversy, shake up the social aesthetic a bit. It’s not to get it right every time all the time because that’s boring and frankly, bad for sales.

What This Signals

Why it matters, and where things are headed.

Brands that will win are the ones where messing up a little is allowed. We’ve created environments where being wrong is punished faster than being boring, so teams are playing it safe. They say the thing they know won’t get them in trouble, close laptop and go home.

The teams who are trying things within a safe internal bubble, supported by aspirational leadership, a strong brand platform, and a smart protocol for responding when things don’t go to plan (they usually don’t because we market to humans, who are messy and unpredictable) will WIN.

Category-dominating brands get to the top by making calls with the best information they have and living with the consequences.

Right now, the market is unforgiving to brands that hesitate or sound like AI-generic slop. Customers can feel when a company is over-managed and under-decided, when everything sounds approved and nothing sounds alive.

Your Decision Model

A simple framework to apply in your work.

Ask yourself and your team where fear is doing the driving.

• Who is actually allowed to decide? Not who should decide. Who does, in practice.

• What happens when someone gets it wrong? Do we respond as a team, coach each other, and learn? Or do we get punitive and shame people?

• Which decisions are locked in, and which are still open? If everything is open to revision, we’re not really getting anything done. Be decisive! Carpe diem!

• What’s the cost of delay right now? Indecision has a price. Inertia is the enemy.

Inside the Work

How I’ve handled it with a client + the template we used.

A mid-sized company in the middle of a growth push wanted to make a bold move in-market. The leadership team was explicit about the kind of work they admired and regularly sent examples of brands taking visible, opinionated swings as inspo. The message was that the brand needed to feel more modern, and provocative.

Working closely with the internal marketing team, we developed a set of concepts designed to meet that bar. The resulting concepts sat squarely within the brand’s existing strategy, used familiar language, and reflected the same level of ambition as the examples leadership had been circulating.

Then came approval time. 😐 Every single concept got killed and not because they missed the brief, but because leadership was afraid of the very thing they asked for. Here's what we did instead.

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Why Brands Break Under Pressure

My Observation

A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.

Brands fail when pressure exposes unresolved decisions.

I define pressure as:

• New growth verticals

• Increased market scrutiny

• Launching a new product

• Fundraising

• A new GTM motion

• M&A, or any capital event

• Leadership change

• A founder stepping into visibility.

These brand moments tend to surface gaps based on decisions that were never made, or because the organization is growing into new things using old brand sensibilities that don’t fit the future.

In practice this looks like decisions getting reopened, teams saying different things when asked what the brand is, messaging feels disjointed, execution is slowed down because getting sign off at the last mile is impossible. For early founders it’s something like “I know my vision but can’t articulate it clearly to early users or investors.”

What This Signals

Why it matters, and where things are headed.

The market is no longer patient with undecided brands. In this environment, brands no longer have the luxury of “building the plane while we’re flying it.” While this method of speed to market works between brand moments, when they reach a stage where the stakes are higher, the brand breaks.

So, what used to be forgiven as early-stage messiness now reads as uncertainty, and as a result, brands are being judged less on what they say and more on how decisively they behave under pressure. In other words, we’re looking at less “is the brand authentic?” and more “is this brand decided?” Undecided brands hesitate and move slowly. Decided brands move forward. Hesitation is now visible in real time.

The signal is: brand work is no longer about expression or alignment in theory, it’s about decision readiness. The brands that win are clear, repeatable, and hard to knock off course.

Your Decision Model

A simple framework to apply in your work.

To determine if your brand is in an “under pressure” moment, consider the following questions. Each stage answers a specific question the business must resolve before moving forward.

1. Clarity

“Do we actually know who we are and how we fit in the market?”

This stage defines the brand’s decision boundaries. Examples in the wild are when a company needs to GTM or raise funds and doesn’t have a clear brand strategy or architecture, when established companies are adding products or verticals and need portfolio logic, or when the market has changed and positioning is no longer relevant.

It clarifies:

• Who the brand is for (and not for)

• How it wins in the market

• What problems it exists to solve

• What tradeoffs it’s willing to make

(Artifacts: architecture, positioning, portfolio logic, ICP definition)

2. System

“Can the organization express this clearly and consistently?”

This stage turns decisions into repeatable structures. Examples in the wild include unclear or undocumented brand messaging, messaging that’s vague and doesn’t speak to what the company does, proof points that any competitor could claim, or a visual identity that ends up going rogue or is unusable. It clarifies:

• Language

• Narrative logic

• Visual rules

• Core touchpoints

(Artifacts: brand narrative, messaging, visual identity, voice & tone)

3. Adoption

“Is the system being used without reopening decisions?”

This stage determines whether decisions stick. Examples in the wild include companies that have a brand guidelines deck but no one uses it, email signatures are all different, or everyone says different things when referring to the brand. Someone in sales is using a dated sales sheet, or the website has language that isn’t accurate.

It clarifies:

• Internal confidence

• Enablement

• Guardrails for judgment calls

• Shared understanding under stress

(Artifacts: brand governance, training & workshops, collateral, website language)

4. Activation

“Does the brand show up coherently at a high-stakes moment?”

This stage tests whether the brand is doing real work. Examples in the wild include things like strong internal brand strategy and adoption but lack of communication or awareness with customers or general public, sales playbooks that don’t mirror how we work internally, or channel activations that don’t match our ICP behavior.

It clarifies:

• Faster execution

• Clearer GTM

• Shorter sales cycles

• Easier hiring and onboarding

(Artifacts: Brand rollout, campaigns, go-to-market, press, physical expressions like merch, events, environments)

Inside the Work

How I’ve handled it with a client + the template we used.

What happens when private equity comes along and gobbles up a bunch of companies that operated for 15 years as a “mom and pop” vibe?

Anarchy.

This work followed a major capital event. The company was entering a new phase of growth, with increased visibility and a broader set of stakeholders evaluating the brand at once. Read: 'numbers guys are coming in and things don't feel fun anymore, should I find a new job?' type vibes.

The teams were angry or scared and we had to get them excited about a rebrand before we could even start building one. Here's how we did it.

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• Jobs have moved! Check out my Notes section for listings each week.

• A new premium feature has been added to all posts: a real world client story that inspired the content, a question prompt, and a monthly template you can download and use.

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Just for Fun

The Meeting Where Brand “Didn’t Scale”

First, a story:

“Brand doesn’t scale,” he murmurs, pulling the zipper of his Patagonia a little higher. He takes a slow sip of his Intelligentsia, letting the bitterness linger as though it proved something.

“There’s no attributable ROI,” he continues, eyes locked on the new CMO. “Customers buy from our ads. Brand is irrelevant here.”

He checks his Rolex. The car should be out of the shop by now. It’s *always something* with the Audi. He has to pick it up before his 3pm meeting about migrating the org off Microsoft Office, even though he’s been living in Teams for years and the thought alone exhausts him.

He exhales. Leadership is heavy, just like Steve Jobs warned it would be.

“Let’s circle back on this later,” he says, already standing. He grabs his Bullet Journal and heads for the door.

My Observation

A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.

We’ve all been in this meeting. Something in the business is in crisis or change, and no one can convince leadership there’s a brand problem. Usually one of two things is true: the business outgrew the brand, or leadership doesn’t really get brand and focuses only on short-term numbers.

This is one of those brand moments I talked about last week, a structural inflection point where the company has crossed into a new phase, but leadership is still operating with decisions made in an earlier one.

When that happens, brand starts to feel abstract, optional, even annoying. People across teams start resenting each other, decisions get stalled because everyone is covering their asses and keeping receipts instead of building something together.

So leadership reaches for what feels controllable:

• Performance channels

• Attribution models

• Short-term ROI

Brand becomes the thing you “circle back to” once the chaos settles. So instead of updating the brand to match the stage they’re in, they try to out-execute the misalignment with more campaigns, content, measurement (shut off what doesn’t perform ASAP!), and what I call “prove it” meetings. It feels like discipline and control to leadership, but I call it avoidance.

What This Signals

Why it matters, and where things are headed.

When leadership starts calling brand “irrelevant,” it’s often because the business crossed a threshold, and no one updated the decisions that once worked.

Common signals:

• Performance is working, but everything feels uphill

• Teams are simply producing, not collaborating on big ideas

• The CMO has to prove brand has value beyond paid campaigns

• Brand conversations get postponed in favor of “real work”

• The org has become more complex than the original brand story

• Sales, marketing, and product are working in silos (and fighting)

This is the tell: Brand has stopped functioning as a shared operating system. People (internal and clients) no longer know what the brand stands for, they aren’t excited about it, and things are starting to feel disjointed and high volume rather than clear and powerful.

That’s a Brand Moment that usually happens when demand grows (scrappy teams have to scale fast and be intentional) or there’s some sort of capital event where a once unified “mom and pop” feel team has to suddenly adapt to complexity and act like a grown up company.

Your Decision Model

A simple framework to apply in your work.

Every Brand Moment forces a choice whether leadership names it or not. In its simplest form, you have 2 options:

Option 1: Optimize Around It

• Double down on paid

• Demand tighter attribution

• Treat brand as overhead

Result:
Short-term stability with long-term drag. Everyone ends up miserable here while brand debt quietly compounds. Bail outs may happen later. Reputation stinks. (Examples: Casper mattresses, Tropicana, Gap)

Option 2: Rebuild for the Stage You’re In

• Acknowledge the business is no longer what it was

• Re-clarify what the company stands for today

• Evolve the brand with the current market state

Result:
The brand stops being a meeting topic and starts being infrastructure, and it’s clear how the company is growing up with the times.

Most companies believe they’re choosing Option 1 temporarily to get out of a bind, but its hard to get out of and more often than not becomes the permanent state of affairs. Churn happens internally and externally. Have you worked for a company that chose Option 1? I sure have.

Inside the Work

How I’ve handled it with a client + the template we used.

Before Casper ever struggled, they nailed brand in a way few companies ever do.

They didn’t just sell mattresses online. They rewrote how the category showed up.

Early on, Casper ran some of the smartest brand-led activations in DTC:

• A sleep-focused content engine (podcasts, books, research) that reframed mattresses as wellness (you could call their help desk and have them read you a bedtime story)

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• Jobs have moved! Check out my Notes section for listings each week.

• A new premium feature has been added to all posts: a real world client story that inspired the content, a question prompt, and a monthly template you can download and use.

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Just for fun

2025: The year brands grew up

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, I wanted to treat this week’s newsletter as a reflection of what feels different this year for brands than it did in 2024.

My biggest observation: brands grew tf up. We saw less pretending the wrong data matters and more focus on community building, clearer goals, and investing in brand as an organizational stabilizer.

Here are a few observations I’ve made with some examples of brands.

Brands stopped treating growth as linear

Brand is being used as stabilizer during change

More leaders acknowledged that growth now comes in bursts, stalls, and inflection points. Instead of planning for smooth expansion, brands started preparing for moments of disruption: second locations, leadership changes, acquisitions, category shifts. Brand became something to stabilize the business during change.

Examples

• Airbnb: Over the past few years (and especially reinforced this year), Airbnb shifted away from growth-by-feature toward brand as an organizing principle during category expansion. Their move to anchor everything around “Live Anywhere” and later Experiences was about giving coherence to a business that had outgrown a single use case.

• Stripe: Stripe’s public positioning increasingly emphasizes trust, infrastructure, and durability rather than velocity. As the business expanded into more complex financial products, brand became a way to reassure customers through change.

Brand moments became unavoidable

Founder instinct expired / scale exposed gaps

Brands were forced to confront moments where what used to work stopped working. Founder instinct expired and alignment fell apart under pressure. Teams hesitated because decision rules weren’t clear. These moments surfaced brand gaps faster than any audit ever could, and companies that ignored them felt the drag immediately.

Examples:

• Allbirds: Allbirds is a visible example of what happens when early brand clarity doesn’t translate cleanly into scale. Expansion into new categories and channels surfaced brand ambiguity, forcing a reassessment of positioning, product focus, and leadership narrative.

• Peloton: Peloton’s post-hypergrowth phase exposed how much of the brand relied on momentum rather than clear decision frameworks. Leadership changes and restructuring highlighted the cost of not evolving brand from founder-era instinct into a scalable system.

Social matured from promotion to presence

We saw less broadcasting and more participation

Brands shifted from using social as a broadcast channel to treating it as an ongoing environment. The emphasis moved toward consistency, participation, and responsiveness rather than campaigns. Brands that performed well accepted that trust on social is built over time through active dialogue and community building.

Examples:

• Duolingo: Duolingo won by committing to a consistent, participatory presence that feels native to the platform. The brand shows up daily, interacts with culture, and lets the community shape the tone without losing control.

• Ryanair: Ryanair’s social strategy leans into responsiveness and self-awareness rather than polish. It’s a clear example of a brand understanding social as an environment, not a billboard.

Influencer strategy moved closer to the product

Credibility became more important than reach

Short-term, transactional influencer posts lost credibility. IMO they just don’t perform as well as longer relationship contracts with influencers who are truly brand-aligned. Brands invested more in creators who actually use the product and integrate it naturally into their lives. The work became less about reach and more about proximity, credibility, and long-term association.

Examples:

• Skims: Skims’ creator strategy emphasizes long-term alignment and real usage rather than one-off endorsements. Creators are part of the brand’s ecosystem, not just a distribution tactic.

• Stanley: Stanley’s growth has been fueled by creators who genuinely integrate the product into their daily lives. The content feels observational and unscripted.

Internal clarity became a competitive advantage

Brand as operating system

• Notion: Notion’s brand clarity (internally and externally) allows teams to make decisions quickly without constant top-down direction. As the product expanded, the brand served as a shared reference point to stay consistent, in other words it served as a decision framework for the whole team.

• Figma: Even amid acquisition drama and market uncertainty, Figma’s clarity around collaboration, openness, and community helped maintain trust and direction across teams and users.

As teams grew and pressure increased, brands that had clear decision-making, priorities, and guardrails moved faster than those relying on alignment or consensus. Brand strategy shifted inward, functioning as an operating system that kept everyone rowing in the same direction.

The Brand Moments Diagnostic

By the end of the year, a lot of brands feel “heavy”, where decisions take longer and the rules are muddy. My clients in this mode tend to find themselves re-explaining things they thought were settled. Their growth is still steady, but it just feels messy and energy draining.

That usually is a signal that the brand has entered a new phase it wasn’t built for yet. Which is a GOOD thing! I think of these inflection points as brand moments. They’re predictable. They repeat. And the fastest way to waste January is to misdiagnose which one you’re actually in.

The 5 brand moments

Let’s look at each of these moments, then a quick diagnostic to see if you are in one.

1. Founder-led → Brand-led: This is the moment when the brand still lives in the

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• Jobs have moved! Check out my Notes section for listings each week.

• A new premium feature has been added to all posts: a real world client story that inspired the content, a question prompt, and a monthly template you can download and use.

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Just for fun

When marketing becomes a service desk

My observation

A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.

Marketing is quietly being de-resourced and treated like a service desk.

Budgets are getting crunched and we all know what that means: marketing teams are shrinking in headcount. This is immediately putting marketing teams (sometimes teams of ONE in large companies) into reaction mode, less on strategy. Instead of thinking about the brand’s growth over a 24 month roadmap, senior brand leaders are designing collateral sheets for sales teams.

Marketing becomes the place everything lands because there’s no system to protect the work that compounds over time. Brand marketing gets chipped away in favor of whatever’s urgent. These days pressure is high and capacity is low. Add lack of structure to the mix and your beloved marketing team’s function defaults to supporting whatever feels like it’s on the shortest ROI cycle (usually direct sales).

What this signals

Why it matters, and where things are headed.

Once this cycle starts, it’s hard to get back out in front of it because the mechanisms that were building long term opportunities are now spent supporting short term wins. In other words, the infrastructure is no longer being built and we’re just reacting to what’s in front of us.

It looks like:

• Collateral becomes ad hoc based on whatever prospect sales is working to close

• Leadership is obsessed with ROI of very tactical activities vs. overall growth

• Marketing is doing strategic work in off hours because 9-5 is reactive

• Vendors and headcount are getting cut while performance goals go up

Your decision model

How to tell if this is showing up at your job.

1. Who decides what work gets done? If priorities are set by whoever asks first or prioritized based on who is asking, marketing is operating as support. If work is set based on approved plans tied to leadership business goals (and maybe you have some occasional department requests) then you’re likely in a healthy spot.

2. Is there a source of truth everyone works from? If decks, messages, and narratives get recreated every time, the brand isn’t being managed. If you get a request from Chief A and then Chief B tells you their request is more important, you lack a source of truth. This is what we like to call “absolute effin chaos”.

3. What gets protected when things get busy? If strategy is always the first thing to go, it’s not part of the system. I’m not describing leaning out or scrutinizing spend more closely when things get tight—that’s just good business practice. I mean when leadership cuts off any strategic forward-looking work with the vibe of “it doesn’t have return.”

4. Can marketing say no without escalation? If every boundary requires leadership intervention, authority doesn’t really exist. This is also true if there is no system or resource for those unmet requests to get answered. For example, if the strategy work had included a collateral design kit with locked elements, marketing can easily say no and point to the resources for sales to DIY. If it’s just a hard “no” then sales doesn’t have the support they need either and no one wins.

Inside the work

How I’ve handled it with a client + the template we used.

My client’s long time creative director was about to implode or quit and her leadership team already exited after a string of acquisitions.

Overnight, the brand surface area exploded.

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• Jobs have moved! Check out my Notes section for listings each week.

• A new premium feature has been added to all posts: a real world client story that inspired the content, a question prompt, and a monthly template you can download and use.

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Just for fun

“Being authentic” isn’t a strategy

My observation

A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.

“Be authentic” is the most common brand directive right now and the least useful.

Authentic is a buzzword, truly. No one seems to be able to say what “authentic” means for their own company, so team start pointing at other brands doing things that feel real and try to mimic. Literally the opposite of authenticity.

Then it’s cute for a hot second until the strategy starts to fall apart because it was all fake and borrowed. They get the surface stuff right (tone, content style, vulnerability cues, pacing) but they miss the core goodness that made all that feel real for the brand they’re copying (ahem, sorry I mean “inspired by”). Meanwhile, none of the decisions, constraints, or incentives have changed and people still don’t know who the brand authentically is.

What this signals

Why it matters, and where things are headed.

When “authentic” isn’t defined specifically for *THAT BRAND* because that’s what authenticity means, the team is constantly chasing whatever new trend someone else is doing because they have no sense of self to keep the brand grounded.

It looks like this:

• Progress stalls because teams get stuck in decision loops

• Messaging/design/creative/whatever keeps changing on a whim

• Marketing is asked to “make it more human” but not given constraints

• Leaders reference other brands instead of their own strategy

• Consistency becomes a goal, but no one can define what should be consistent

Your decision model

A simple framework to apply in your work.

Instead of asking, “Does this sound authentic?” ask three more useful questions:

1. Does this sound like us today, right now? Not aspirational. Who the brand is at its best, under everyday constraints, against real competitors, focused on promises only you can own, with a personality that can be observed in your process, with the team, on the website, and so on.

2. Would we still say this if it made something harder? (Or if some side opportunity shows up that makes us stray?) Authenticity shows up in tradeoffs, when you have to make hard choices. If a message only works when it’s convenient, it’s probably performative or aspirational.

3. Can this hold up across teams and channels? If Sales, Product, and Leadership can’t use the same language without rewriting it, it’s not grounded enough to scale. I cannot stress the importance of including voices across *more teams than marketing and leadership* when developing brand strategy.

Inside the work

How I’ve handled it with a client + the template we used.

We ran into this exact issue with Volo City.

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Join chat

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Just for fun

Your brand is breaking from inside the building.

My observation

A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.

Brands are failing because the organization can’t support the strategy.

IMO, most brand problems are internal systems issues. What I mean: Leadership wants to go faster and bypasses thoughtful development. Timelines and budgets are restricted. Someone’s wife on the C suite likes purple so we’re adding it to the logo. Brand and product are running separately. Teams are siloed. Approvals? What approvals?

And it doesn’t stop there. Instead of clarifying the customer, the entire team starts arguing about vibes, product launches happen before the story is finished, sales is still using a deck from 2019 but asking marketing to jeuje it up for a prospect. And my all time favorite: The CEO forwards a competitor’s website at 10pm with “Let’s do this.” Or…no one agrees on the problem but somehow everyoneeee has an opinion on the color palette. Innovation dies because of CEO egos.

This is how systems fail the brand, which ends up collapsing from the inside long before it ever hits the market. I call it fear-based brand marketing.

What this signals

Why it matters, and where things are headed.

Why this matters right now:

• Too many companies are trying to scale (fast) without alignment.

• CMOs are getting fired for cross-functional failures.

• Founders blame “brand” when it’s actually incentives, communication, or power dynamics.

• Revenue leaders are breaking shit for the sake of growth.

• Investors are watching for internal consistency as a leading indicator of future performance.

• Misalignment = wasted money and resources and who can do that, in THIS economy??

Your decision model

A simple framework to apply in your work.

Here is what I call The Internal Brand Stability Test, and it asks just three questions:

1. Ownership: Who actually owns the brand? THERE IS ONLY ONE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION. It is not sales, marketing and the CEO, I promise you.

2. Incentives: Do the decision-makers succeed from the same outcomes? (e.g., CMO wants reach, CFO wants CAC efficiency, CEO wants narrative.) This is the biggest point of friction because everyone is fighting for their metric instead of letting the tension intersecting them creates turn into progress.

3. Readiness: Do teams understand the strategy enough to execute it consistently with existing resources?

What this test really exposes is whether the organization is structurally capable of holding a brand at all. Most companies treat brand like something Marketing applies at the end, but it’s really a system that requires ownership, aligned incentives, and operational readiness. When those foundations aren’t there, the strategy falls apart instantly.

When to use this test: right before you approve a rebrand, a campaign, a positioning shift, or a GTM reset.

Inside the work

How I’ve handled it with a client + the template we used.

Brand new CEO alert! We were brought in to a major staffing company to rebuild messaging after new leadership set fresh growth priorities. The internal operating model around messaging didn’t support high growth verticals and was too tied to the core brand and not the unique value propositions for those industries.

When we ran The Internal Brand Stability Test, we found the real problem in under 10 minutes. It wasn't messaging or creative. It was something leadership had been ignoring for two years, and it was about to cost them their best people.

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