1. The Story Doesn’t Live in One Brain

• Written down, not memorized: The positioning, the customer promise, the “why we win”—it exists on paper, not just in the founder’s head.

• Anyone can pitch it: A new hire, salesperson, and board member can all sell the real, measurable value you provide to specific buyers.

• Decisions have a logic, not just a decider: People know how brand calls get made. What’s the process for evaluating decisions? Risk appetite?

⸻

2. The Team Tells One Story

• Internal alignment: Leadership, sales, and marketing describe the company the same way. Ask ‘em next week, see what you get.

• No “founder translation” required: Customers don’t need the founder in the room to articulate the brand value or “close the deal”.

• The promise survives the org chart: What you sell stays consistent even as who-sells-it changes.

⸻

3. The Relationship Belongs to the Company, Not the Person

• Relationships transfer: Your top accounts are tied to the company, ideally multiple stakeholders at your org have multiple relationships at the client’s.

• The reason they buy is bigger than who they buy from: Differentiation lives in the product and the brand, not the departing leader’s charisma.

• Continuity is visible: Customers can see who’s accountable before they have to ask what’s going on (read: they go “aw, Greg’s leaving.” And that’s the extent of the friction for them)

⸻

4. The Brand Is Built to Outlive Its Leader

• Adoption infrastructure: There are systems (playbooks, guidelines, training) that keep the brand alive without relying on one person.

• Culture is shared: The company’s identity lives across the team, it’s documented, it’s felt, it’s lived and expressed in ways that your team can say if something feels like us or not.

• Institutional memory is captured: The “why we do it this way” exists somewhere other than someone’s memory. We love us a good SOP.

⸻

5. The Transition Has a Narrative

• Someone owns the story of the change: The transition is framed deliberately to employees, customers, and the market in a proactive, leading way.

• The next leader gets an introduction: The market is given a reason why the change is happening, what the new person is bringing, a reason to trust them.

• The brand can carry a new name: The identity is strong enough that a new face strengthens it instead of destabilizing it. It should feel exciting, like evolution.

⸻

I know it feels like “we have an email going out to employees, and another to customers, oh and also a press release” feels like you’ve got it all covered. But trust lost is hard to regain, and building infrastructure around a transition can make or break whatever is to come next.

Did someone forward this to you and you want your own? Subscribe here.

Find me on LinkedIn and Instagram

If we are to compare this to human metrics, think: if you are a runner, and your PR is improving, but you have been ignoring a serious underlying medical condition, there’s a time bomb on those performance metrics. You can only improve on the PR for so long before your health catches up to you. They both matter, and brands only measure the PR time but don’t diagnose underlying health issues.

The Brand Pressure Index is a brand health score we created at Backroom, and it it measures a brands health based off of 10 dimensions. Today I will teach you five diagnostics we run as part of our assessment. They tell you what’s structurally fragile before any metric on your dashboard starts moving, and none of them are hard to run.

1. Promise-to-delivery gap velocity

Every brand has a gap between what marketing promises and what the product delivers. The diagnostic worth tracking is the slope of that gap, not its current size.

Most companies look at NPS once a quarter and treat the number as a diagnostic, which is roughly like checking your blood pressure after the heart attack. What predicts a crisis is how fast the gap is widening, quarter over quarter and year over year. A three-point NPS drop in one quarter means almost nothing on its own but the same three-point drop happening for three quarters in a row is the leading indicator of a brand that won’t hold up the next time something goes wrong. Plot the slope.

(It’s not always about overselling—last month we had a client score low for the opposite reason most brands do: they had more capabilities than they talked about, meaning they were grossly underselling themselves resulting in wasted capex and pipeline opportunity.)

2. The 30-second leadership narrative test

Pull your top senior people into a room. Don’t tell them why. Hand each one a recorder and ask them to answer one question in thirty seconds, no preparation: what does our company do?

Then play the recordings back to back.

When five senior leaders give five different answers (and they often do, with different emphasis on what the business even is) the brand has no center. It becomes whatever the most recent meeting decided it was. This is roughly what investors are hearing in every pitch, prospects piece together on their own, and press is reconstructing every time they cover you.

Internal alignment is something you can hear when leadership has to describe the company without a slide deck. A recorder is mild pressure, which makes it a useful proxy for how the narrative will hold up under the real thing.

3. CEO visibility decay rate

For founder-led and CEO-fronted brands this is one of my favorite and most predictive things to track.

Take the number of public touchpoints your CEO had in a typical month eighteen months ago: posts, panels, podcasts, press hits, conference talks, customer dinners, anything visible. Compare it to this month. If it’s down 40% or more and revenue hasn’t softened yet, you are watching a brand lose its center of gravity.

When a CEO is the brand, their visibility functions as brand equity, and so when they go quiet the brand loses the magic sauce that was holding the brand’s position together. The market doesn’t notice for six to twelve months and then “overnight” deals start slipping.

The question your board should ask: if the CEO stopped showing up tomorrow, who’s holding up the brand?

4. The “name three competitors” test

Call ten real, paying customers. Not prospects, and not the ones who’d describe you to a friend unprompted (those people are already biased). Ten actual customers. Ask each one to name three other companies that do roughly what you do.

If they can rattle off three names without thinking you may have a service in a crowded category, and the differentiation you think you have might be, ahem…not real.

Most companies skip this test because it’s scary to face the “we may not be that special” music. The internal narrative of “we’re the only ones who do X” is so embedded that nobody wants to find out the customers don’t see it that way at all. Give me a dollar for every leader I’ve worked with who said they don’t really have competitors because what they are doing is so unique….Run it anyway. The brands that survive pressure are the ones whose customers can’t easily name a replacement.

5. Named defender count

When something goes sideways who shows up unprompted, by name, to defend you Make the list and count it. Then check next quarter to see if it’s longer or shorter.

Most companies don’t measure this because most companies don’t have any named defenders to count. They have customers who pay them and employees who haven’t quit yet, which is a different thing.

A named defender is the brand asset companies discover they have, or don’t, in the exact moment they need it—and by then it’s already too late to build one. Brands that walk through pressure moments intact almost always have a list of people who’ll speak up without being prompted. The ones that don’t crack quietly, six months after the moment passes, when the silence around them turns out to have been the actual signal.

These five are the diagnostics any leadership team can start running this month without hiring anyone, buying anything, or commissioning a study. If any of them make you anxious, that’s where you start. Get uncomfortable.

Did someone forward this to you and you want your own? Subscribe here.

Find me on LinkedIn and Instagram

Now give me 3 feature differences between the latest iPhone model and the previous generation. No? Is that harder?

Let’s do the same with Nike. Aside from the mainstream everyday wearers, what kind of true athletes wear Nike? How are they different from Adidas or Under Armour loyalists? When you imagine their training environment, are they casually jogging on a suburban street, or are they running 200m sprints at a track? Do they run in the rain, or phone it in on inclement days?

Now, what is the most commonly used material in their gear? Sewing patterns? Where is it made? No? Harder too?

Somewhere along the line we got obsessed with sales performance and not only segmented it away from brand, we pitted them against each other. One cannot exist without the other and create any meaningful, sustainable brand value. The rise of PE backed companies, the startup boom, and Millennial DTC boutique brands got us looking at CAC and LTV and all kinds of new revenue-gilded metrics that look at how product is performing, but not the brand (Hello, Casper).

Performance metrics on their own do not indicate sustainability or equity in a brand, only that product is moving. Brand performance metrics use all data points to show how our company is embedding into people’s minds in ways that create the type of nostalgia you probably feel when you think of Reese’s Pieces and E.T. or those plastic Grimace installments next to the ball pit at McDonald’s.

I talked to a friend working at a heritage accessory company this past week (and he reads this so, hi! You know who you are) who is struggling to get leadership to look at the legacy of the brand and the nostalgia it brings; circa 90’s skate scene. A look at the website and it’s just…a bunch of product listings. No nod to their history, the very real equity and love people have for the brand, and no mention of the thousands of dollars people are listing vintage and limited edition pieces on eBay. In other words, the customers love the brand more than the brand does.

A 108 year old manufacturing client of ours discovered through our Brand Pressure Index that they have an online community of vintage resellers listing products in the thousands for a single product. They had no clue that there was an avid fanbase of customers who sought out and traded their items from the 1940’s, leaving those people completely ignored.

So what happens when, as a society, the marketplace becomes so crowded and saturated that we are optimizing the hell out of every single campaign and channel we have that we forget the meaning of it all? Capitalism, yay, sure we’re all here to make money but Pepsi is brown sugar water and they have made people feel something for generations. They have ingrained themselves into the social aesthetic of our lives. What’s the ROI on being mentioned in a rap song or on a show or simply being part of someone’s daily grab at the bodega? What’s the ROI on the fact my sister put cartoon BandAid’s in my stocking for Christmas every year and now it’s compounded into a multi-generational tradition that makes people feel safe and loved? What’s the value of that presence in the formative cells of our brains beyond “5 boxes of Care Bears Bandaids x $5/each - CAC”?

Brand measurement (NOT = marketing performance measurement) is what I do every day with every client. It’s not about loyalty, you can keep your NPS scores, I want to know how sticky the brand is. If people got angry and thought boycott!—is it easy for them to leave? Would they really? Does the brand signal something as part of their identity that giving it up would cost them emotionally? In B2B and B2G is the brand so embedded in the day to day across the organization that it would be near impossible to move to a competitor?

I also ranted a bit on LinkedIn last week about how exhausted I am [insert all the eye rolls] about brands and their agencies talking about the importance of being “customer first” and “customer obsessed” and “people centric” and “omg wtf are you even talking about.” It’s become so easy to just say what everyone else is saying, be actionless about it, and puff up our chests like we’re doing anything meaningful because we say we care about our customers.

Sorry but.. what else is there? Your customers = money = your business being afloat. Caring about them doesn’t make you special. It’s easy to care about the source of money people give us. It’s harder to think about what that transaction does to make their lives better (lining your pockets doesn’t equal value to them).

Behind the paywall: Two test you can run this week with Claude prompts, adapted from our Brand Pressure Index scoring.

Read more

Why:

1. It is the single most effective tool in creating loyalty on an emotional level

2. Messaging and creative is forced to pass the Promise test, creating meticulous consistency

3. Employees get excited and motivated to deliver on a clear, shared goal

4. People make emotional decisions that make them feel safe, and safety happens when promises are kept

   

Mission, Vision, Values Aren’t It

So many brands invest in Mission, Vision, and Values which, don’t get me wrong, can be useful exercises in determining direction for a brand framework. In over 15 years of working with brands I haven’t read one that sound wildly different from everything else out there, but they can be valuable if the team knows their place and purpose (it’s not about us copy for your website).

The real issue is when these documents are used as the foundation for a brand’s messaging. Usually combined with a list of product/service features and benefits, the communications framework is considered complete.

…but when was the last time you booked a flight based on airplane features or the airline’s mission statement? Instead we make decisions usually first filtered by flight availability, then the airline’s reputation for taking care of its passengers, cost of the flight, and maybe comfy amenities. Many of us are willing to pay a little more for the peace of mind if our plans change, we’ll get a credit.

How many companies have you worked for where you were really feeling the mission, vision, and values? (It’s okay if you didn’t know what they were, most people don’t).

What did they look like in daily practice?

What impact did they have on customers purchase decisions?

Did they influence how you worked?

Brand promise transforms corporate strategy into how people feel

No Brand Promise = Minimal Brand Feels

At the end of the day, increased profit is the name of the game. No matter how you slice it, clients hire agencies like mine because they want more money. Whether increasing revenue through lead volume, improving customer retention, or making campaigns run more efficiently, we’re in a numbers game.

The reality is that we (even the most self aware of us marketers who get the game) are irrational, emotional decision makers when it comes to final decisions. We choose vendors who “give us warm and fuzzies” or buy luggage that we’ve seen in destinations that align with our lifestyle goals. It’s just how we’re wired.

Famous Brand Promises

Can you guess what brands these promise statements belong to? (answers at the bottom of this post)

a) Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

b) Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete.

c) Inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time

How To Get Your Very Own Brand Promise

An oversimplification is to define the actions that your company already does consistently and well.

For example, at Backroom we consistently deliver brand frameworks that are both actionable and authentic to each client. We focus our messaging around data analytics, such as benchmarking and measuring brand awareness metrics like recognition, recall, and perception, combined with strong art talent on messaging and design.

What’s important to note is that the promise itself doesn’t become the message. It becomes the checkpoint for vetting business decisions and communications.

Does the social post you’ve scheduled tie back to the promise?

Does your ad creative aesthetic match how your customer should feel?

People will forgive an erroneous social media post from time to time. But what is unforgivable with customers is inconsistency and unreliability. Investing in a brand promise, including stakeholders across your employee and customer base in the process, and being honest about your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to aspiration will save time, money, and risk in the long term and build an unbreakably loyal community of employees and customers.

Brand Promise Answers:

a) Google

b) Nike

c) Starbucks

Did someone forward this to you and you want your own? Subscribe here.

Find me on LinkedIn and Instagram

Then they ran that single infamous partnership and lost their #1 spot.

Sales dropped sharply within weeks and by May, Modelo had taken over. Two and a half years later, Bud still hasn’t gotten the position back.

Every system that measured Bud Light’s brand had it right: at steady state. What none of them measured was what would happen the day the brand had to absorb a decision.

This also happened to Peloton. Through 2021 they were on every consumer brand list, “most loved” roundup, and category ranking that mattered. The brand looked iron-clad. Then the world reopened, the market they’d built the brand for stopped existing in the same shape, and the brand couldn’t translate. Stock crashed 95% from peak, valuation went from roughly $50B to under $2B, they’re on their third CEO in three years, and they still haven’t figured out what they are. The rankings didn’t see it coming because the brand they’d been measuring was the wrong brand for the moment that arrived.

Or take pretty much any acquired company eighteen months in, the ones still operating under three different brand names because nobody in the deal sorted it out, with sales decks that contradict the website that contradicts what the founder says on the podcast. From the outside it still looks like a brand, but anyone working there will tell you it’s four companies sharing a logo and the merged sales teams probably hate each other.

There’s a whole measurement industry built around brand health. A few examples: Interbrand publishes its annual list, Prophet has its Brand Relevance Index, and BrandZ ranks the top 100 most valuable.They are all fabulous, and each one measures the same thing: how a brand performs when nothing is happening to it.

Steady-state brand measurement is useful right up until the moment it stops being useful, which unfortunately tends to be the exact moment you most need information.

The reason the model persists is that it’s the easier model. Steady-state is comparable. You can run it year over year. You can publish a list. You can sell it to a board. Pressure is harder to measure because pressure is situational—what’s about to happen to a specific company, in a specific market, with a specific leadership team and a specific cap structure. The variables don’t repeat, so the industry built the number that scales and stopped asking the question that doesn’t.

But brands don’t break under steady state. They break under pressure: a leadership transition, a sale process, a founder who finally exits, a new owner who wants the brand to do something it was never built to do, a market shift that exposes a positioning gap, a 24-hour news cycle that asks the brand to take a public position. These are the moments that decide whether a brand survives the next five years, and not one of the major rankings tells you anything useful about how a brand will perform in them.

Last year I started building a different number, based off of 12+ years seeing this pattern with clients. A brand pressure score, rather than a brand health score. The question wasn’t “how is this brand performing right now?” It was “how would this brand perform if something happened to it tomorrow?”

It’s called the Brand Pressure Index. (try it out here)

It’s built around what actually happens when a brand gets squeezed. Not market share, CAC, LTV, brand awareness or anything that might show up in a Q3 deck. It looks at the things that show up when a PE firm wires the money and starts asking why nobody internally agrees on what the company does, or when a founder leaves and the brand walks out the door with them, or when a category-defining moment requires a position and the brand discovers it doesn’t have one (and then takes one anyway, badly, in real time).

Every brand sits somewhere on the Index, whether anyone has measured it or not. The four scores are In Crisis, Under Pressure, Stable but Exposed, and Pressure-Ready.

Most brands I’ve scored land in Stable but Exposed—the steady-state metrics look fine and there’s a fault line nobody’s checked. Bud Light was Stable but Exposed for twenty-two years…then it wasn’t. (It’s like when they say “the divorce came outta NOWHERE!? Right but did it? Or were you not paying attention?)

Fun fact: the people inside the company rarely know which tier they’re in. The CEO 9 times out of 10 thinks the brand is in better shape than it is, and the team thinks it’s worse than the CEO does, and the market is usually operating off something different than either of them or isn’t even clear on what they do. I’ve started calling that delta between how a leadership team scores their own brand and what the actual Assessment surfaces the Self-Perception Gap. It’s one of the most consistent patterns in the work, and the size of the gap turns out to be a problem in itself, separate from whatever the actual score is.

A health score works if you never get sick. The brands that broke in the last eighteen months all had clean scores right up until the day they didn’t.

Behind the paywall, I’m walking through what each tier of the Index actually looks like from inside a company versus from outside, plus a 7-question self-diagnostic that’ll give you a directional read on your own brand in about ten minutes. It’s the part I’d normally only share inside a leadership session.

Read more

Patrice nailed it. She said good storytellers are becoming vanilla because they’re over-relying on AI, and bad storytellers are rising up a little because the tools are helping them, and everyone is just averaging to the statistical center. That phrase stuck with me. The statistical center. Because that is exactly what I’m watching happen in the market right now and nobody’s naming it.

The real story is at question nine

Read more

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.

Read more

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…

Read more

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 inte…

Read more

• 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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

@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

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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..😂

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

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.

Read more

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:

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more