Marketing Intelligence

A personal board of directors is a small, deliberately chosen group of advisors, mentors, and peers who give you honest perspective on your career, your decisions, and your blind spots. Unlike a formal mentoring relationship or a coaching engagement, it is informal, reciprocal, and built over time. The people in it do not need to…

Test marketing is the practice of launching a product, campaign, or go-to-market approach in a controlled environment before committing to full scale. Done well, it gives you real market signal at a fraction of the cost of a failed national rollout. Done poorly, it becomes a bureaucratic delay that produces data nobody acts on. The…

Personalization at scale means delivering relevant, contextually appropriate experiences to large audiences without requiring manual effort for each individual. It works when marketers stop treating personalization as a data problem and start treating it as a decision-making problem: what signals matter, what responses they should trigger, and where the system breaks down if the logic…

Books on strategy are not in short supply. The business section of any airport bookshop will give you fifteen variations on the same three ideas, dressed up in different case studies. The ones worth reading are rarer, and they tend to share a quality: they make you think differently about problems you thought you already…

A strategy on a page is a single document that captures the essential logic of a go-to-market plan: who you are targeting, what you are offering, why it matters, and how you intend to win. Done well, it replaces a 40-slide deck that nobody reads with one sheet that everyone actually uses. Most marketing strategies…

Mobile strategy is the set of decisions that determine how a business reaches, engages, and converts customers on mobile devices across the full customer lifecycle. It is not a question of whether to have a mobile presence. It is a question of how mobile behaviour shapes your go-to-market approach, your media mix, and your product…

Psychographics in marketing is the practice of segmenting audiences by their values, beliefs, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle choices rather than demographic characteristics like age, income, or location. Where demographics tell you who bought something, psychographics tell you why they bought it, and that distinction matters more than most marketing plans acknowledge. Done well, psychographic segmentation…

Patagonia’s sustainability strategy is one of the most studied and most misunderstood in modern marketing. The “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign, launched in 2011, looked like brand suicide on the surface. A company telling customers not to buy its products. But it wasn’t a stunt. It was a deliberate commercial position, built on a coherent…

A plan and a strategy are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the most common and costly mistakes in marketing. A strategy is the logic that explains how you will win, given your market position, your resources, and your competition. A plan is the sequence of actions that follows from that…

The best business books to read in 2025 are the ones that change how you think, not just what you know. This list skips the airport bestsellers that repackage obvious ideas with a catchy framework, and focuses on books that have genuinely shaped how serious operators run businesses, build strategies, and make decisions under pressure….