Acting and thinking like a leader are not the same skill, and most people wait far too long to develop either. The moment you step into a leadership role, or are handed the metaphorical whiteboard pen, you either move or you freeze. The ones who move, even imperfectly, are the ones who grow. Leadership in…
Owned media is any channel or content asset your business controls outright: your website, email list, blog, podcast, app, or any platform where you set the rules and keep the audience. Unlike paid or earned media, no algorithm change or ad auction can take it from you. That distinction matters more than most marketing teams…
Executive strategy alignment means ensuring that marketing goals, budgets, and activity are visibly connected to the commercial priorities of the business. When that connection breaks down, marketing becomes a cost centre that senior leaders tolerate rather than invest in, and the CMO becomes the first person cut when the board wants to find savings. Most…
Michael Porter’s definition of strategy is this: strategy is the deliberate choice to be different. Not better at the same things as everyone else, but genuinely different in ways that create a defensible competitive position. In his 1996 Harvard Business Review essay “What Is Strategy,” Porter argued that operational effectiveness, doing the same things as…
The best marketing books are not the ones that top airport bestseller lists. They are the ones that change how you think about a problem you have been solving the wrong way for years. After two decades running agencies, managing client P&Ls, and sitting across the table from some genuinely sharp marketing minds, I have…
Porter’s Five Forces is one of the most widely taught frameworks in business strategy, and one of the most superficially applied. The model, developed by Michael Porter, maps the five competitive pressures that determine how attractive an industry is and where power actually sits: rivalry among existing competitors, the threat of new entrants, the threat…
The October 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review landed at a moment when the strategy conversation was shifting. The dominant frameworks of the 1990s, Porter’s five forces, the resource-based view, competitive positioning, were being stress-tested by faster markets and more complex competitive dynamics. What that issue captured, across several essays and case studies, was a…
Empathetic marketing is the practice of building strategy around a genuine understanding of what your audience actually feels, fears, and needs, rather than what you assume they want to hear. It is not about being warm or emotionally expressive in your copy. It is about doing the harder work of understanding the human on the…
Strategy is one of the most overused words in marketing, and one of the least understood. Most of what gets called strategy is actually planning: a list of activities, a media schedule, a content calendar dressed up in confident language. Real strategy means making deliberate choices about where you will compete and where you will…
Marketing myopia is the tendency to define your business by what you sell rather than the problem you solve, leading to strategies that protect today’s revenue at the expense of tomorrow’s growth. Theodore Levitt named it in 1960, but the pattern it describes is not a relic of mid-century boardrooms. It shows up constantly, in…
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