SMART KPI criteria , Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound , give marketers a useful framework for setting targets that are grounded in reality. But the framework is widely misapplied. Teams use it to validate the metrics they already track rather than to challenge whether those metrics are worth tracking in the first place. Done properly,…
American Express advertising has spent decades doing something most financial services brands cannot manage: making a credit card feel like a membership to something worth having. The campaigns are not about cashback rates or credit limits. They are about who you are, or more precisely, who you become when you carry the card. That positioning…
A brand essence is the single, distilled idea at the core of a brand, the thought that everything else should be consistent with. It is not a tagline, not a mission statement, and not a list of values. It is one idea, usually expressed in two to five words, that captures what a brand fundamentally…
Brand health metrics give you a structured way to measure how your brand is perceived, recalled, and preferred over time. The benchmarks matter less than the direction of travel and the gap between where you are and where your competitors sit. Most marketers track brand health metrics badly, not because they lack the tools, but…
Marketing frameworks are thinking tools, not execution templates. The best ones give you a structured way to ask better questions, stress-test assumptions, and make faster decisions under uncertainty. The worst way to use them is to treat them as a checklist you fill in and file away. Most marketing teams have encountered the same dozen…
Entering a SaaS marketplace, whether that means listing on AWS Marketplace, Salesforce AppExchange, HubSpot’s ecosystem, or a category-specific platform, is a go-to-market decision, not a distribution tactic. The research phase that precedes that decision is where most teams either build a real commercial case or accumulate a convincing-looking stack of assumptions. Getting this right requires…
Influencer marketing challenges are rarely what brands expect them to be. Most teams walk in worried about fake followers and walk out having lost budget, brand equity, or both, for reasons that had nothing to do with bots. The real challenges are structural: misaligned incentives, weak measurement, and a category that has industrialised faster than…
Product adoption strategies are the structured approaches companies use to move customers from awareness through to habitual use of a product. The best ones are not built around features. They are built around the specific moment when a customer first experiences value, and everything before and after that moment is engineered to make it happen…
Brand health and brand equity are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is one of the more common mistakes I see in brand strategy conversations. Brand health measures how your brand is performing right now, tracking awareness, sentiment, consideration, and loyalty at a point in time. Brand equity is the accumulated value…
Odd-number pricing is the practice of setting prices just below a round number, typically ending in 9, 7, or 5, to make a price feel smaller than it is. It works because buyers process the left-most digit first, so £199 registers closer to £100 than £200, even though the gap is a single pound. The…
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