AI in branding is genuinely useful in a narrow set of applications and genuinely dangerous in others. The useful applications tend to involve speed, scale, and synthesis. The dangerous ones involve judgment, meaning, and the kind of strategic clarity that has to come from people who understand the business, not from a model trained on…
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…
Adaptive leadership is the ability to read a changing situation, make a call with incomplete information, and keep the organisation moving. It is not a management philosophy or a workshop exercise. It is what separates leaders who build something durable from those who manage well only when conditions are favourable. Most marketing and agency leaders…
Transformation leadership mistakes rarely announce themselves. They accumulate quietly, buried under confident slide decks, restructured org charts, and language that sounds decisive but means very little. By the time the damage is visible, the strategy has usually been running for eighteen months and the people who could have stopped it have either left or stopped…
Misleading correlations occur when two variables move together in a way that looks meaningful but shares no causal relationship. In marketing, they are everywhere, and they are expensive. When you build strategy around a correlation that does not hold up under scrutiny, you are not making data-driven decisions. You are making confident mistakes. The problem…
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…
A purpose-driven product strategy isn’t about mission statements or brand values printed on a wall. It’s about building products around a clear answer to one question: what problem does this actually solve, and for whom? When that question is answered honestly, every downstream decision, from pricing to positioning to go-to-market sequencing, gets easier. When it…
Consumer preference for brands that take social responsibility seriously has shifted from a nice-to-have to a commercial variable. Brands that treat social responsibility as a positioning decision, rather than a PR exercise, are seeing measurable differences in loyalty, premium tolerance, and long-term equity. Those that treat it as window dressing are increasingly being called out…
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