Insights

Thinking you can check my work against.

Marketing fundamentals the way Kotler meant them, portfolio strategy from lived experience, and honest reporting from the AI front line. Written from daily practice across a multi-brand portfolio, not from the sidelines. Also published on LinkedIn.

Strategy Fundamentals

Segmentation, targeting, positioning: the discipline most marketing plans skip

Kotler's STP is still the spine of real strategy. What it looks like in practice when your buyers range from site foremen to gift shoppers.

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Fundamentals · AI

The fundamentals didn't die. Your patience did.

AI changed marketing's tools, not its physics. Kotler's questions still decide whether the fast new execution is aimed at anything.

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AI Search · SEO

SEO as you knew it is over. Here's what's replacing it.

92% of brands are failing at AI search visibility. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the new game: getting cited by AI, not just ranked by Google.

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Portfolio Strategy

How to market a multi-brand portfolio without the brands eating each other

Lessons from running portfolios of 5, 9 and 14 brands at once: distinct positioning per brand, shared infrastructure underneath, and one budget logic above it all.

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AI · Judgment

After three years of using AI daily, here's what it genuinely cannot replace.

Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini every single day, and four things where human judgment still wins every time.

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Retention · CLV

Retention is the quiet profit engine. Here's the machinery.

Acquisition gets the applause; retention pays the bills. Lifecycle flows, behavioural segmentation and the CLV lens, from someone who has built them across 17 brands.

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Email · First-Party Data

The cookieless future arrived. Most brands still aren't ready.

Third-party cookies are gone, privacy rules are tighter, and the brands in good shape are the ones that did the unglamorous owned-channel work.

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B2B Marketing

B2B equipment marketing is a long game. Play it like one.

Equipment buyers research for months and buy for decades. What actually works: research-stage visibility, proof over promises, and owned media between purchase cycles.

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Marketing Leadership · AI

39% of CMOs are cutting agency budgets. Here's the honest reason why.

Agencies lost 8% of their workforce in 2025 and Forrester forecasts 15% more cuts in 2026. The execution work moved in-house, and AI is why.

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Brand Strategy

Brand vs activation on a small budget: you still need both

Binet and Field's 60/40 logic, Byron Sharp's availability, and what they mean when your budget is a rounding error compared to the case studies.

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AI · Future of Work

AI agents are now running marketing tasks autonomously. Most marketers haven't felt it yet.

McKinsey estimates agentic AI could power two-thirds of current marketing activities. Here's what that means in practice, from someone using it daily.

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Careers · AI Skills

The AI skills divide in marketing is widening faster than anyone wants to admit.

Two marketers, same title, same salary, completely different output. AI literacy is now a baseline skill, not a differentiator.

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