Marketing is one of the few professions where the fundamentals were written down decades ago and are still routinely ignored. I've built my career on the opposite bet: study the people who defined the field, test their thinking against real businesses, and then teach what survives contact with reality.
Standing on shoulders
My journalism degree gave me the writing; the giants of marketing gave me the discipline. Philip Kotler taught me that marketing is a management science, segmentation, targeting, positioning, before it is ever a creative act. When I map fourteen safety brands to the different minds of a site foreman and a retail shopper, that's Kotler at work in muddy boots.
David Ogilvy taught me respect for the customer's intelligence and for the long, factual sales argument, which is why my B2B equipment content reads like a helpful expert, not a billboard. Al Ries and Jack Trout taught me that positioning is a battle for a slot in the mind, one word if you can win it. Seth Godin taught me that permission and remarkability beat interruption, the thinking behind every retention program and every magazine I've built. And Byron Sharp's evidence, that brands grow through mental and physical availability, keeps me honest whenever a plan drifts toward only preaching to the converted.
None of these thinkers agree with each other completely. That's the point. Holding their arguments in tension, classic positioning against modern evidence, brand against activation, is what stops a strategy from becoming dogma.
The urge to keep growing
The field refuses to stand still, which is exactly why I love it. In one career I've had to master print production, then SEO, then social platforms, then marketing automation, then GA4's event model, then AI as a working tool. I treat learning as a weekly discipline, not an occasional course: reading the field's best current thinkers, studying what other industries do well, pulling apart campaigns I admire, and testing new tools on real work the week they appear.
That habit is how I moved across six industries without a stumble, and why AI became a working method for me while much of the industry was still debating it. A marketer who stops being a student starts being a liability, usually about eighteen months before it shows.
Teaching is how knowledge compounds
Knowledge kept private retires with you. Passed on, it compounds. That belief has followed me through every role:
- At AWS Legal, I developed and delivered in-house training workshops and wrote custom marketing playbooks, teaching lawyers and partners how marketing actually works, in their language, so the capability outlived my tenure.
- Leading teams, I mentor the people I direct: not just assigning the work but explaining the reasoning behind it, so a coordinator becomes a strategist over time.
- With stakeholders, from dealership sales floors to boardrooms, I've made a habit of turning every report into a small lesson: here's what the number means, here's why it moved, here's what we do next.
Teaching is also selfish, in the best way. Nothing exposes a half-understood idea faster than trying to explain it to a sharp room. Every workshop I've delivered has sharpened my own thinking as much as the audience's.
What this looks like in a team
Hire me and you get the habit, not just the knowledge: a leader who brings the field's best thinking into the building, tests it against your reality rather than quoting it, raises the people around him, and never assumes that what worked last year will work next year. The day I stop learning is the day the work starts going stale, so I've simply decided that day doesn't come.