Brand-Strategy on The Findings Report

The Missing Middle

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I.

Last year, my friend Jeremy Korst co-authored a great piece for Harvard Business Review that opened with a bold prediction, “among all the managerial functions, marketing is likely to be the one that’s most disrupted by generative AI.” That turns out to be an understatement. The changes are occurring so rapidly marketing’s foundation feels like it rests on quicksand. In the most recent release of The CMO Survey, senior marketers said they were using AI to automate and optimize marketing about a quarter of the time, a 40% increase from the 2025 study. The same audience forecast that they will be using the technology for this purpose more than half the time in 3 years—representing a 131% increase in AI’s power over marketing.

The Grey Line

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:30:00 -0800

I.

The question arrived subversively as I stood in the center of the well, moderating a class discussion on Duolingo for my Executive MBAs. I’d structured the pastures of the discussion so that students could explore product development choices, growth loops, and gamification mechanics. It’s a new case. I’d only taught it once before, but it prompted a strong debate. My philosophy on case teaching is that the quality of the discussion is proportional to the intensity of the debate. I was hoping for a repeat on this day, but I didn’t expect the kind of debate that surfaced.

Life, Liberty, and the Promise of the American Brand

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 12:35:00 -0800

I.

In the winter of 1777, a fifteen-year-old Connecticut farm boy named Joseph Plumb Martin was camped with what remained of the Continental Army near Morristown, New Jersey. He hadn’t been paid in months. His shoes had disintegrated. He was surviving on what he later described as “half a day’s allowance of beef for a week.”

Martin would go on to serve the entire war—eight years—and write one of the only surviving enlisted-man memoirs of the Revolution. In his trademark style, Ken Burns uses Martin’s story to thread the needle in his new documentary, The American Revolution. What’s striking about Martin’s account is something more relatable to me than patriotism. It’s his complaining. He complains constantly. About the food, the pay, the officers, the mud, the lice, the boredom, the terror.

Smile Policies and Other Ways to Trash a Brand

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 15:24:00 -0800

Last week, Target Corporation issued a new directive to its store employees. As reported by Bloomberg News, the new store policy instructs employees, “if a shopper comes within 10 feet of you, then make sure you smile, make eye contact and greet or wave. If they come closer–within four feet–ask whether they need help or how their day is going.” Common courtesy? Perhaps. Good strategy. Negative. Why not give them something to smile about rather than admonish them to fix their face?

Flatter, Faster, Smarter: The New Shape of Work

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 14:24:00 -0700

Two headlines collided in my feed this afternoon. One from The Wall Street Journal noted that several companies, despite strong profits and growth, are cutting headcount. Another, from Bloomberg, reported that Microsoft was preparing sweeping layoffs in its sales, marketing, and customer-facing teams.

Layoffs in times of plenty? The easy answer is AI. But the real story is more complicated.

AI is reshaping the workplace, but I believe these co-occurrences are part of a pattern that hints at something deeper than automation replacing human roles. We’re in the middle of a cultural shift in perspectives on productivity, the structure of organizations, and the value of human work. We are perhaps witnessing a reset, rather than a preemptive strike against recession. I believe it traces back to COVID.

The Thing To Fear

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 07:01:00 -0700

Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, when I was growing up, life in the shadow of a potential nuclear war was a trope that occurred everywhere in culture. It was in music (The Clash’s “London Calling”), movies (War Games), and countless television mini-series (“The Day After,” which drew an audience of more than 100 million people when it aired on ABC in 1983). The threat of nuclear holocaust was a reality that lingered persistently in the background. We lived with it for so long that we developed coping mechanisms that allowed us to carry on. Like a case of arthritis, it always reminded us it was there, but the fear and anxiety it provoked didn’t keep us from daily life.

Are You In or Not?

Sun, 18 Jun 2017 17:15:00 -0700

Did you sit on the senior quad? How often do you get invited to the hottest events within your industry? Or, more relevant to the current times, how much do your Instagram pics get liked?

All of these circumstances deal with degrees people feel of inclusion or exclusion. It’s a primal feeling—a feeling that is often purposefully induced by marketers. Most brands choose the route of inclusion (e.g, Coke’s infamous “teach the world to sing” campaign) while others go for the more controversial choice of exclusion (e.g., Equinox’s “Commit to something” campaign). The exclusive choice is a favorite of luxury brands and counterculture brands. The objective of this strategy is to reinforce the unique value of the brand by explicitly stating who qualifies and who doesn’t, implicitly relying on the fact that everybody wants to feel special.

Skip B-School. Study Life.

Sun, 29 Jan 2017 14:56:00 -0800

The young man hovered outside my office. At first I thought maybe he came to visit my assistant, who was out at lunch. But then I realized that he was doing “fly-bys.” He’d walk past the door and glance ever so carefully to see what I was doing in my office. When his loitering bordered on annoying I called out.

“Hey, there. Can I help you?”

He introduced himself and asked if I had a minute. He had seen the presentation on brands that I give every 8 weeks or so to new trainees and he had some questions. They were good questions, too. One of them is the question I get asked the most: what should I read if I want to learn how to become a brand strategist.