Smoke Signals How to build your marketing message An owner recently asked me how to build a marketing message for his product. I told him he needs two messages. Here is how to create them: The first message is the brand message, an enduring, long-term headline you will use continuously. It clearly communicates why your product (or service) matters, and it often sits at the top of your website. In B2B, a brand message is functional. It focuses on how the offering eliminates risk, saves cost or...
28 days ago • 1 min read
People completely overestimate the power of marketing. It's fundamentally a weak force, as Dale W Harrison so beautifully puts it in this podcast. I've been canoeing on and off over the years, and basically the comparison works like this: The market is the river. It takes you where it takes you, and mostly at the speed of the flow. The boat is your business. It kind of floats along. Marketing and sales are the oars. They're used primarily to move the boat along the optimal path and not to get...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
The initial marketing a business does when it starts isn’t marketing and sales. It’s entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is whatever you do at the beginning of a business to see if you have something viable to build a business on. It is a subject on its own and has its own course material covering things like bootstrapping, speed, spending more time out of the office than in the office, begging for money, begging for payments, listening to customers, and growing at all costs. Marketing is when...
3 months ago • 1 min read
I send this out roughly once a month. The thing that caught my eye most recently is the distinction between “growth” and “maintenance” marketing. Most marketing is focused on maintenance. The objective is to wrap an established brand in cotton wool and keep it protected until the current round of executives retire. The marketing you see daily is primarily maintenance marketing. Big brands. Big budgets. Big creative. They’re telling you they’re still around and it’s still ok to buy them. But...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Someone I know recently told me they never read email newsletters but also never unsubscribe out of fear of upsetting the sender. It got me thinking because I know this person does indeed get my monthly mailer. Clearly they don't read it, and I know they haven't unsubscribed either. It took me down a bit of a rabbit hole investigating what the trend is – it's quite stark when you explore actual engagement behaviour. People have simply stopped reading, and listening. The golden era of content...
4 months ago • 1 min read
June 2026 Marketing nonsense you should dodge Here's a summary of marketing-related nonsense I see quite often and that you should try to avoid. Predictable growth (consultant speak) I see a lot of consultants pontificate that they deliver this: predictable growth. As I posted recently on LinkedIn, the very company that basically invented the term predictable ARR (annual recurring revenue), Salesforce, has seen a massive dive in its own revenue growth rate. There goes predictability out the...
4 months ago • 1 min read
May 2026 The hard barriers limiting marketing success 25 years ago, a small business had basically two marketing options: drop flyers into post boxes or advertise in the local newspaper. Medium-sized businesses might have layered on regional radio, while the giants dominated TV. Then came digital marketing. Suddenly, everyone got a sniff of an affordable, nationwide market presence. But the reality is a bit different. Digital marketing promises easy access, but it is still bound by the same...
5 months ago • 1 min read