Pay attention to whether you are engaged in reinforcing customer loyalty by aligning messaging with their deeply held beliefs or trying to change their minds. If you are doing the latter you are risking triggering the backfire effect. Simply put, this phenomenon occurs when individuals encounter information that challenges their existing views, causing them to resist accepting the new evidence and become even more convinced of their initial stance.

Marketing has certainly entered an era of unprecedented potential, with AI serving as a catalyst for professional growth and innovation. This technological shift offers marketers an opportunity to elevate their strategic capabilities and create more authentic customer connections int eh following ways:

Draw customers to you instead of chasing them. This eliminates the need for price-cutting or gimmicks and allows your business to maintain its value and dignity. This philosophy/strategy is adaptable across industries, including professional services, retail, B2B, healthcare, and education, but their implementation can vary based on industry norms, audience characteristics, and available resources. How? Great question.

In marketing, defensive practices emerge when teams prioritize documentation and consensus over effectiveness. Marketing teams might spread the budget across numerous channels to "cover all bases" rather than concentrate resources where data shows they'd perform best. This stems from the fear of missing opportunities, leadership criticism, or blame if focused strategies don't yield immediate results.

Always remember that it is impossible to craft marketing copy in such a way that it cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.

The principle that "good habits create good art" translates directly to marketing excellence. Consistent brand voice, regular customer engagement, and disciplined testing build the foundation upon which creative marketing flourishes. The systematic, daily practices of listening to customers and refining messaging ultimately produce what appears as marketing genius.

Are you paralyzed by the fear of launching imperfect campaigns or testing unproven strategies? Are you waiting for the perfect market conditions, creative, or timing that never arrives? This hesitation is particularly damaging in today's seemingly always-shifting landscape, where market opportunities can evaporate in weeks or even days.

Breaking free from marketing inertia demands decisive action and sustained energy. Yes, marketers must invest significant effort to master new tools, craft fresh creative approaches, and build a presence on emerging platforms. However, once they establish these new marketing systems, maintaining momentum requires far less energy than the initial push.

The tendency to prioritize low-impact tactics over strategic initiatives is particularly damaging in marketing. Many marketers, myself included, have fallen into the trap of spending their peak creative energy on minor tactical details like tweaking email subject lines or adjusting button colors, while tackling major strategic decisions like brand positioning or customer segmentation when they're already mentally drained. This misallocation of energy leads to mediocre results on the initiatives that matter more in the grand analysis of effectiveness.

While a marketing team might be capable of running campaigns across dozens of platforms, managing multiple content streams, and juggling various promotional initiatives simultaneously, this doesn't mean it's the optimal approach. When marketing resources – both human and financial – are spread too thin, the quality of execution inevitably suffers, and the impact becomes diluted.

Your last marketing campaign probably didn't go exactly as planned which immediately surfaces the use value of using marketing margins as your buffer zone. These buffers can be the difference between a campaign that crumbles under unexpected pressure and one that adapts and thrives.

When you make one bold move: everything becomes clearer and you can see where you actually need to go, not where you think you should go. But, most people wait for perfect conditions before taking action. That's backwards. Bold moves create perfect conditions. They shake things up. They force you to think differently. They make you deal with reality instead of hypotheticals.

Sometimes time spent reinventing the wheel results in a revolutionary new rolling device. But sometimes it just amounts to time spent reinventing the wheel. Our intertwined social world is too complex for us to master, driven by feedback loops and tipping points, forces that are constantly changing, swayed by chance and chaos, accidents, and black swan events.

The process of focusing our attention only on a subset of the stimuli in the environment — usually those related to our goals makes crafting effective marketing campaigns even more challenging. Why?

Most marketing campaigns are lots of activity and noise, but there's no real sense of where they're headed. We launch campaigns because that's what we do.

This is misguided.

Try starting with the end in mind. Not just "we want more sales" (that's lazy thinking), but a crystalline vision of what transformative success looks like. When you're fuzzy about success metrics, every A/B test is just guesswork (most A/B tests are done incorrectly but I digress). Every piece of content is just content for content's sake. You're throwing post-its of varying sizes at a wall, hoping something sticks.