Budweiser won the USA Today Ad Meter for a record 10th time on Sunday.

When I saw the results, I did something I hadn't done before. I reviewed all Ad Meter scores from 2009. I adjusted them to a common scale and averaged the top ten ads for each year.

The pattern revealed a disturbing trend.

The Decade-Long Ceiling

Here are the top-ten averages, adjusted to a 5-point scale:

• 2009: 3.90 · 2010: 3.77 · 2011: 3.87 · 2012: 4.20

• 2013: 3.59 · 2014: 3.51 · 2015: 3.41 · 2016: 3.17

• 2017: 3.39 · 2018: 3.38 · 2019: 3.41 · 2020: 3.30

• 2021: 3.32 · 2022: 3.26 · 2023: 3.12 · 2024: 3.11

• 2025: 3.47 · 2026: 3.51

Something cracked around 2013.

The averages dropped, then flatlined for a full decade. Only now, in 2025 and 2026, have they climbed back to 2013–2014 levels.

Part of the initial drop was a measurement change. In 2013, USA Today shifted the Ad Meter from focus groups to online voting. In a group, laughter is infectious. It raises scores due to Social Facilitation. The shift to phone voting removed that effect and deflated scores across the board.

But that only explains the cliff between 2012 and 2013.

Once the new system was in place, the scores still slid. And they stayed suppressed for over a decade.

Something else was happening. Something inside the industry.

The Forces That Broke the Work

Between 2012 and 2016, four forces converged to degrade the industry's creative output.

The first was the pivot from ideas to data. As programmatic advertising and hyper-targeting grew, CMOs started to believe that efficiency was key. They thought it could replace persuasion.

A 2016 AMA Article captured the mood. One leader warned that "many have been blinded by the technology itself... missing one of the most powerful opportunities: creativity." The belief was simple: with enough data, you didn't need a great ad. You just needed the right eyeballs.

This belief had a direct consequence for creative work. When the goal becomes "right person, right time," the quality of the message becomes secondary. Agencies invest in targeting systems, not storytelling. Budgets shift from production to media buying. The ads become interchangeable containers for offers. And they lose the depth that makes people care.

The second was the loss of sustained attention. Between 2012 and 2016, U.S. smartphone use surged from roughly 45% to over 80%. Data from Infillion found that more than 80% of Super Bowl viewers were on a second screen during the game. To combat this, agencies designed ads to be "glanceable": louder, faster, built to jerk attention from the phone.

This shift reshaped the creative process itself. Research by McIlvaine and colleagues identified a key change in ad creation. Before the shift, the process was "human-led." It started with a customer insight, and the creative team built a story around that truth. The medium served the message.

After the shift, the process became "device-led." It started with a delivery format (a six-second bumper ad, a vertical mobile video, a social media clip designed for sharing). The creative team worked backward from the container, instead of the customer. The message served the medium.

This inversion made ads more efficient to distribute. But they became less likely to create the associations that build brands.

The third was risk aversion. Data is backward-looking. As reliance on it grew, agencies tested concepts to death before they aired, producing a regression to the mean. The ideas that tested safest were the ones that looked most like what already worked. This cycle stripped the work of surprise, the very quality that makes people pay attention.

The fourth, and most damaging, was the empathy gap. A study called ”The Empathy Delusion,” published by Reach Solutions, revealed a stark reality. People making ads were nothing like the people watching them.

Agency employees tended to be coastal, urban, educated, and socially liberal. The Super Bowl audience skewed toward tradition, security, and conservatism.

This gap hit its low point in 2015.

Misreading data about Millennials and "purpose-driven" brands, agencies decided the Super Bowl was the place to lecture America on social issues. Nationwide Insurance aired an ad about a child who died in a preventable accident. Nissan aired a somber spot about a father missing his son's childhood. Toyota featured a tearful military send-off. Slate captured the mood with the headline: "What's With All the Dark, Depressing Super Bowl Ads This Year?"

The public recoiled.

By 2016, brands, fearing they might become cautionary tales, chose to play it safe and bland. The scores showed it.

The Effectiveness Collapse

The Ad Meter captures how people feel about ads. But the damage went deeper than feelings.

Peter Field and Les Binet tracked what they call the "creative multiplier," using the IPA Databank (covering over 1,400 campaigns from 1998 to 2022). The creative multiplier measures how much more effective ambitious campaigns are at driving business results compared to average ones.

Through the early 2000s, that multiplier was large. By the late 2010s, it had collapsed.

The IPA data showed a direct link. As the industry shifted toward short-term, sales-focused messaging (what Field calls "salesmanship" over "showmanship"), overall effectiveness declined.

Orlando Wood, in his books, Lemon and Look Out, mapped the decline from the creative side. Elements tied to emotional engagement (dialogue, characters, melody, a sense of place) were vanishing from ads. Replacing them: text on screen, abstract imagery, rhythmic soundtracks, product close-ups.

The work was easier to produce and more flexible across formats. It was also invisible.

Why the Scores Recovered, and What That Actually Means

Against this backdrop, the 2025 and 2026 Ad Meter recovery looks different.

Here is the 2026 top five:

1. Budweiser "American Icons": Clydesdales (a brand asset since 1933), a bald eagle, and Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" (1973).

2. Lay's "Last Harvest": An emotional potato farmer story set to Keane's "Somewhere Only We Know" (2004).

3. Pepsi "The Choice": A Coca-Cola polar bear (Coke's mascot since 1993) takes the Pepsi Challenge (from 1975), set to Queen's "I Want to Break Free" (1984), with a callback to a 2025 Coldplay viral moment.

4. Dunkin' "Good Will Dunkin'": A remake of the 1997 film Good Will Hunting as a '90s sitcom, packed with '80s and '90s NBC comedy stars. Ben Affleck's third year in the Dunkin' cinematic universe.

5. Michelob Ultra "The ULTRA Instructor": Kurt Russell and Winter Olympians.

Every ad in the top five is built mainly from pre-existing cultural material: legacy brand assets, classic songs, old movies, borrowed mascots, and known celebrity personas.

These ads are not dull. They don't trigger neutrality. Budweiser generates warmth. Lay's makes people cry. Pepsi makes people laugh.

But there is a gap between generating emotion and generating meaning.

Every top ad this year activated existing associations. The Clydesdales already meant "tradition." "Free Bird" already meant "American anthem." Coca-Cola's polar bear already meant "refreshment" before Pepsi borrowed it.

The Pepsi Challenge is a 50-year-old concept. Good Will Hunting came out in 1997.

These ads reinforced what people already felt. They didn't give anyone a new reason to choose the brand.

The scores didn't recover because the creative thinking improved. They recovered because the industry got better at mining the past.

The Nostalgia Tailwind

This makes sense when you zoom out.

We are in the middle of what researchers call a "nostalgia boom." The traditional nostalgia cycle used to revisit a period about 20 to 30 years later. Now, it has shortened to around 10 years.

The acceleration is driven by three forces: digital archiving (nothing is forgotten), algorithmic amplification (platforms reward nostalgic content because it generates 2x higher engagement), and the collapse of what cultural theorists call the "forgetting phase" that once separated eras.

The data is everywhere. Reader's Digest reported that TikTok saw a 452% increase in searches for "2016" in early 2026. Spotify saw a 71% spike in 2016-specific playlists. And the Pinterest Predicts 2026 report found that "comfort" is the top emotional driver for 55% of global consumers.

The pandemic was the accelerant.

A peer-reviewed study published in PMC analyzed social media data from Douyin (TikTok's Chinese counterpart) to measure how nostalgic content changed during COVID-19. The researchers found an immediate spike in nostalgic posting the moment lockdowns began. Not a gradual trend. A structural break in behavior.

The neuroscience supports this.

A 2025 study from Yale found that cortisol alters brain networks to favor nostalgia. It strengthens emotional memories while weakening the brain's capacity to process uncertain futures. Under chronic stress, the brain retreats to what's known. The familiar feels safe because its outcome is certain.

The Ad Meter measures likability: "Did I enjoy this?" It does not measure whether the ad changed a single perception about the brand.

In 2026, the industry responded to a stressed crowd. It gave people what they craved: horses they love, songs they know, characters they trust, and rivalries they already get.

This is where the threads come together. The data pivot replaced insight with efficiency. The attention crisis replaced depth with speed. Risk aversion replaced surprise with formula. The empathy gap replaced understanding with assumption.

When work stopped connecting, the industry turned to nostalgia. It's a reliable emotional shortcut that doesn't need new customer insights.

The result is ads that make people feel something but don't give them anything new. Emotion without meaning. Warmth without growth.

The Diminishing Return

But even nostalgia has a ceiling. Budweiser's own history proves it.

Using distinctive brand assets consistently is a smart strategy. Budweiser should use the Clydesdales. They are one of the most effective brand devices ever created. The question is what you do with them.

In 2014, "Puppy Love" scored an adjusted 4.15, higher than any ad since. Its structure: an animal friendship between a Clydesdale and a puppy. A bond forms. They're separated. The horse escapes to find its friend. Emotional reunion.

Same heritage, same horses, but a new story. The asset was stable. The storytelling was fresh.

In 2026, "American Icons" runs the same template. An animal friendship between a Clydesdale and a bald eagle. The eagle is hurt. The horse helps. They bond. It's "Puppy Love" with the puppy swapped for an eagle, the intimacy replaced with patriotism, and "Free Bird" on top.

It scored a 4.00. Lower than the original, despite every tailwind.

"Puppy Love" aired 14 years ago, right in line with the compressed nostalgia window. "American Icons" is nostalgic for its own previous ad. And then it layers a second coat: Americana, "Free Bird," the 150th anniversary, the bald eagle.

They threw more borrowed meaning at it and got less back.

The first time Budweiser told an animal friendship story with the Clydesdales, it was original. It was a new narrative built on an existing asset. The second time, it was a cover of their own greatest hit. And even in a moment where nostalgia appetite is at an all-time high, the cover didn't outperform the original.

Why This Matters If You're Not Budweiser

You don't have Clydesdales. You don't have 150 years of heritage or an $8 million production budget.

If the best-funded brands in the world, with the last monoculture audience of 100+ million, are defaulting to the past, it says something about the state of the industry. And if you follow the same instincts, like using comfortable messages and category conventions, you’re playing their game. But you don’t have their resources.

But this is also your edge. The giants are stuck. So much brand equity that the easiest move is always to leverage what exists. You don't have that constraint. You have the freedom, and the need, to do the thing these $8 million ads chose not to do.

You can uncover something new about your customer and build your brand around it.

The Deeper Problem, and the Way Out

The decline in ad effectiveness mirrors a broader trend in how we think.

Dr. Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary analyzed  nearly 300,000 scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, the gold standard in divergent thinking research. Since 1990, scores have declined, with the steepest drops in "Elaboration": the ability to take a basic idea and develop it with detail and specificity.

This isn't about intelligence. IQ keeps rising. It's about the ability to develop an idea. The ability to push past the obvious into specific, granular detail, is eroding. And that ability is what separates an ad that activates a familiar feeling from one that reveals a new insight.

Angus Fletcher, a narrative creativity researcher at Ohio State's Project Narrative, makes a useful distinction. The standard model of creativity, "Divergent Thinking," is about generating lots of ideas. But Fletcher argues that's a retrieval exercise, not an invention exercise.

The real engine of original thinking is what he calls "Narrative Creativity." It's the brain's ability to simulate a specific chain of actions, causes, and outcomes that doesn't exist yet.

This maps directly to the Elaboration decline Kim identified. The industry doesn't have an idea shortage. It has a development shortage. Agencies often settle for the first version that feels right. They don’t dig deeper.

But specificity is where original insight lives.

Three Questions to Build New Meaning With What You Have

The Super Bowl offers a diagnostic. Three questions to test whether your brand is building new meaning or just showing up.

1. Are your distinctive assets working harder each year, or just showing up?

Consistent brand assets are essential. But consistency is not repetition. Budweiser's Clydesdales in "Puppy Love" (2014) told a new story and scored a 4.15. The same Clydesdales in "American Icons" (2026) replayed the formula with a patriotic coat of paint and scored a 4.00. More nostalgia, less impact.

Your logo, your voice, your visual identity: these should be stable. But the stories you tell with them should keep revealing new dimensions of what your brand means.

2. Can you name the specific customer insight your marketing is built on?

Not a demographic. Not a persona. A specific insight: a tension, a frustration, an unmet need you've found through direct contact with your customers.

If you can't state your insight in one sentence, your marketing is built on assumption. And assumption is how you end up with a message that could have any brand's name on it.

3. Does your marketing give your customer a new reason to choose you, or just a familiar feeling?

Familiar feelings build comfort. New reasons build preference. Both have value. But only one drives growth for a brand that doesn't already own its category.

If a competitor could swap their name into your message and it still works, you're advertising your category, not your brand. The goal is to find the thing only you can say, because only you did the work to find it.

The $8 million Super Bowl ad is the most scrutinized piece of marketing on Earth. In 2026, the top five chose comfort over clarity and old meaning over new.

The brands that grow from here won't follow that lead. They'll use what they have (their assets, their heritage, their identity) to say something their customer has never heard before.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. If you found this valuable, share it with another leader, coworker or colleague who could use a new lens on their brand.

Horst Schulze, co-founder of The Ritz-Carlton, argued that "service cultures are subject to the laws of thermodynamics."

They drift toward disorder unless actively counteracted. Strategy sessions create alignment. But alignment doesn't hold on its own. Six months later, marketing is pushing benefits sales never mentions. Product is building toward a vision that no longer matches the messaging.

Nobody went rogue. The organization simply drifted.

Think of a clean room. There's no force creating dust. But there are far more ways for a room to be dirty than clean.

Given enough time, disorder wins.

Organizations work the same way. Your strategy is a single, ordered state. But the millions of small decisions made daily can combine in countless disordered ways.

Without constant effort, organizations drift toward entropy.

How Organizations Drift

This drift happens at two levels: individual and organizational. A third mechanism ensures no one remembers the original standard.

Driver I: Individual Drift

The first mechanism is personal: micro-divergence.

Small daily decisions that stray slightly from the strategy add up over time.

Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize for showing that humans don't optimize. We "satisfice": we pick what's good enough given our limits.

The brain uses 20% of the body's energy. To save resources, we default to what's right in front of us.

This is where organizations get into trouble.

Every day, each person makes dozens of small choices. Marketing picks which benefit to highlight. Sales decides how to frame a discount. Customer service finds shortcuts for common complaints.

An employee facing an angry customer will focus on what's immediate: ending the conflict fast. Not what's strategic.

A marketer under deadline will reuse what worked last time instead of following the new positioning.

A sales rep will say whatever closes today's deal.

None of these are bad choices on their own. They're practical responses to real pressure.

But each one is shaped by what's in front of the person right now. Not by the strategy document from six months ago.

After six months of micro-decisions, teams that started aligned end up pointed in different directions.

Not because anyone chose to stray. But because everyone optimized for their immediate context.

Driver II: Organizational Divergence

The second mechanism is structural. Departments adapt to different environments and lose sync with each other.

Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety explains why. It's a core idea in cybernetics: "Only variety can destroy variety."

In other words, an organization's internal complexity must match the complexity outside it to survive.

As your company grows, the outside world throws more at you: markets, competitors, regulations, technology. No single person or team can handle it all.

So the organization splits up.

Sales absorbs customer complexity. Engineering absorbs technology complexity. Marketing absorbs competitive complexity.

Silos are adaptations to complexity.

But context changes faster than teams can communicate.

By the time Product shares a technical limit, Sales has already adjusted their pitch for an objection that no longer exists. By the time Marketing updates the messaging, Customer Service has built workarounds that contradict it.

Everyone is responding rationally to their piece of reality. But those pieces have diverged.

Teams don't sync up constantly because of cognitive switching costs. Moving from focused work to coordination work has a real cost: slower thinking, more errors, more effort. Stopping to update another team means losing your train of thought. Multiply that across a dozen people, several times a day, and the cost adds up fast.

Inside a silo, teams build efficient shorthand. To talk across silos, they have to translate. And that's cognitively expensive.

Organizations drift into silos because it's the path of least resistance.

The problem is that internal divergence creates external fragmentation.

Think of it as Brand Entropy: as a message passes through layers of an organization, it gets diluted and distorted—like a game of Telephone.

Without a way to correct errors, the signal degrades. Eventually, frontline behavior has nothing to do with the CEO's vision.

Driver III: The Compound Effect

The third mechanism locks in the other two: memory decay.

This happens at both the personal and organizational level.

Memory isn't a recording. When employees recall the strategy session from a year ago, their brains don't replay a video. They pull fragments and rebuild the scene based on current pressures.

If the sales team is under pressure to discount, they'll reshape their memory of the strategy to stress "flexibility."

They're not lying. Their brains are rewriting the past to fit the present.

At the organizational level, memory fades through turnover.

New hires join without context. Veterans leave and take knowledge with them.

Organizations develop what researchers call Transactive Memory Systems. Those systems are the webs of "who knows what." And when key people leave, the whole system's performance drops.

Collective memory decays in a predictable way.

"Communicative Memory," kept alive by conversation, fades fast once the topic changes. "Cultural Memory," kept alive by artifacts, rituals, and systems, lasts.

Most organizations rely on talk. "We discussed this."

Without moving strategy into rituals and systems, collective memory drops to near zero within months.

This is where individual drift and organizational divergence become permanent.

Safety scientists call this Normalization of Deviance.

Here's how it works: an employee takes a shortcut. Nothing bad happens. They save time. The brain tags this as a win. The behavior sticks.

As this repeats, the baseline shifts. The shortcut becomes the standard.

And because memory has faded, no one remembers what the original standard was.

Diane Vaughan studied the NASA Challenger disaster and found something chilling: the agency drifted into launching an unsafe shuttle.

For years, they accepted "minor" O-ring damage as "within limits." Each time nothing went wrong, the behavior was reinforced. The safety margin was eaten away bit by bit.

By the day of the fatal launch, no one remembered why the margin existed. The rule felt like red tape, not survival.

Your brand promise works the same way.

There's only so much drift between what you say and what you deliver before customers notice. Every micro-divergence eats a piece of that margin.

Each time no one complains, the behavior sticks—until a competitor with a clearer promise shows up and you find there's no margin left.

The Cost of Institutionalized Entropy: Sears

Most companies drift into entropy gradually. Sears structured itself for maximum chaos.

At its peak, Sears was the Amazon of its era.

It accounted for 1% of the entire U.S. GDP. Two-thirds of Americans shopped there each quarter. It ran 3,500 stores. Half of American homes had a Kenmore appliance.

Then they institutionalized entropy.

In 2008, CEO Edward Lampert broke Sears into about 30 separate business units.

Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, Apparel, and Appliances became their own companies. Even IT and HR became profit centers that other units had to pay to use.

Bonuses were tied to each unit's P&L alone.

The enemy was no longer Walmart or Amazon. It was the VP down the hall.

Individual drift became policy.

The Appliance division found it could make more money selling LG or Samsung than Sears' own Kenmore brand. So they gave competitors the best shelf space.

Kenmore's market share collapsed. All to hit a quarterly target.

Local optimization was rewarded. Global coherence was impossible.

Organizational divergence was engineered.

Craftsman wanted to launch a flashlight with DieHard batteries. But DieHard demanded such high royalties that Craftsman killed the product.

Because units ran independently, they built separate IT systems: 30 different supply chains. There was no single view of the customer.

Memory had nowhere to anchor.

The weekly ad circular became an auction. For Mother's Day 2011, the "Outdoor Living" unit outbid apparel and jewelry.

The cover showed a "Doodle Bug" minibike, a product for young boys. No one owned the whole.

Meanwhile, stores rotted.

Sears spent $0.91 per square foot on updates. Best Buy spent $15.36.

By 2016, American women preferred Goodwill, a thrift store, over Sears for clothing.

The brand had negative value.

On October 15, 2018, Sears filed for bankruptcy. Today, fewer than 20 stores remain.

The pressure from Amazon and Walmart was real, but it was context, not cause.

Best Buy faced the same pressure and thrived by investing in people and partnerships. Target put $7 billion into store upgrades.

Sears failed because Lampert took the natural pull toward entropy and made it official policy.

He built a system where alignment was impossible by design.

The Antidote to Entropy: Ritz-Carlton's Daily Lineup

Now consider an organization that faces entropy every day and built a system to beat it.

The hospitality industry averages 70-100% turnover per year. Knowledge is constantly lost. Service standards slip as new people cycle through faster than culture can spread.

In this chaos, The Ritz-Carlton keeps turnover in the low 20% range.

They've won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award twice. No other service company has matched that.

Their secret is better maintenance.

Schulze built the Daily Lineup because he knew human behavior drifts daily.

So realignment must be daily.

Each shift begins with a 15 to 20-minute standing meeting. This happens in every department and at every property around the world.

The content is synced globally. Corporate sets the focus for each day. If today is "Service Value #3," staff in Tokyo, Berlin, and New York discuss that same value on the same day.

35,000 people. 115+ properties. Dozens of countries. Same conversation.

The agenda is clear: company news keeps everyone in the loop, property updates cover today's arrivals and their preferences, and the Gold Standard focus includes reading a Service Value, sharing a "Wow Story," and asking, "How can we apply this today?"

The Wow Stories make abstract values real.

One example: a family arrived at the Ritz-Carlton Bali with a son who had severe food allergies. They'd brought special eggs and milk, but the food spoiled in transit.

These items weren't available locally.

The Executive Chef remembered a store in Singapore, over 1,000 miles away, that carried them. He called his mother-in-law in Singapore, asked her to buy them, and had them flown to Bali.

The child was fed safely.

The Lineup lesson: "No" is not an answer. Resources extend beyond the building.

This is backed by the $2,000 Rule: every employee can spend up to $2,000 per guest, per incident, to fix problems without asking a manager.

The logic: the lifetime value of a loyal guest dwarfs a $2,000 fix. Losing the relationship costs far more than solving the problem.

But the money matters less than removing friction.

In most hotels, an employee says "I have to check with my manager"—and by the time approval comes, the guest is lost.

The $2,000 Rule gives instant ownership.

The results prove the investment.

In the 2024 J.D. Power rankings, Ritz-Carlton scored highest in the luxury segment. "Staff service" was the key driver.

Competitors can buy the same furniture. They can't copy the consistency that comes from 35,000 people discussing the same values on the same day.

The 15-minute Lineup counters each level of entropy:

It surfaces individual drift early. When employees share how they applied yesterday's value, shortcuts become visible. Before they turn into complaints.

It creates shared language across departments. When housekeeping and front desk both discussed "anticipating unexpressed needs" that morning, they work together when they spot a chance. Silos don't form because everyone starts the day aligned.

It resets memory every 24 hours. Values are reinforced daily, in context, with real examples. Culture doesn't fade because it's constantly renewed. The drift never has time to become the new normal.

The Contrast That Matters

Sears and Ritz-Carlton faced the same challenge: keeping a large, spread-out organization coherent.

Sears chose fragmentation. 30 divisions. 30 strategies. 30 definitions of success. Built for maximum disorder.

Ritz-Carlton chose synchronization. One conversation. One set of values. One daily reset. Built for constant realignment.

The difference isn't resources or talent. Both had plenty.

The difference is whether leaders treat alignment as something you achieve once, or something you maintain every day.

How to Counteract Entropy in Your Organization

1. What daily or weekly ritual resets your team's alignment?

If the answer is "our quarterly all-hands," entropy is winning. Every day without a reset is a day when drift compounds unchecked.

2. Are your teams using the same language?

If marketing calls it "brand positioning" and sales calls it "our value prop" and product calls it "the north star," you don't have alignment. You have three versions slowly drifting apart.

3. Who owns the coherence of the whole?

At Sears, no one did. At Ritz-Carlton, the Daily Lineup makes coherence everyone's job. If no one owns the integrity of the full experience, each department will define it differently.

The companies that stay aligned haven't gotten lucky.

They've built systems to counteract the natural pull toward drift.

Strategic entropy is constant. The only question is whether you're counteracting it, or pretending it doesn't exist.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is your organization showing signs of strategic drift? Messaging that varies by department? Inconsistent customer experiences? Teams pulling in different directions? Reply to this email, and I'll set up a free 15-minute call to help you determine where to focus to fix it.

Your brand makes promises in every ad.

Your employees keep those promises in every interaction. Or they don't. The difference isn't training or talent. It's whether they have the authority to make judgment calls when customers need help. "I need to check with my manager" doesn't mean the employee doesn't know what to do. It means they're not allowed to do it.

And customers experience that gap at every touchpoint.

The Authority Paradox

Companies approach branding backward.

They invest millions crafting the perfect message. They hire agencies for compelling campaigns. They build elaborate brand guidelines.

Then they send these beautiful promises into the world through employees who lack the power to deliver them.

This gap has a name: The Empowerment Deficit.

It's the distance between the authority employees need to deliver on brand promises and the authority they actually have. It's where brands go to die.

When employees can't make decisions, they can't be brand ambassadors. They become brand apologists instead.

The root cause is trust, not training.

The Mathematics of Broken Promises

Customer satisfaction measures how expectations match reality. It looks at what people hope for versus what they get.

The formula: Satisfaction = Performance - Expectations

The stronger your brand, the more you raise expectations. And the more authority your employees need to maintain satisfaction.

If expectations rise through marketing but performance stays flat due to restrictive policies, you guarantee dissatisfaction.

A budget airline can enforce rigid fees without destroying satisfaction because expectations are low.

A premium brand claiming, "We care about you," but enforcing a strict policy leads to strong disappointment.

The Empowerment Deficit caps your brand experience at your most restrictive policy level. Your marketing faces no such cap.

The gap widens until it breaks.

What You're Really Signaling

Every policy is a message.

Granting authority signals trust. Stripping it signals the opposite.

When you require manager approval for minor decisions, you signal distrust. When you force script adherence, you signal distrust. When you create permission loops, you signal distrust.

When employees feel untrusted, they respond in kind. They withhold the discretionary effort that makes brands special.

They do exactly what's required to avoid getting fired. Nothing more.

After many tries to help, employees face blocks. They start to develop Learned Helplessness. Their brain adapts to powerlessness. They stop looking for solutions.

Even if you relax the rules later, employees with Learned Helplessness might not use the new authority. They no longer believe in their own agency.

This is why "empowerment initiatives" fail. They overlook the lasting impacts of past disempowerment.

Case Study: The Diseased Orchard

From 2002 to 2016, Wells Fargo workers opened 3.5 million unauthorized accounts. No permission. No customer consent.

The system stripped authority while demanding impossible results. Fraud became the predictable outcome.

The Impossible Goal

After Wells Fargo's 1998 merger with Norwest, leadership rejected traditional banking. Branches became "stores." Banking became retail.

From this philosophy came "Going for Gr-Eight"—a strategy to sell every customer eight financial products.

By 2014, Wells Fargo claimed they'd reached 4.6 products and were pushing toward 6. They touted this to Wall Street as proof of a superior business model. But the demand for eight products didn't exist.

To bridge the gap between customer need (2-3) and corporate demand (8), the workforce had to manufacture it.

Every morning, huddles laid out daily quotas. Some as high as 20 products per day.

Miss Tuesday's target? The deficit was added on to Wednesday. By Friday, it became clear that the targets were mathematically unachievable through legitimate means.

The bank fired 1,000 employees yearly for sales violations. This created constant churn. It terrified survivors into compliance.

The stress was acute. Employees reported vomiting before shifts. Hair loss. Migraines.

One Wisconsin banker, Angie Payden, drank hand sanitizer to numb panic attacks. She was being forced to exploit customers while being told she was a "helper."

"It was the lowest point of my life," she said.

The Mechanics of Fraud

Faced with poverty or fraud, employees developed gaming techniques.

• Simulated Funding: Open unauthorized accounts. Transfer money from legitimate accounts to "fund" them. This triggered overdraft fees. It bounced rent checks.

• Pinning: Issue unauthorized debit cards. Assign PINs. Enroll customers in online banking with fake emails. This boosted digital metrics.

• Bundling: Tell customers products came in required packages. "To qualify, you need this account." A lie. But customers couldn't verify.

These weren't isolated inventions. They were shared between branches.

The Whistleblower Trap

Wells Fargo's "EthicsLine" trapped dissenters. Complaints were routed to HR officers who worked with accused managers.

Whistleblowers faced sudden scrutiny for minor infractions. And termination for "performance issues."

Claudia Ponce de Leon was a ten-year manager. She called the hotline in September 2011. Three weeks later: fired for "drinking excessively." No evidence.

Seven years for OSHA to confirm retaliation.

The bank fired 5,300 employees. Leadership called this evidence that controls worked.

But firing 1% of your workforce for the same violation shows a systemic pattern, not isolated incidents. A diseased orchard, not bad apples.

The Lost Decade

September 2016: $185 million fine. CEO resigned after brutal congressional hearings.

February 2018: The Federal Reserve froze Wells Fargo's assets at $1.95 trillion. The cap lasted seven years. Until June 2025.

During that decade, JPMorgan grew to $2.1 trillion in deposits. Wells Fargo stagnated at $1.4 trillion.

And in February 2020, the bank made a $3 billion settlement. They admitted to "unlawfully misusing customers' sensitive information." Mass identity theft.

By early 2026, 27 units had unionized. In April 2025, a report alleged the bank replaced "quotas" with "outcomes." Same pressure, new name.

Consumer complaints in 2024-2025 surpassed pre-scandal levels.

The Real Lesson

Wells Fargo took away the authority employees needed. Then, they demanded impossible results.

Employees had no power to question quotas. No power to advocate for what customers actually needed. No ability to say "This customer doesn't need eight products." Or, "This goal is mathematically impossible."

But they were 100% accountable for sales numbers.

When you remove the authority to serve customers or challenge bad strategy, but maintain absolute accountability for outcomes, people find other ways to survive. Wells Fargo employees had no legitimate path to hit quotas—so they created illegitimate ones.

The 5,300 fired employees weren't the problem. They were the symptom.

Case Study: The $25 Investment That Bought a Legacy

In 1975, a man rolled two dirty tires into a Nordstrom store in Fairbanks, Alaska.

He'd driven 50 miles to return them.

One problem: Nordstrom has never sold tires.

The Context That Changes Everything

Nordstrom hadn't built that store. They'd acquired it from Northern Commercial Company. A mercantile outfit that sold everything. Including tires.

When Nordstrom bought the Alaska stores, they gutted inventory. Out went tires and hardware. In came apparel and shoes.

The building transformed. But in locals' minds, it was still where they'd done business for years.

The customer wasn't a scam artist. He was a legacy customer caught in a corporate transition. He'd bought tires from Northern Commercial. In that building. With a return guarantee.

To him, the name on the sign was an administrative detail.

The Decision

Craig Trounce was 16. He'd been with Nordstrom for weeks.

Typical retail would provide a safe retreat: "Our policy says I can't take these."

But Nordstrom's handbook was different. A single card: "Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules."

By removing the policy shield, Nordstrom exposed Trounce to the full complexity. He couldn't hide behind rules.

Trounce recognized the situation. A legacy customer with a valid moral claim. Based on the building's history.

He didn't guess at a refund. He called a Firestone dealer for the market value. About $25.

He opened the register. Withdrew cash. Handed it to the customer. Then he invited the man to shop for what Nordstrom did sell.

The Silent Validation

The transaction wasn't secret.

John Nordstrom, co-chairman, happened to be visiting the store. When the customer came in with tires, Nordstrom told the store manager: "Let's see how our team handles this."

Both men watched from the stockroom as Trounce worked through the problem. The manager looked ready to intervene, but seeing Trounce handle it well, he gave a silent thumbs-up instead.

In command-and-control organizations, the manager's job is to stop "shrinkage."

Here, he validated Trounce as the decision-maker. The thumbs-up reinforced psychological safety: I trust you.

The executive stood back, too. He let a 16-year-old make a $25 decision that would define the company culture for 50 years.

Afterward, the manager nailed the tires to the stockroom wall—a physical reminder that service standards were absolute.

The Strategic Genius

By honoring a promise Nordstrom never made, Trounce showed what the company actually stood for. Merchandise changed, but integrity didn't.

In tight-knit Fairbanks, this story circulated immediately. The narrative shifted from "Nordstrom is an outsider" to "Nordstrom is honorable."

The ROI:

• Direct cost: $25 (~$140 today)

• Marketing value: 3.4 million Google results. Countless case studies. Decades of free publicity.

If Nordstrom bought ads to convey "exceptional service," it would cost them tens of millions. The tire story achieved global reach for the price of used tires.

Craig Trounce later built a 30+ year career at Alaska Airlines. He links the cultures: "For both companies, service comes from giving people the training and authority to say, 'This is what we can do for you today.'"

His decision-making technique: holding his hand over his heart. "If you listen to what you're feeling right here, you'll discover the right thing to do."

This technique uses emotional regulation, not sentiment. It allowed empathy instead of defensiveness.

Pete Nordstrom recently shared full context on the company podcast. "Almost everywhere I go, someone says 'there's no way that's true.' And I say 'no, it's actually true.'"

The tire story defined Nordstrom's culture. Proof that empowerment delivers competitive advantage, not just aspiration.

Tires are cheap. Trust is expensive. Craig Trounce knew the difference.

The Three Requirements

To make employees brand ambassadors, you need more than just saying, "You're empowered.""

Based on the contrasts between Wells Fargo and Nordstrom, employee empowerment needs three critical elements:

1. Authority

Employees must have actual power to make decisions. Without seeking approval.

This means establishing clear guidelines:

• Monetary limits they can spend to solve problems

• Situations where they can make exceptions to policies

• Authority to make judgment calls in ambiguous situations

Wells Fargo's employees lacked this. Nordstrom's employees have it in abundance.

2. Resources

Authority is meaningless without resources to act on it.

This includes:

• Budgets for service recovery

• Access to systems and information

• Time to solve problems rather than process transactions

• Support from management when they exercise judgment

Nordstrom's "One Rule" handbook worked because employees had the resources and management support to act.

3. Training

Employees need to understand not just policies, but principles.

They need to know:

• What the brand actually stands for

• How to make judgment calls aligned with brand values

• How to balance customer needs with business sustainability

• When to escalate and when to decide

Nordstrom trains on judgment. Wells Fargo trained on quotas.

The difference in outcomes was predictable.

The Strategic Imperative

Your brand is a by-product of what customers experience consistently across every touchpoint. Your employees deliver most of those touchpoints.

If you don't trust them to deliver it, you don't have a brand. You have a logo and a liability.

The companies that win don't just talk about customer centricity. They structurally enable it. By distributing authority to the people who interact with customers every day.

They understand that the Empowerment Deficit goes beyond HR or culture. It's a strategic vulnerability. One that destroys brand value with every transaction.

Here are three questions to diagnose your own empowerment gap:

1. Can your front-line employees solve the most common customer problems without asking permission? If not, you're teaching customers that your brand can't help them.

2. When was the last time an employee was celebrated for breaking a rule to help a customer? If you can't remember, you've signaled that rules matter more than outcomes.

3. Do you measure employees on customer outcomes or activity metrics? If it's activity (calls answered, accounts opened, transactions processed), you've optimized for the wrong thing.

The answer to all three questions points to the same root problem.

Close the gap between your brand promise and your employees' authority.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is your marketing team making promises your front-line can't keep? That gap is where customer trust dies. And growth stops. If you're ready to align your brand promise with operational reality, let's talk. Reply to this email, and I'll set up a free 20-minute call to help you think through the disconnect between authority and accountability.

In 1999, Sony watched Apple steal the category they invented.

Sony had the Walkman. The technology. The music catalog. Everything needed to own digital music.

But within five years, the iPod won.

The root cause wasn't Sony's engineering. It wasn't their ads. It was that their department heads were never part of the brand strategy. Instead, they were told to carry it out after the fact.

Most leaders think brand consistency is a marketing problem. It's not. It's an alignment problem.

Part 1: The Invisible War Inside Your Company

You can craft perfect positioning. Hire the best creative agency. Hand out pristine brand guidelines to every department.

None of it matters if your department heads see the brand as marketing's job, not their own.

Your brand is the sum of what customers experience at every touchpoint. And those touchpoints are run by departments that don't report to your CMO.

When sales, product, operations, and finance each chase their own metrics without a shared vision, customers don't experience a brand.

They experience chaos and confusion.

The Agency Problem

Economists call this the Agency Problem.

When you give someone authority, their goals do not match yours by default.

Your company wants long-term brand equity and customer lifetime value. Your division heads want to hit quarterly targets tied to their bonuses.

Your company will sacrifice some current products to win in future categories. Your division heads protect current revenue because it sets their pay.

Your company thinks resources should flow to the highest return. Your division heads think resources must be hoarded to keep their power.

This is a systems problem.

When divisions run separate P&Ls, the brand's vision becomes abstract. The quarterly target is real. It decides if the division head keeps their job.

Without something that ties their win to the brand's win, managers will always put their own metrics first.

And each department eyes the others with suspicion.

Operations sees Marketing as careless with costs. Marketing sees Operations as rigid. Finance sees everyone as wasteful. Sales sees everyone as out of touch.

The brand becomes shapeless. Defined by the messy outputs of warring groups.

Brand Entropy

This breakdown has a name: Brand Entropy.

Think of your company as an open system. Without constant focus, it drifts toward disorder. Physicists call this entropy. The same principle applies to organizations.

Your brand requires constant energy to stay coherent: leadership attention, cross-functional alignment, ongoing communication. When that energy stops, departments stray. The system falls apart.

Low Entropy: Finance policies match Marketing promises. Operations delivery fits brand positioning. Every department reinforces the same message.

High Entropy: The brand says one thing but does another. Marketing promises personal care. But Operations cuts call times to hit efficiency targets. Sales promises partnership. But quotas reward one-time transactions over relationships.

A 2020 study by Erdem, Keller, Kuksov, and Pieters looked at 615 brands. It found that 55% of Brand Entropy's damage to customer preference comes from customers feeling risk.

When customers see an inconsistent brand, they feel confused. And it's hard to trust something that's confusing. It feels risky.

Our brains read unpredictability as danger. A messy brand triggers the same alarm.

The customer doesn't see a nuanced brand.

They see chaos.

And chaos doesn't win customers.

The Service-Profit Chain

Harvard researchers mapped how this decay turns into lost money. They call it the Service-Profit Chain:

Internal Service Quality → Employee Satisfaction → Employee Retention → External Service Value → Customer Satisfaction → Profit

The Agency Problem breaks every link.

When Finance cuts spending to boost quarterly margins, employees lack the tools to do their jobs. When Operations eliminates buffer time to boost efficiency metrics, employees can't spend extra time solving customer problems.

Poor internal quality leads to burnout and turnover. New hires are less productive and less able to deliver what the brand promises.

Customers feel the hit. Service gets slow, sloppy, and impersonal. The brand becomes the frustration at the counter, not the promise in the ad.

The bitter irony: Finance thought cutting training would boost profits. Operations thought faster service meant better efficiency.

But by chasing their own metrics in isolation, they broke the machine that makes profit: customer preference built on consistent experiences.

Why Co-Creation Stops the War

When department heads join after the brand strategy is done (told to carry it out), they default to protecting their turf.

This is structural, not personal.

Research on Procedural Justice explains why: Commitment to a decision depends less on the outcome and more on whether the process felt fair.

When strategy comes down from Marketing, the Finance VP feels no ownership. If it clashes with their P&L, they see it as something forced on them. Something unfair.

So, they push back.

But when the Finance VP helps build the brand strategy, the process feels fair. Even if the strategy means short-term margin pain, they back it because they had a voice.

Co-creation forces executives to hash out conflicts before the strategy is final.

It surfaces the tension (if we launch Office on iPad, Windows revenue drops) and resolves it at the top.

When the leadership team co-creates the vision, they own the trade-offs together.

The Windows VP can't later block the iPad launch to save their P&L. They already agreed the company goal comes first.

The vision becomes a binding contract.

You cannot build a brand when department heads chase different outcomes.

And you can't win in the market when you're fighting yourself.

Part 2: The Cautionary Tale (Sony)

In 1999, Sony sat at the top of consumer electronics. The Walkman meant portable music. A cultural icon for two decades.

Sony had everything to own digital music:

• The Brand: Walkman had unmatched equity in portable music.

• The Technology: Flash memory, batteries, audio codecs, miniaturization know-how.

• The Content: Sony Music controlled Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Celine Dion.

Within five years, that dominance vanished.

The iPod captured the culture. Sony scrambled with confused, clashing products that customers rejected.

This was an alignment failure, not a capability failure.

The Silo Structure That Broke Sony

Sony's divisions ran separate P&Ls with separate goals. By the late 1990s, vertical silos had created clashing business models under one roof.

Sony Electronics sold devices: low margin, high volume, needing new formats to drive hardware sales. Sony Music sold copyrights: high margin, needing to protect physical CD sales from digital threats.

When MP3 arrived, it threatened Sony Music while helping Sony Electronics.

With no way to settle this clash, Sony chose to support MP3 in name only. Electronics could build digital players, but they couldn't play MP3 files. They had to use Sony's proprietary format instead.

This pleased neither division. And it pushed customers away.

Sony Music lobbied to block Electronics from supporting MP3s.

Electronics had to fight with one hand tied, unable to support the format the market wanted.

The clash spilled into the courts. In 2000, Sony Music sued Napster. At the same time, the Consumer Electronics Association, which included Sony Electronics, filed a brief backing Napster's technology. Sony was suing itself.

But the crack ran deeper.

Inside Electronics, two groups started building rival music players at the same time.

The Personal Audio Company (Walkman loyalists) pushed proprietary formats to protect Sony Music.

The VAIO Division (the computer team) wanted devices that worked seamlessly with PCs.

Instead of pooling resources, Sony split talent across two clashing lines. Internal politics drove the call, not market logic.

Two Products, One Disaster

In late 1999 and early 2000, Sony launched two digital music players.

The Memory Stick Walkman cost $400. It didn't play MP3s, only Sony's proprietary format.

The VAIO Music Clip also didn't play MP3s. The two devices weren't compatible with each other.

Sony asked the market to pick between two Sony visions. Neither played MP3s. And they didn't work together.

The software was worse. To satisfy Sony Music, Sony's software viewed every customer as a possible pirate. Songs could only be checked out to three devices. If your hard drive crashed, your music vanished forever.

The Fatal Licensing Deal

The final blow came in 2003. Apple needed record labels to license songs for iTunes at 99 cents per track. Sony Music signed the deal.

The division logic was clear: We need digital revenue. Apple has a secure platform. This helps our quarterly P&L.

Sony Music gave Apple the final piece to destroy Sony Electronics.

If Sony had acted as one company, leadership could have blocked the deal. But the silo structure meant Sony Music chased quarterly results. They armed the enemy.

Sony had every ingredient to win. Their structure turned those assets into liabilities.

Their content library forced hardware to treat customers like criminals through copy protection.

Their technology fractured into competing product lines that confused the market.

Their brand bred arrogance. Leadership thought customers would put up with anything from Sony.

Apple didn't have better engineering. Apple had better alignment.

Apple organized every part of their company around reducing friction for users.

Sony organized around reducing risk for divisions.

The Walkman didn't die of natural causes. It was strangled by the company that created it.

Part 3: The Turnaround (Microsoft)

While Sony bled market share, Microsoft bled relevance.

By 2013, Microsoft's stock had been flat for a decade. The Lost Decade.

The company missed every key shift: search with Google, smartphones with Apple, and social media with Facebook.

Analysts saw it as a wealthy dinosaur milking Windows and Office. Innovation happened elsewhere.

But Microsoft had something Sony didn't. A leader willing to co-create the fix with his department heads.

The Gladiatorial Culture

Under Steve Ballmer, Microsoft was a financial powerhouse and a cultural war zone.

Meetings were battles. Senior leadership sessions had executives attacking each other's divisions. Everyone guarded their turf.

The most toxic system was stack ranking. Every team had to rate employees on a forced curve: 20% were stars, 70% were average, and 10% got fired. The percentages were fixed, no matter how well people performed.

This meant a colleague's success came at your expense. If they got a top rating, you couldn't.

The results were toxic: sabotage, secrecy, fear of risk.

A 2011 viral cartoon nailed it: Microsoft's org chart showed Windows, Office, and Xbox pointing guns at each other.

Windows blocked Office from appearing on iPad. Xbox wanted Windows integration; Windows refused.

Each division optimized for itself while the company suffered.

The Co-Creation Strategy

When Satya Nadella became CEO in February 2014, he recognized something critical: he couldn't force buy-in. He had to co-create it.

So he built systems that made department heads co-authors of the transformation.

First, he co-created the culture. Nadella and Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan formed a Culture Cabinet. They selected 17 influential leaders from different, warring divisions. This group debated and defined what Growth Mindset would mean for Microsoft.

Because these leaders helped write the new cultural standards, they became evangelists rather than resisters. They had ownership before the transformation was even announced.

Second, he co-created the mission. In one of his first moves, Nadella took his Senior Leadership Team on an offsite. Instead of reviewing P&L sheets or product roadmaps, he asked them to share their personal philosophies.

Department heads who had spent years competing were forced to see each other as humans. By connecting their personal purpose to the company's mission, they forged a shared sense of purpose. Buy-in wasn't mandated. It was built through vulnerability.

Third, he operationalized co-creation. Nadella replaced stack ranking with a new system called Connect. Every employee is evaluated on three circles:

• Circle 1: What was your individual impact?

• Circle 2: How did you contribute to the success of others?

• Circle 3: How did you leverage the work of others?

In the old Microsoft, using another department's code was a sign of weakness. In the new Microsoft, you cannot get a top bonus unless you prove you co-created with other teams.

The Test of Safety

A culture of co-creation requires psychological safety. If you punish failure, people retreat to silos.

In 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, an AI chatbot. Within 24 hours, the internet corrupted it into spewing offensive hate speech.

In the old Microsoft, the department head would have been fired. Instead, Nadella emailed the engineering team: Keep pushing, and know that I am with you.

This signaled to every department head that it was safe to take risks and collaborate, even if it didn't work perfectly the first time.

The Results

Microsoft's market cap went from $300 billion in 2014 to over $3 trillion today.

The Cloud segment went from almost nothing to over $30 billion per quarter.

Department heads voluntarily sacrificed their own turf to support the broader mission. Xbox released games on PC. Office ran on iPad. Moves that would have been impossible under the old siloed model.

Sony had better resources. Microsoft had better alignment.

Sony's divisions were told to get along. Microsoft's leaders co-created the vision together.

When you co-author the strategy, you defend it.

Make Department Heads Co-Creators, Not Implementers

The gap between Sony and Microsoft comes down to alignment.

When department heads join after the brand strategy is set, they protect their turf. When they co-create the strategy from the start, they own it.

Ask these questions about your business:

1. Are your department heads measured on brand outcomes, or just their own metrics? If Finance only gets judged on cost cuts, they'll slash training that builds brand capability. If Sales only gets judged on volume, they'll push products that don't fit customer needs. Build a scorecard that ties department metrics to brand health.

2. Do you have a forcing mechanism that makes teamwork mandatory? Microsoft didn't ask divisions to work together. They made it impossible not to. Set up a Brand Council, a cross-functional team that reviews big decisions against brand impact before they go live.

3. Who defines what the brand promise means in practice? If Marketing defines we care about customers and hands it to Support, Support will read it through their own lens. The promise dies in translation. Bring department heads into defining brand strategy from day one.

Sony had everything and lost because divisions warred with each other. Microsoft was losing but saved itself by making leaders co-authors of the turnaround.

Your brand is the sum of promises kept by every department. Those promises start with alignment.

Make department heads co-creators, not implementers. Stop treating the brand as a department. Start treating it as the operating system of your company.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Are your department heads fighting each other while customers feel chaos? That misalignment costs more than you think: wasted resources, mixed messages, lost market share.

If you're ready to stop building on sand and start building real alignment, respond to this email and I'll set up a free 20-Minute Alignment Call. We'll find where silos are costing you growth and map a clear path forward. No pressure, no pitch, just clarity.

Companies drown their teams in strategy documents that nobody can use.

The 80-page PDF sits unread. The all-hands deck gets skimmed and forgotten. The brand guidelines gather digital dust. Leaders blame disengaged teams. But the teams aren't the problem.

The problem is noise.

When you broadcast everything to everyone, you give them nothing they can actually use.

The Strategy: Segmented Relevance

The human brain wasn't built to process information it can't apply.

Every time an employee opens your master strategy deck, their brain does two things at once:

1. Try to understand the goal. What are we building? This is productive work. This is the mental effort that creates learning.

2. Filter for relevance. Which parts actually apply to me? This is wasted work. It's mental effort that doesn't advance understanding. But it uses the same limited brain power.

Think of working memory like computer RAM. You might have 2TB of knowledge stored. But you only have 32GB of RAM, so you can only use 1.6% of everything you know at any time.

Every irrelevant slide in your strategy deck is an app running in the background. It steals processing power from the work that matters.

Send a sales rep a 50-slide deck on "Brand Positioning and Go-To-Market Strategy." Their brain burns mental energy filtering through organizational restructuring plans. Long-term R&D roadmap. Financial forecasts. Supply chain optimization.

By the time they reach the slides about competitive differentiation—what helps them close deals—they've tuned out.

The strategy dies in the filtering.

Cognitive psychologists call this the Redundancy Effect. When people process irrelevant information, it blocks the cognitive resources needed for learning.

Your strategy deck functions as spam for 90% of your team.

This is where Segmented Relevance comes in. It's the practice of translating your strategy into targeted guidance. Each team gets only what they need based on their specific role.

The organization does the filtering work. You remove the noise. Employees can focus their full brain power on understanding the strategy and how they fit in.

It forces you to stop acting like a funnel that pours everything onto everyone. And to start acting like a filter, giving each person what they need to make better decisions.

Your strategy should be one destination with different routes to get there. Each role gets the specific path they need. But everyone arrives at the same place.

The Cautionary Tale: Home Depot's Factory Mistake

In 2000, Home Depot was defined by "expert helpfulness."

They hired master plumbers and electricians. They paid them well above retail market rates.

These experts patrolled the aisles as technical advisors. Customers bought more than lumber. They bought the confidence to execute complex projects.

They learned from people who had spent decades in the trades.

This service model was Home Depot's competitive advantage.

Then Robert Nardelli arrived from GE. He brought Six Sigma manufacturing methods designed to eliminate variance in turbine production.

But he applied these factory techniques to retail service teams. And this category error had devastating results.

Nardelli's regime made three critical mistakes:

First, he replaced expertise with efficiency metrics. Store associates were measured on stocking speed and transaction time. Not customer problem-solving.

Time spent helping customers became waste to eliminate.

Second, he "juniorized" the workforce. To cut costs, Home Depot pushed out master tradesmen earning $25-30/hour.

They replaced them with part-time college students earning $7-10/hour. The ratio of part-time employees surged to nearly 50%.

Third, he centralized decision-making. The founders had empowered store managers with "B.S. stamps." Physical stamps that let them reject any bureaucratic paperwork that didn't serve customers.

Nardelli confiscated them. And corporate dictated everything—from Dyson vacuum placement to training module delivery.

The operational metrics improved. Checkout times decreased. Stocking efficiency increased.

But the brand collapsed.

By 2005, Home Depot's customer satisfaction score dropped to 67 out of 100. Dead last among major retailers.

Customers described stores as "ghost towns." They wandered the aisles, unable to find help.

While Home Depot's stock price sat flat, Lowe's surged 180% during the same period.

Lowe's had recognized what Home Depot forgot. A customer asking about complex electrical wiring doesn't need efficiency. They need confidence from someone who knows the answer.

Home Depot had broadcast the factory playbook to service teams. And instead of alignment, they got strategic sabotage.

The Gold Standard: Disney's Opposing Playbooks

Disney Parks appears to operate on one unified "magic" strategy.

Internally, they run different playbooks.

And they've built an entire infrastructure to manage the tension between them.

The Imagineers: Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI)

WDI's mandate is First-of-its-Kind innovation—creating attractions that have never existed before.

Their creative process has three phases. Dreamer: Blue Sky ideation. Realist: feasibility planning. Critic: stress testing.

The Blue Sky phase is pure vision. Imagineers work in rooms filled with inspirational art. They generate concepts with no limits, no budgets, no physics.

The Dreamer is explicitly protected from the Critic. This ensures the initial concept is as ambitious as possible.

The Blue Sky phase focuses entirely on vision. Viability comes later.

Imagineers ask "What if?" They don't worry about "How much?" or "Can we maintain it?"

Operations Staff: Cast Members

Operations follows the "Four Keys." A strict hierarchy that's been the training doctrine at Disney University for decades:

1. Safety (physical and emotional)

2. Courtesy (respect in all interactions)

3. Show (preserving the narrative environment)

4. Efficiency (throughput and speed)

This priority order is absolute.

A Cast Member knows that maintaining the "Show" is secondary to Safety and Courtesy. But it's prioritized over Efficiency.

This creates the specific "feel" of Disney parks. Aesthetic and narrative integrity valued higher than pure throughput.

For Operations, Safety is non-negotiable. Imagineers are paid to take risks. Operations staff are paid to eliminate them.

The playbooks contradict by design.

The Critical Handoff: Project Turnover

The tension between these teams peaks at Project Turnover: the moment WDI hands a billion-dollar asset to Operations.

This creates a huge potential for misaligned incentives. WDI is rewarded for delivering jaw-dropping innovation for Opening Day. Operations is rewarded for minimizing downtime over a 30-year lifecycle.

If complex systems get turned over without perfect documentation, assets begin degrading immediately.

This is why Disney employs Show Quality Standards (SQS) teams. Auditors who inspect everything. Light bulb color temperature. Animatronic timing. Everything must match WDI's "Creative Intent."

SQS creates healthy tension. An Operations manager wants to save money using standard paint instead of a custom-mixed hue. SQS intervenes.

Operations protects the budget. SQS protects the brand.

Decentralization Through "Small Worlds"

To execute this strategy at scale, Disney breaks parks into autonomous profit centers called "Small Worlds."

Individual restaurants. Merchandise locations. Attraction zones.

Each manager has autonomy to manage their unit. Three targets: Financial, Quality (SQS), and Cast Excellence.

An Adventureland manager doesn't need VP approval to fix a broken queue fan. They manage their own P&L.

This allows rapid decision-making. Critical for maintaining Show and Courtesy in real-time.

But it only works because every manager has been through "Traditions." That's Disney University's foundational training that converts employees into believers. It frames labor as "making magic."

By keeping playbooks separate and role-specific, Disney ensures Dreamers don't break the budget. And Doers don't kill the dream.

Three Principles Behind Segmented Relevance

Implementing Segmented Relevance is complex work.

It requires understanding each role's work and customer touchpoints. And how to translate strategy into concrete guidance they can use.

But the difference between Home Depot's failure and Disney's success comes down to three core principles.

Principle 1: Segment by Role and Scope, Not Title

Don't group people by their job title on the org chart.

Group them by two things: what they actually do and how much they need to see.

Start with role. A receptionist and a delivery driver have different titles. But they both have frequent customer contact with low marketing involvement.

They both need clear behavioral norms for "moments of truth." They get the same type of guidance.

But even within the same role type, what they receive differs.

A frontline sales rep gets one page.

Their manager gets three pages—their own page plus the pages for the two team types they manage.

Their VP gets more—enough to coordinate across multiple functions.

The CMO gets everything because they need visibility across the entire organization.

The receptionist's one page is just as valuable as the CMO's full playbook. Just more focused.

They need depth on their specific touchpoints, not breadth across the organization.

And even at the same level, the specifics differ.

A VP of Marketing and a VP of R&D both have high strategic impact. But their playbooks aren't identical.

Marketing needs brand voice documentation and campaign frameworks. R&D needs technical roadmaps and innovation processes.

They might both need market trend analysis, but through completely different lenses.

Home Depot treated all frontline staff the same. Store associates, department managers, specialists—everyone got factory efficiency rules.

They ignored role differences between customer service and stocking. They ignored that managers needed broader context than their teams.

At Disney, all Imagineers operate under "Blue Sky" rules during ideation, regardless of seniority. All Cast Members follow the same Four Keys hierarchy.

But a custodian on Main Street gets clear guidance for their specific touchpoints. An Attractions Manager gets that plus coordination guidance for their team. Operations VPs get broader strategic context.

Segmentation by role and scope, not rank.

Principle 2: Translate, Don't Broadcast

Abstract strategy can't guide daily decisions until you translate it into role-specific rules.

"Customer obsession" is meaningless until you define what it means for each role.

For Sales, it might mean "Never promise a delivery date without checking inventory first."

For Product, it might mean "Ship features customers request, not features you think are clever."

For Accounting, it might mean "Process refunds within 24 hours, not when convenient."

The translation must be explicit and concrete. Vague values create strategic ambiguity.

Home Depot told everyone to prioritize "efficiency." But they never clarified that stocking efficiency shouldn't override customer conversations.

Associates interpreted "efficiency" as "avoid time-consuming customer questions." The opposite of what the brand needed.

Disney doesn't tell Cast Members to "create magic." They translate it: Safety is non-negotiable priority one. Courtesy second. Show third. Efficiency fourth.

When a child drops their ice cream, the Cast Member knows exactly which rule applies—courtesy over efficiency. Fix it immediately, don't make them wait in line.

Principle 3: Filter, Don't Funnel

Once you've segmented and translated, ruthlessly remove irrelevant information.

Most organizations act like funnels. They pour all strategic information onto everyone. They believe understanding everything helps. And they assume the right pieces will stick.

This creates cognitive overload. Employees waste mental energy filtering noise instead of understanding strategy.

Instead, act like a filter. The organization does the filtering work.

The master strategy exists for those who need the full picture. Typically leadership coordinating across functions. Frontline teams get curated access. The barrier isn't about secrecy. It's about protecting their mental energy for execution.

Each segment gets only the information that helps them make better decisions in their specific role.

Home Depot broadcast factory optimization metrics to customer service teams. The metrics were accurate. They just weren't relevant.

Store associates couldn't influence supply chain efficiency. So the information was pure noise that distracted from their actual job—helping customers.

Disney gives Imagineers detailed creative briefs. But shields them from operational constraints during Blue Sky.

They give Operations staff detailed maintenance protocols but shield them from creative debates.

Each group gets the signal. Not the noise.

The Bottom Line

These three principles won't give you a step-by-step implementation plan.

Segmented Relevance requires judgment, not a checklist.

But understanding these principles reveals why most strategy communication fails. And why fixing it matters.

A strategy that lives in a PDF is dead. A strategy that lives in your team's daily decisions is alive.

The question isn't whether your team understands the strategy.

The question is whether you've translated it into guidance they can actually use.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is there a disconnect between the strategy in your head and the execution on the ground?

It's usually a translation problem. You're broadcasting when you should be filtering.

If you want to stop shouting into the void and start building a team that actually "gets it," reply to this email. I can set up a free 15-minute call to look at how you're currently communicating your strategy and identify where it is breaking down.

2025 is almost in the books.

Before we turn the page to 2026, I wanted to curate the 5 most well-received Brand Strategy Briefs from this year.

If you missed them, or just need a refresher, these 5 newsletters will help you hit the ground running in 2026.

1. Reactive Leadership Destroys Brands (10 min read)

• The Problem: Your calendar is a shield. It gets filled with back-to-back meetings that drain the energy needed for deep strategic work.

• The Pivot: "Busyness" is actually a state of cognitive shutdown. This brief explains why meetings can do more harm than good. And how to build the moat you need to actually lead.

2. Brand Awareness is a Deceptive Metric (5 min read)

• The Problem: You celebrate reach and impressions. But your growth is stalled. You are paying for eyeballs, not desire.

• The Pivot: Awareness is table stakes. But it doesn't win the battle for your customers' wallets. Preference is a bankable asset. This brief shows you why you need a strategy for moving from known to preferred.

3. Why Great Companies Say No (3 min read)

• The Problem: You are so terrified of losing a single sale that you have diluted your brand into a vanilla commodity that stands for nothing.

• The Pivot: This brief explores the scary—but profitable—discipline of strategic sacrifice. If you aren't saying no to good ideas, you aren't building a brand.

4. Is Your Brand Fighting the Wrong War? (4 min read)

• The Problem: You are obsessed with your competitors. You copy their features, match their pricing, and wonder why you are stuck in a race to the bottom.

• The Pivot: You cannot win a game where the rules were written by the incumbent. This brief challenges you to stop competing on "better" and start competing by changing the category design entirely.

5. Why Smart Brands Make Dumb Decisions (7 min read)

• The Problem: You think internal alignment is a sign of a strong strategy. In reality, your team is just all wrong together.

• The Pivot: This introduces The Consensus Trap. It reveals why the most comfortable meetings often produce the most dangerous blind spots—and provides the framework to pressure-test your ideas before the market humbles you.

Information without application is just noise.

You don't need to read all five of these today. Bookmark this email.

When you feel the drift of "busyness," read Brief #1. When you are arguing about ad spend, read Brief #2. When you are terrified to narrow your focus, read Brief #3.

Here is to a clearer, sharper 2026.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. The hardest part of strategy is getting others to see what you see.

If one of these briefs helped clarify your thinking, pass it along. It might be the spark that gets everyone on the same page for the new year.

A silent disconnect plagues established businesses.

As things grow, they become more complex. So, we organize companies into silos to maximize efficiency. Marketing owns the promise. Sales owns the close. Operations owns the delivery.

We treat them as separate disciplines with separate playbooks.

But the customer experiences them as one single story.

When Marketing promises innovation, but Finance sends a confusing paper invoice that looks like it was formatted in 1995, it creates a contradiction.

It signals that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

This structural gap creates what I call an Incoherent Brand.

It is a state where the company’s personality changes depending on which department the customer talks to.

In a market where trust is the currency of growth, this inconsistency is fatal.

The Brand Lives in Memory, Not Marketing

To fix the disconnect, we must correct a fundamental error in how we view branding.

Most strategies see the brand as a created object. It’s something the company makes, markets, and uses to shape customer behavior.

But cognitive neuroscience tells us a different story: the brand exists solely in the customer's memory.

It’s a biological system, a neural network built from our experiences.

1. The Memory Mosaic

We must view the brand through the lens of the Associative Network Memory Model.

In this model, memory is not a filing cabinet. It is a complex web of "nodes" (concepts) and "links" (connections).

• The Brand Node: This is the anchor (e.g., your company name).

• The Associative Links: These are the neural pathways connecting your brand to meaningful attributes. It isn't just a vague link to "Speed"; it is a specific link to "Answering in 4 seconds so I don't feel ignored." It isn't just "Quality"; it is "The specific smell of roasted beans that signals a break from work."

Every interaction a customer has—be it a support call, a contract review, or a packaging slip—offers a chance to form an association.

Each event places a new tile into this neural mosaic.

Crucially, the brain is agnostic regarding the source of these tiles. It doesn’t separate "Marketing" inputs from "Operational" inputs. It weaves them all into a single, tangled network.

2. The Brain is a Prediction Machine

Why does a mismatched tile matter so much?

To answer this, we look to Predictive Coding Theory. The brain is a pattern-matching machine that consumes 20% of the body's energy. And it's built with shortcuts so its energy consumption doesn't get out of control. To conserve energy, it constantly builds predictive models of what will happen next.

• The "Prior" (Marketing): Your marketing functions as the "Prior." It sets the expectation. When you promise "Ease," the brain constructs a model predicting a smooth interaction. This is a "Blue Tile."

• The Input (Operations): The customer then interacts with your operation. This is the evidence. If they encounter a rigid policy or a confusing invoice, this is a "Red Tile."

When the "Blue Tile" of your promise meets the "Red Tile" of your operation, the brain registers a Prediction Error.

This is not a metaphor. It’s a measurable brain event. A surprise signals new information. And new information is worth consuming extra energy for. It makes the brain switch from low-energy automatic processing to high-energy conscious processing.

This creates Operational Dissonance. You are literally taxing your customer's brain.

3. The Biological Cost of Inconsistency

The damage goes deeper than annoyance. It triggers a Negative Reward Prediction Error (RPE).

When reality falls short of marketing promises, dopamine neurons fire less.

This dip in dopamine acts as a punishment signal. It trains the brain to change its model: "This brand is unreliable. Avoid it next time".

4. The Imperative of Processing Fluency

Ultimately, the brain prefers things that are easy to process. This is known as Processing Fluency.

A coherent brand ("Blue Tile" Promise + "Blue Tile" Delivery) has high fluency. The brain knows exactly what to expect.

An incoherent brand ("Blue Tile" Promise + "Red Tile" Delivery) creates a chaotic image. The brain struggles to categorize it because it doesn't know what to expect.

In the economy of the mind, inconsistency is treated as a risk. Trust is born from the reduction of prediction errors.

The Solution: Operational Branding

So, how do we solve this? We need a strategy.

Strategy is a filter. It tells you what you can and cannot do.

To stop Prediction Error, you must adopt the strategy of Operational Branding. This means you stop viewing the brand as a creative job for the marketing team. Instead, you view the brand as the rulebook for your operations team.

The Strategy: Every operational decision must match the marketing promise. If an efficient process hurts the promise, we cannot use it.

To see the impact of this strategy, let’s compare a company that violated it with one that mastered it.

Starbucks: When Efficiency Cannibalizes the Brand

For decades, Starbucks sold a "membership" to a club.

The $6 latte was effectively a rent payment for the "Third Place"—a sociological safe haven between home and work. The operational inefficiencies—manual espresso pulling, steaming milk by hand—created the theater that justified the price.

But when the focus changed to increasing transaction volume, the Operations Silo stepped in. It removed the signals that showed value.

1. The Promise: The brand promised human connection. The brain predicted an environment of armchairs, the smell of roasting beans, and a craft moment with a barista.

2. The Violation: To maximize volume, Operations introduced Mobile Order & Pay (MOP). While financially successful, it broke the psychic dynamics of the cafe.

• The Invisible Queue: MOP moved the line into the cloud, creating what former CEO Howard Schultz called a "mosh pit" of customers hovering near the hand-off plane, staring at phones.

• The Vending Machine: They rolled out the Siren System, a suite of automated ice throwers and milk dispensers. This turned baristas into machine operators. It stripped away the craft.

• Hostile Architecture: To stop "loitering" (which makes $0/minute), cozy furniture was exchanged for hard wooden chairs and counters for pickup only.

3. The Result: The customer walks in expecting a Third Place ("Blue Tile") and encounters a High-Output Factory ("Red Tile").

• Cognitive Dissonance: The brain struggles to reconcile the premium price with the fast-food reality. The "mosh pit" destroyed the intimacy of the experience.

• The McDonaldization Effect: By removing the theater, Starbucks invited direct comparison with commodity competitors. The brain asks: "Why pay $6 for a machine-made drink when McDonald's is $3?".

• Value Destruction: This prediction error led to a big drop in brand value. Starbucks lost its title as the world's most valuable restaurant brand to McDonald's in 2025.

Starbucks let spreadsheet logic take over brand logic. This changed a premium destination into a commodity utility.

Chewy: When Empathy is the Strategy

If Starbucks demonstrates how efficiency can harm a brand, Chewy demonstrates how inefficiency can build one.

Chewy competes in a crowded market for pet food. They face tough competition from logistics giants like Amazon. Yet, they command irrational preference and a Net Sales Per Active Customer (NSPAC) of $578.

They achieved this by constructing what they call a "Silo of Empathy"—a protected operational zone where the standard rules of efficiency do not apply.

1. The Promise: Chewy promises to be a "partner in pet parenthood." They promise that they view your pet as a family member, not an SKU.

2. The Alignment: To keep this promise and avoid Prediction Error, Chewy created protocols that reject cost-saving "Red Tiles".

• The No-Automation Infrastructure: In an era where AI deflection is the norm, Chewy’s policy is to answer 96% of calls within four seconds. They refuse to use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems because a robot cannot empathize with a sick dog.

• The Bereavement Loop: The ultimate test of the mosaic occurs when a pet dies. Standard retail logic demands a return of the product to save margin. Chewy’s protocol instructs agents to refuse the return, refund the money, and ask the customer to donate the food to a local shelter.

• The Sympathy Protocol: This is followed by a sympathy protocol where the customer receives a handwritten condolence note and flowers.

3. The Result: When a grieving customer calls to return food, the standard retail category has taught them to expect a hassle.

But Chewy rejects the category norm to protect its brand promise. By refusing the return and sending flowers, the operations team delivers the "Blue Tile" that marketing promised.

The customer was promised a partner, and the operations team proved it. This coherence between what was said and what was done is why 78% of their net sales come from Autoship customers who trust the brand implicitly.

Three Ways to Diagnose Your Disconnect

You don't need to be a billion-dollar company to use this. You just need to translate the strategy into daily tactics.

Here are three diagnostic tactics to test your Operational Branding:

1. The Blindfold Test: If I blinded the logo on our invoices, contracts, and error messages, would they sound like "us," or do they sound like generic corporate templates? The boring documents are often the biggest source of "Red Tiles."

2. The Incentive Check: Does my customer support and finance team know our Brand Values? And more importantly, are they incentivized to uphold them? If you promise "Care" but pay for "Speed," you are paying your team to destroy the brand.

3. The Gap Analysis: Where is the biggest expectation gap between what our sales team promises and what our operations team actually delivers?

Coherence creates preference. Incoherence destroys it.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Are your departments speaking different languages?

If your sales team promises one thing and your operations team delivers another, you are eroding your brand. Reply to this email, and I’ll set up a free 15-minute call to help you identify your biggest brand disconnects.

Reading Time: 7 min

Intelligence can’t protect you from the costliest mistake in business.

Tropicana lost $50 million because executives got bored with their logo. LEGO nearly went bankrupt because they trusted a spreadsheet over a sneaker. These were issues of perception, not of resources.

This perceptual error occurs when you think that if you understand your product's value, the customer will too.

It's the Inside-Out Trap.

And it's rooted in the way we're wired to make decisions.

The Principle: The Biology of Bad Decisions

Even with lots of data and high-priced consultants, brands still make major blunders.

This failure stems from a specific blind spot in the human brain called Egocentric Bias.

This is a biological reality rather than simple arrogance.

Neuroscientists have pinpointed a brain structure known as the Default Mode Network (DMN). This network is for self-referential thoughts, daydreaming, or when the mind is at rest. In other words, it helps control how we think about ourselves.

But recent fMRI studies reveal a critical twist. The DMN is also the brain's default network for figuring out what other people are thinking.

This creates a structural problem. The brain effectively uses the "self" as a template to model the "other." It projects your own feelings onto other people.

The DMN uses your own thoughts and attitudes as a proxy for understanding other people, like your customers.

The brain does this because it's wired to conserve energy. And, the DMN doesn't use much energy. So, thinking about others by proxy is the easiest, lowest-energy way to simulate a mind.

To see the customer’s reality accurately, your brain must actively suppress the DMN. And then activate another region: the right Supramarginal Gyrus (rSMG).

The rSMG acts as a correction mechanism that separates your feelings from their feelings.

It allows you to have a more realistic understanding of the way other people view the world.

But there's a big problem: energy cost.

Activating the rSMG to suppress the DMN requires a lot of energy. It's not something the brain will do by default. And it will avoid trying to do it.

So, when executives operate under stress or fatigue, the brain conserves energy. It fails to activate the expensive rSMG and reverts to the cheap DMN.

As a result, you stop solving problems for customers and start solving problems for yourself.

The Compound Effect: Biological Groupthink

This individual bias gets worse when you enter the boardroom and Groupthink takes over.

Groupthink isn't just social pressure. It’s a biological state that limits your ability to detect errors through two processes:

1. The Sedated Alarm Bell (dACC): The dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex (dACC) acts as the brain's "alarm bell" for mistakes. But in a group, this alarm gets turned down. Your brain offloads the responsibility to the room. Your brain reduces vigilance because it assumes someone else is watching.

2. The Pain of Dissent (Amygdala): The brain uses the same pathways for social rejection as it does for physical pain. So, when you consider disagreeing with the group, the Amygdala (the threat center) activates. It hijacks the logic center to silence you.

Together, these two processes result in Shared Information Bias.

Groups spend their time discussing facts they already agree on because it triggers a reward. And they skip unique or conflicting data because handling it feels uncomfortable.

When decision-making is shaped by the Egocentric Bias and Shared Information Bias, you might think you really understand the customer. But really, you just understand yourself. And everyone in the group agrees.

This can convince you that you're on the right path when you're headed towards failure.

Part 1: The Traps (When Inside-Out Thinking Fails)

When the Inside-Out view takes over, companies often confuse their own preferences with market needs. This is most evident when brands value aesthetics more than function, or when they favor logic over identity.

Case Study A: The Aesthetic Error (Tropicana)

In 2009, Tropicana made a $50 million mistake by prioritizing design over psychology.

The Context

At the time, Tropicana dominated the orange juice aisle, generating over $700 million a year. But executives at PepsiCo felt the packaging looked "dated". They wanted to modernize the brand with a sleek, minimalist look.

The Trap

The design team broke the customers' ability to recognize the product.

Shoppers rely on patterns to find products. For decades, Tropicana’s pattern was simple: an orange with a straw in it. The new design removed the orange and the straw. It even rotated the logo sideways, forcing customers to crane their necks to read it.

The Result

By "cleaning up" the design, the brand broke the cognitive map customers used to find the product. The minimalist look also made consumers mistake it for a generic store brand. Sales collapsed 20% in less than two months.

Competitors like Minute Maid stole their loyal customers overnight.

The Lesson

Just 46 days later, Tropicana panicked and reverted to the original packaging. They learned that you cannot buy what you cannot find.

Case Study B: The Segmentation Trap (BIC "For Her")

Tropicana failed by focusing on aesthetics. BIC failed by focusing on segmentation.

The Context

In 2012, BIC looked at the numbers and decided to create a new revenue stream by targeting women. They launched the "BIC Cristal For Her"—a pen with a thin barrel and pastel colors.

The Trap

BIC fell into the Pink Tax trap. They assumed women would pay a 70% premium for a pink product.

But writing is a gender-neutral act. By making a "pen for women," the brand implied a deficit rather than solving a problem. This suggested that women’s hands were too weak or fragile to handle a man's pen.

The Result

The backlash was legendary.

Women turned the Amazon product page into a platform for satire, posting thousands of funny reviews. One reviewer wrote: "Finally! For years I've had to rely on pencils... Bic has released a womanly pen that my gentle baby hands can use". Ellen DeGeneres even mocked it on national TV.

The Lesson

Segmentation without a real functional difference is simply condescension. Treating your customer as a demographic, not a person, leads to trouble.

Part 2: The Fixes (When Outside-In Thinking Wins)

When companies stop looking at their own spreadsheets and start looking at the real world, the results can be massive.

Case Study C: The Social Utility Fix (Liquid Death)

The antidote to the Inside-Out Trap is looking at the customer's reality, not just their purchase history.

The Context

The packaged water industry is worth over $300 billion. For years, every brand followed the same Inside-Out rule: Sell Purity. Brands like Evian and Fiji focused entirely on the liquid.

The Fix

Founder Mike Cessario saw something different.

He observed musicians at punk rock concerts pouring water into empty energy drink cans. Holding a crinkly, plastic water bottle on stage looked "soft" and killed the vibe. The musicians needed hydration (Functional Need), but they also needed to look cool (Social Need).

The Result

Liquid Death sold Social Camouflage in the form of water.

They put water in a tallboy aluminum can—the universal symbol for beer or energy drinks. Now, a sober person could hold a Liquid Death can at a party and visually blend into the crowd. The brand grew to a $1.4 billion valuation.

The Lesson

To succeed in a crowded market, you need to grasp your customer's social reality. Simply having a "better" product isn't enough.

Case Study D: The Small Data Fix (LEGO)

To understand why customers act, rely on observation instead of just spreadsheets.

The Context

In 2003, LEGO was on the brink of bankruptcy, losing nearly $1 million a day. Popular data at the time told a scary story: kids don't have patience anymore. They didn't have the attention span for long LEGO builds. Supposedly, millennials wanted instant gratification.

The Fix

LEGO tried a new approach: they sent researchers to live with families.

In Germany, a researcher asked an 11-year-old boy about his most prized possession. The boy showed him a beat-up pair of Adidas sneakers. He said the scuffs were great. They showed his friends he had mastered a tough skateboard trick.

The Result

Popular data said kids want it "easy," but the sneaker proved some kids don't. They want mastery. LEGO immediately changed strategy. They started making sets harder and more complex. Sales of the complex LEGO City line tripled in one year.

The Lesson

The Inside-Out leader trusts the neat data. The Outside-In leader trusts the messy reality.

The Framework: The "Empty Chair" Strategy

You cannot fix these problems by simply trying harder to be empathetic.

The biological pull of Egocentric Bias (saving energy) and Shared Information Bias (fitting in) is too strong. Your brain will naturally revert to the path of least resistance.

To stop this, you need a physical interrupt. You need a mechanism that forces your brain to do the high-energy work of seeing a different reality.

Jeff Bezos famously used the empty chair method.

In critical meetings, he would pull an empty chair to the table. He told his executives, "That is the customer. How do they feel about this decision?"

The chair served as a cognitive anchor. It forced the room to switch off their "Default Mode" and engage with the customer's perspective.

You don't need a physical chair. Use these three diagnostic questions:

1. The Stranger Test

Determine if your idea requires insider context to work.

• The Test: Check if a busy stranger with zero context would understand the value in 3 seconds. If you have to explain the "strategy" for the idea to make sense, you have failed.

2. The Boredom Test

Identify the source of the change.

• The Test: Clarify if the change is driven by customer demand or internal boredom. Companies sometimes get rid of effective assets, such as the Tropicana orange, just because they’re bored of them.

3. The Behavior Test

Distinguish between what customers say and what they do.

• The Test: Check if what customers do matches their survey answers. Build for the Old Sneaker (what they actually value) instead of the focus group (what they say they value).

The Bottom Line

Your brand lives in the customer's mind. Not in your office.

If you don't fight for their perspective in the boardroom, no one else will.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. When was the last time you audited your decision-making process? If your marketing feels flat, you might have lost the thread of the customer's perspective. Reply to this email and I'll set up a free 15-minute call to discuss how you can start bringing the customer back into your boardroom.

Reading Time: 6 mins

Customer feedback can be a wealth of insights or a dangerous trap.

The trap happens when you treat every piece of feedback equally. It throws you nto a boardroom where you're paralyzed by contradictory data. Your professional customers want one thing. But your hobbyist customers want another. Your family buyers ask for a feature. But it's one you know your young single users would hate.

And it can send you into a state of strategic whiplash..

This paralysis stems from hearing many different customer types at once. It leaves you without a clear direction. You end up moving toward the average of what all customers say, not what the right customers say.

Clarity doesn't come from more feedback. It comes from having the focus to listen to the right customer for a specificbusiness goal.

To get the right answer, you must first ask the right question.

The Solution: Align the Customer to the Goal

Before you analyze another feedback report, you must define the outcome you want to achieve.

The right customers are simply those who are relevant to helping you reach that outcome.

There is no single group of right customers. Only the right customers for an outcome.

The outcome must come before the customer data. It acts as a filter for relevance.

Goal 1: Acquire a New, High-Value Segment

Right Customers: The Customer You Want, Not the One You Have

By 1990, Black & Decker's (B&D) brand was a liability.

It meant "consumer" and "DIY" tools. Because of this, its market share with professionals fell to only 9%. Meanwhile, Makita had a strong 50% dominance.

The problem was a strange puzzle.

B&D's pro-grade tools were rated by one research study as the "highest quality in the industry." But pros still refused to buy them. The B&D name, sold in mass-market retail, had a bad reputation that felt incongruent with a professional's identity.

No professional wanted their customers to see them using hobbyist tools.

Listening to their average customer (the hobbyist) would have been a fatal mistake. To win, B&D's leaders needed to stop listening to their current customers. They had to focus on the ones who ignored them: professional tradesmen.

The problem was never the tool's quality; it was brand permission.

To solve the problem, B&D reintroduced a professional brand it had purchased in 1960: DeWalt. And they got it into professionals' hands through a grassroots campaign.

The very first 1992 DeWalt tools were relabeled models of B&D tools from its existing "Kodiak" and "Professional" lines. Nothing was different on the inside from existing B&D models that professionals shunned.

The durability, quality, and extended warranty made them loved by contractors.

This focus on the right customer—with the right brand name and sold in the right stores—is what solved the 9% market share problem. It led to significant market share growth for B&D and the DeWalt brand.

Goal 2: Survive a Competitive War

Right Customer: The Purchaser and the User

By 2009, Old Spice was a dying brand.

It was a relic, widely viewed as an outdated brand for old men, with a U.S. market share of only 3%.

P&G and its agency Widen+Kennedy identified one key statistic: women purchased 60% of male body wash. The users weren't the purchasers.

It was a key moment, but the future still didn't look bright. The brand was about to be squeezed in a dual-front competitive war:

1. Axe owned the young male user.

2. Dove Men+Care was launching a massive Super Bowl campaign to target the same female purchaser that P&G had identified.

As a struggling brand, they didn't want to compete head-to-head with either customer group. So, they took a different approach and targeted both the purchaser and the user in a single conversation.

As Wieden+Kennedy said, the central question became, "How can we get couples to want to have a conversation about body wash?" And the solution was to use humor as a Trojan Horse.

The "Hello, ladies" campaign was a funny twist on romance fantasies aimed at women. Its wild moments, such as "I'm on a horse," let men join in the fun. This created a new space that was distinct from Axe (Juvenile) and Dove (Serious/Nurturing).

And they launched it three days before the Super Bowl, to get ahead of Dove's new direction.

It eclipsed the Dove launch and drove a 125% year-over-year increase in sales.

Goal 3: Defend Your Brand AND Expand Your Audience

Right Customers: A Split Strategy

In 2008, Starbucks faced a perfect storm..

The latte had gone from a luxury indulgence to, as founder Howard Schultz put it, "a poster child for excess." And McDonalds' waged a price war with ads claiming "four bucks is dumb."

Internally, the company was suffering from brand dilution as a result of its aggressive growth.

With profits in free fall, Howard Schultz returned to a company in a "desperate" state.

Listening only to the "average customer" (demanding $1 coffee) would have been a death sentence. But relying solely on the core loyalists wouldn’t have been a smart strategy during the 2008 financial crisis.

Schultz’s brilliant insight was not to choose. Instead, he addressed customers in two phases.

Phase 1: The "Soul" Strategy (For the Core Customer): His first move was to fix the brand dilution problem. Because without being able to defend their quality, they couldn't charge for it.

In February 2008, he closed all 7,100 U.S. stores for "Espresso Excellence Training." It was a $6 million loss in revenue to signal to the core customers that Starbucks was serious about quality returning.

Phase 2: The "Survival" Strategy (For the Price-Sensitive): After recommitting to quality, his second move was to fight the price war.

In early 2009, he introduced "$3.95 'breakfast pairings'" and "$1 bottomless cups of coffee." It helped Starbucks target price-conscious customers with certain items. At the same time, it kept prices higher on others. This way, Starbucks avoided being easily replaced by fast food competitors.

He listened to both customers. But he aligned their feedback to two different, parallel strategies, not one average one.

Goal 4: Expand Your Market by Evolving Your Focus

Right Customer: The Aspirational Customer (The Halo Effect)

The right customer is not static. It must evolve as your business goals change.

And that's what B&D did with DeWalt after winning over the professional customers.

After "Act 1" (winning the pro), their new goal was to capture the entire market. They did this by leveraging the "pro-grade" badge they had built.

The aspirational hobbyist didn't have the same needs as the heavy pro users. The issue for this customer wasn’t about the reliability of the power tools during heavy use, like the pros. Instead, they wanted to feel capable and professional.

B&D's leadership created a powerful halo effect that flowed down from the professional to the hobbyist. The amateur's logic became simple: if the tool was good enough for a pro to abuse daily, it was more than good enough for them.

This move reversed B&D's original race-to-the-bottom problem.

It allowed them to capture the "average" customer as a premium, aspirational brand. A feat they could never have achieved under the B&D name.

Your Diagnostic Toolkit: Finding the Right Customer

Your strategic paralysis will end the moment you stop averaging your feedback. Use these four questions to find your focus.

1. What is the single biggest business goal we must achieve in the next 12 months?Be specific: Is it acquiring a new high-value segment, like DeWalt in Act 1? Surviving a competitive threat, like Old Spice? Or do you need a split strategy, like Starbucks?

2. To achieve that one goal, which customer segment feedback matters? If your goal is frequency, you must talk to existing, semi-frequent customers—not new prospects. If it's acquisition, you must talk to non-customers who prefer a competitor.

3. What feedback is irrelevant or distracting from this core objective? This is the most important question. Who are you listening to right now that is sending you on a wild goose chase? Who is diverting you away from the goal?

4. Is our "right customer" from five years ago still the right customer for our goals today? This is the DeWalt "Act 2" question. If your goal has evolved, your customer focus may also need to.

Clarity in strategy doesn't come from having more data. It comes from knowing which data to pay attention to. And which to ignore.

Your brand cannot be the preferred choice for everyone, but it must be the preferred choice for the right ones. And that depends on your current goals.

Stop averaging your feedback and start aligning it.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. That fourth diagnostic question is the one I see most established leaders get stuck on: Is your "right customer" from five years ago still the "right customer" for your goals today?

This is the "DeWalt Act 2" problem. If your goals have evolved but your customer focus hasn't, you're stuck. If you'd like a free 15-minute sparring session to navigate this exact transition, just reply to this email and I’ll set up a time.

Reading Time: 9 min

What happens when your customer data is a lie?

Not a malicious lie. But a subconscious one. One they may not even be aware of.

It’s the "Say vs. Do" gap.

Customers say they want variety. But Spotify's data shows they listen to the same songs on repeat. Consumers say they'll pay more for eco-friendly products. But their behavior shows they only buy them when the price is the same.

If you build your strategy only on what customers say, you risk building it on a foundation of sand.

A few months back, we looked at the first challenge in innovation research. This is the customer's "blind spot." It’s their struggle to envision a new solution.

This "Say vs. Do" gap is even more dangerous.

It's not that they can't see the future; it's that misrepresent the present. The truth—the kind of insight that leads to sustainable growth—is only found in their behavior.

This is why true exploration can't only be a survey. It has to be a system.

The Foundation of Sand: A Persistent Problem

The gap between what people say and what they do isn't limited to business.

It's one of the most persistent problems in human behavior. And it shows up in several forms in human behavior research:

• The Attitude-Behavior Gap: What someone says (for example, "I’m worried about the environment") often doesn’t match what they do.

• Stated vs. Revealed Preferences: Stated Preferences are what people say in a survey. Revealed Preferences are what they do when they have to make a real-world trade-off.

• The Intention-Behavior Gap: The failure of individuals to act on their own stated intentions.

This last point trips up marketers. Your surveys measure "purchase intent." So, you build strategies on the assumption that intention equals a sale.

The research proves this can create false assumptions. That intention is an unreliable predictor. It can break the instant it hits real-world friction like price, convenience, or habit.

It's not that the data are bad—they capture intent correctly.

It's that it represents something different from what gets used for.

The "Subconscious Lie": Why the Gap Exists

Your customers aren't trying to deceive you.

They are, as research confirms, participating in a subconscious lie.

This gap is created by three cognitive biases:

1. The "Looking Good" Problem (Social Desirability Bias)

People tend to give socially acceptable answers. They often say they engage in "good" behaviors, like ethical consumption. And then downplay "bad" ones.

This isn't always a conscious choice to deceive. It’s often what's called Self-Deceptive Enhancement. Your customer thinks they are rational and ethical in the survey. But their purchase history tells a different story.

2. The "Knowing Why" Problem (Introspection Illusion)

This is the most profound driver.

It's a bias where people confidently believe they have direct access to the origins of their own decisions, but they don't. Research suggests 95% of our decisions are subconscious.

So, when your focus group asks, "Why did you buy that?", the customer has no access to that true subconscious driver. So, their conscious mind invents a plausible, rational story to explain it: "I bought it for the quality".

Your surveys are often not "truth-gathering" tools. They are "rationalization-gathering" tools.

3. The "Good Enough" Problem (Bounded Rationality)

In a survey, a customer can easily state, "Yes, I would absolutely buy the most sustainable, high-end option."

But the real world is messy.

Human decision-making is limited by time and cognitive capacity. In a real store, we don't optimize. We "satisfice"—we choose the first option that is "good enough."

The "good enough" rule often sways decisions more than "optimal" choices from the survey. Factors like familiar labels and low prices play a bigger role in decisions than what's objectively ideal.

The System: How to Find the Behavioral Truth

World-class brands don't get lucky. They build a scalable, repeatable process for uncovering the truth in what customers do, not just what they say.

It's not magic. It's a three-part discipline.

Part 1: The Synthesis — How Data Finds the "What" and Observation Finds the "Why"

The popular story of how Intuit created QuickBooks is a dangerous oversimplification.

The myth is that founder Scott Cook, trapped by data had a moment of insight that invalidated the data and led to a pivot. This myth is dangerous because it pits data and observation against each other.

The truth is far more useful. The opportunity for QuickBooks was first found using quantitative data:

1. Find the "What" (The Data Anomaly): Years after Quicken, Intuit's personal finance software, led the market, surveys revealed a surprising fact: nearly 50% of Quicken users were small businesses.

Scott Cook’s first reaction was denial. He didn't think the data made sense. So, he ignored it.

2. "Savor the Surprise" (The Mindset Shift): When the anomaly continued, Cook's team saw that their bias was the problem. They learned to, as Cook put it, "savor the surprise" and interrogate the data.

3. Find the "Why" (The Observation): Cook implemented the "Follow Me Home" program. Cook and his team would wait at a local Staples. They looked for customers who had just bought their software. Then, they would ask to follow them home. This way, they could see how they installed and used the program. No interviewing. Just observation.

The goal wasn't to refute the data, but to understand the 'why' behind it. They observed these small business owners and saw confusion.

The team discovered the unarticulated need. According to Cook, these users "hated accounting" and were "morbidly intimidated by accounting terminology."

They were paralyzed by the "psychological minefield" of "debits" and "credits" and were force-fitting Quicken just to avoid the "professional jargon."

4. The Real Pivot (The "Black Box"): The solution was a new market position. Cook called it "the first accounting software with no accounting in it."

Instead of forcing users to learn accounting, Intuit built a system that hid the complexity. They used the non-intimidating screen that looked and felt like their paper checkbook.

When they entered a payment to "Staples," the software performed the complex calculations in the background. And then translated it into simple language for the user. The user was shielded from jargon. This helped them overcome their fear without losing technical accuracy.

This system uses data to uncover the "what" and observations to explore the "why." It helped build an $8 billion-a-year business segment.

Part 2: The Observation — Defending Behavioral Truth from "Say" Data

The Swiffer story shows what to do when your observational data is in direct conflict with what your customers say.

It's a case study in strategic courage.

1. The "Confirmation" Trap (The "Better Soap" Fallacy): In the mid-1990s, P&G's home cleaning division was stagnant. P&G tried to innovate by asking customers about "more suds" or "a fresh scent." These were just small tweaks to a system that was fundamentally broken.

2. The Pivot to "Do" (The Ethnographic Insight): Frustrated, P&G's Corporate New Ventures group hired the design firm Continuum.

Continuum decided to stop asking questions. Instead, they would watch people clean their floors.

But they never got that far. When they went into homes, they found floors that were already clean. The existing process was so messy and burdensome that people were ashamed to be seen doing it.

Continuum labeled this the "Clean Floors Paradox."

People didn't have issues with the soap. They had issues with the multi-step process of cleaning.

3. The "Say vs. Do" Collision (The Failed Concept Test): The team developed a prototype, code-named "FastClean," with a disposable pad.

But the entire $5 billion innovation nearly died in research.

P&G ran a "say" test. They showed consumers a written concept of the product and asked for their opinions. Consumers were not enthusiastic. They said they were reluctant to buy another disposable product. And they were concerned about the environmental impact.

This is the "Say vs. Do" gap in its purest form. When asked, consumers respond as their rational, "looking good" self. Based on this "say" data, the project should have been killed.

4. The "Do" Wins (The Experiential Prototype): The team, armed with the conviction from their "do" research, ignored the "say" data. They built a crude prototype and got it into people's hands..

Everything changed. When potential customers were able to use the product, they fell in love with it. They had the "Oh my god" moment, as P&G's R&D Director recalled, turning over the pad to see the "visual proof" of the trapped dirt.

The visceral, behavioral "do" was the real signal. The rational, attitudinal "say" was just noise.

The behavioral insight is the catalyst. But it's the system that creates the billion-dollar brand.

Part 3: The Intervention — The "Unscalable" Experiment

You can't risk a multi-million dollar strategy on an insight alone. The next step is to run a fast, low-cost, unscalableintervention to prove the hypothesis in the real world.

The Airbnb photo experiment provides a clear blueprint for this process.

1. The Crisis & The Symptom (The "Forcing Function"): The experiment was born from profound desperation. In 2009, the company was in Y Combinator and close to going bust. Their growth, as co-founder Joe Gebbia described it, was a "horizontal drumstick graph." It was flatlined at a meager $200 per week.

This crisis was a strategic gift. It proved that their scalable, engineering-first solutions (like a photo upload wizard) were not working.

While reviewing New York listings with Y Combinator's Paul Graham, Gebbia, a RISD-trained designer, spotted the issue. As he said, he found a pattern of "photos that sucked."

This led to Graham's counterintuitive advice: "Do things that don't scale."

2. The "Trojan Horse" Intervention (The Unscalable "Excuse"): The founders diagnosed the problem as a skill gap, not a tool gap. Hosts couldn't take good photos, and no tool would teach lighting.

So they flew to New York and borrowed a $5,000 camera. And they offered free professional photos so they could get into hosts' homes and understand more about them.

3. The Real Diagnosis (Uncovering the "Why") This intervention allowed them to move from diagnosing a symptom to understanding the problem. While in the hosts' homes, they weren't just photographers; they were ethnographers.

This is where they uncovered the true "Say vs. Do" gap:

• The Guest Gap ("Say"): Guests said their reasons for not booking were rationalizations like "price" or "location."

• The Guest Gap ("Do"): Their behavior was "bouncing from ugly listings" that looked like Craigslist-quality photos.

• The Insight: The "say" was a rationalization. The "do" revealed a trust issue. The ugly photos were a proxy for risk, amplifying the danger of staying in strangers' homes.

4. The Breakthroughs (the "Test Nugget" and the "Binder"): The intervention had two immediate, massive payoffs.

First, the quantitative "test nugget": The following week, revenue doubled from $200 to $400. This proved the hypothesis that better photos build trust and drive revenue.

Second, the qualitative breakthrough: Hosts gave them "binders full of suggestions."

The revenue-doubling proved their one hypothesis. The binder gave them ideas for their future product roadmap.

How to Build Your Exploration System: A 3-Step Process

You don't need a massive R&D budget to do this. You just need to follow the 3-step system our case studies revealed.

Stop asking your customers to predict their own future. Start building a process to observe their present.

Step 1: Find the Anomaly (The Intuit "Surprise"): Start with your data. Look for the quantitative "surprise" that contradicts your assumptions. Where are users doing something unexpected? That data point you've been dismissing as a fluke is your starting point. It tells you who to go observe.

Step 2: Find the Why (The P&G Observation): Now that you know who to observe, find their why. Schedule time to watch these users. Your goal is to find the behavioral truth they can't articulate.

Step 3: Test with an Unscalable Experiment (The Airbnb Intervention): Once you have a new hypothesis, don't build a new product. Run a fast, unscalable test to see if your hypothesis is correct.

The answers you're looking for aren't in your next survey. They are in a system that combines data and observation.

Find the anomaly. Observe the behavior. Test with a manual intervention.

Stop asking. Start watching.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. When was the last time your customer data truly surprised you? If it's just confirming what you already believe, you might be stuck in the "Say vs. Do" gap. If you want to start uncovering deeper insights, reply to this email and I'll set up a 20-minute call to help you start looking in the right direction.

It’s a scene that plays out in offices every Monday morning.

You open your calendar and see a solid wall of purple and blue blocks, stacked like a bad game of Tetris. Back-to-back. You feel "busy." You're pulled in a dozen directions by "quick syncs." But you have a gnawing suspicion that you're not making progress.

That feeling of overwhelm is a state of cognitive overload. It plagues companies in every sector and is one of the biggest threats to running an effective brand.

Part 1: The Anatomy of Your Overwhelm

The "Bad" vs. "Good" Cognitive Load

This problem is explained by Cognitive Load Theory (CLT).

Your working memory—the mental "RAM" you use for complex tasks—is severely limited. Think of it like a computer: you might have a 2TB hard drive (your total knowledge), but with only 64GB of RAM, you can only use 3.1% of that memory at once. The more "apps" you run (meetings, emails), the less capacity you have for the one app that matters: strategic thinking.

Every task you do competes for this finite resource by creating three types of load:

1. Intrinsic Load: The actual difficulty of the task (e.g., understanding a complex financial model).

2. Germane Load: The "good" load. This is the mental work needed for deep thinking, creative problem-solving, and gaining new market insights. This is where your true value lies.

3. Extraneous Load: The "bad" load. This is the useless mental effort spent processing the work, not doing it. It’s the load from a poorly designed dashboard, a confusing email chain, or a calendar full of interruptions and unnecessary meetings.

These three loads add up. The simple, brutal math is: High Extraneous Load (bad) steals the brainpower needed for Germane Load (good).

From Decision Fatigue to "Task Paralysis"

This high load pushes you into Decision Fatigue.

Decision Fatigue is more than feeling tired. It's a biological reality where your ability to make decisions gets worse. Your brain uses a ton of energy, and as it gets tired, its ability to plan, reason, and self-regulate dips.

The final stage is Induced Executive Dysfunction.

This term refers to how chronic stress and overwhelm cause temporary but serious issues with the brain, affecting your ability to plan, organize, start, finish, and focus.

These symptoms include:

• Impaired Prioritization: You struggle to see the difference between "urgent" and "important".

• Task Paralysis: You feel "stuck," unable to start a critical project even though you know it's vital.

• Emotional Dysregulation: You feel a heightened frustration with minor setbacks.

This is a predictable brain reaction to this environment. It forces you into a reactive mode and prohibits the proactive work strategic brand building requires.

Part 2: The Brain's Forced Default

The "Planner" vs. the "Firefighter"

When you experience executive dysfunction, your brain makes unconscious choices driven by survival.

This is explained by the Dual Mechanisms of Control (DMC) Framework.

Your brain has two distinct operating modes for managing goals:

1. Proactive Control: This is the top-down, goal-driven, forward-thinking mode. It's your brain as a Strategic Planner. It involves planning, foresight, and holding a goal in mind in advance of an event. This is the state required to build a vision and a brand. It's highly effective, but it has one major drawback: it requires a lot of energy.

2. Reactive Control: This is the bottom-up, stimulus-driven mode. It's your brain as a Firefighter. It's a late correction mechanism that kicks in after you're caught off guard. It’s energy-saving but cannot do long-term, strategic planning.

The Tipping Point: Running on Empty

When you are in a state of cognitive overload and decision fatigue, your brain is running on empty. It "can no longer afford the high energy cost" required for proactive control.

So, it makes an unconscious, survival-based move.

It shuts down the energy-hungry Proactive mode and defaults to the energy-saving Reactive mode.

Part 3: The Strategic Consequences of a Reactive State

Living in this reactive state doesn't just feel bad. It makes strategic brand building impossible.

1. The Inability to Do Proactive Work

You cannot build proactive guidelines for your brand when your brain is locked in a reactive mode.

The deep Germane Load work—defining your brand and holding that line—requires the Proactive Control system that overwhelm shuts down.

2. The Bias Amplifier Effect

A resource-depleted, reactive mind relies heavily on quick, System 1 thinking.

You default to mental shortcuts, and your risk of falling for them (cognitive biases) skyrockets.

• Confirmation Bias: You lack the mental energy to challenge your own assumptions, so you just seek information that confirms what you already believe. This is death by a thousand seemingly safe decisions.

• Status Quo Bias: The mental effort to evaluate a new, innovative alternative is too high. So, you default to the safe, familiar option, even if it ceases to work effectively. It's a quick path to commoditization or irrelevance.

3. Left Defenseless (with No Playbook)

Because you were never able to do the proactive work, you have no playbook. You have no filter.

So when an inevitable challenge appears—a cultural backlash, a competitor's move, an internal conflict—you're caught off guard and forced to react.

Case Study: The Reactive Panic (Cracker Barrel)

Cracker Barrel's recent rebranding failure is a chronic condition, not an isolated event. It's a perfect diagnosis of a leadership team stuck in the Reactive Control loop, which created a catastrophic failure of strategic conviction.

1. The (Valid) Business Problem

The leadership team at Cracker Barrel faced a crisis of relevance.

Their business was stagnating, with a 59% decline in net income in 2024.

In a May 2024 conference call, the new CEO, Julie Felss Masino, identified that the brand had "leaned too heavily on the 'timeless nature of our concept'" and needed to "freshen things in such a way as to be noticeable and attractive but still feel like Cracker Barrel."

On the surface, it was a valid goal.

2. The (Flawed) "Safe" Solution

The leadership likely faced Executive Dysfunction. They were too overwhelmed by what felt urgent to focus on what was truly important. As a result, they opted for a $700 million overhaul that was disconnected from their brand's reality.

• Customers felt they stripped the iconic logo of its "soul"—removing the Uncle Herschel figure and Old Country Store tagline.

• They replaced the unique grandma's house ambiance with a brighter, more sterile aesthetic.

This was a fundamental error.

They didn't modernize the brand. Instead, they dismantled it, disrupting all the associations customers had with it.

They failed to do the proactive work of understanding the brand before attempting to change it.

3. The (Predictable) Backlash

The reaction was quick, strong, and very negative.

This wasn't backlash from non-customers; it was their core audience.

• A YouGov poll found 76% of U.S. adults preferred the old logo.

• Worse, 29% said the change made them less likely to dine there.

• The criticism was that the new look was "sterile," "soulless," and a "violation" of the brand's identity.

Regular customers felt the brand no longer wanted them there.

Political commentators like Donald Trump amplified this existing outrage, calling it a "woke" corporation turning its back on tradition.

4. The (Reactive) Capitulation

The leadership team had no Proactive Conviction.

They didn't expect the backlash and had no grounds to back their decision in the face of dissent.

The timeline shows a company in pure panic:

• August 20, 2025: The new logo debuts.

• August 21, 2025: Widespread customer backlash erupts; the stock plummets 11-12%.

• August 26, 2025: Just six days after launch, Cracker Barrel scraps the new logo and reinstates the classic design.

• September 9, 2025: The company suspends the entire nationwide remodel plan.

This is the very definition of Reactive Control.

Their apologetic statements claiming they "listened" projected profound weakness and damaged the credibility of the leadership team.

5. The (Chronic) Pattern of Capitulation

This is the most devastating part.

The public surrender served as an open invitation for further pressure.

Activists who had claimed victory on the rebrand immediately pivoted to a new line of attack, demanding the company also renounce its "woke" DEI and LGBTQ+ support initiatives.

Faced with this new pressure, the leadership team continued in its reactive mode and folded again.

In late August, the company removed the dedicated Pride page from its website. They couldn't even stand by that change, claiming it was just a routine website update.

This pattern of reactive capitulation betrayed all stakeholders at the same time.

They alienated their core customers with the rebrand, then alienated their employees by scrubbing their Pride content.

Cracker Barrel's leadership proved they have no proactive measures in place. They failed to do what strong brands do: know how they'll react ahead of time and respond based on their brand, not just the market's whims.

As a result, they are a brand without a core conviction, managed not by leadership but by whichever external group is yelling the loudest.

Case Study: The Proactive Conviction (American Eagle)

Now, contrast that with a masterclass in Proactive Control.

The massive success of American Eagle's (AE) "Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans" campaign wasn't a lucky gamble. It was the final, visible step of a deep, proactive strategy built by first creating the Strategic Capacity to do the deep, Germane Load work.

1. They Did the Foundational Work First

AE's success was only possible because they had already defined their brand.

Years prior, they executed a brand refresh in conjunction with Checkland Kindleysides.

As Checkland Kindleysides describes it, they used consumer insights to reimagine their eagle icon. It went from a "static, masculine emblem rooted deeply in Americana" to one that was "soaring freely, bold, and effortlessly youthful."

Their guiding principle, "Live Your Life," championed the confident self-expression and individuality that resonated with their primary customers.

2. They Knew Their Audience (Not the Noise)

AE invested heavily in understanding their Gen Z consumer, even establishing an in-house council of their core audience of teenagers and young adults.

This likely gave them an insight into a group fatigued by the hyper-seriousness and political correctness dominating corporate messaging.

3. They Built a "Strategic Shield"

For years, AE made consistent deposits in a trust bank.

They did the proactive work in areas their audience valued—like inclusive sizing and significantly increasing diverse representation in their marketing.

This pre-existing brand equity functioned as a strategic shield for bolder moves, giving them the credibility and latitude to take a calculated, provocative risk.

4. The "Proactive" Execution and Anticipated Backlash

The "bold, playful" double entendre—playing on "genes/jeans"—was a calculated choice, not just a clever ad.

They intentionally deployed a polarizing concept.

They likely knew that two things would happen:

1. A "vocal minority" outside their core audience would be outraged.

2. Their actual target audience would see that outrage as an "overreaction," driving even deeper brand affinity.

And that is exactly what happened.

The backlash was quick and strong, coming from clear, expected groups:

• Academics and Scholars: Argued the "genes" pun was "historically loaded" and activated "troubling historical associations" with the American eugenics movement.

• Civil Rights Advocates: Focused on the choice of Sweeney (a blonde, blue-eyed white woman) as a "coded promotion of eugenics" and a "celebration of whiteness."

• Social Media Activists: Amplified these critiques, labeling the ad a "dog whistle to the rise of conservatism."

5. The "Proactive" Response: Ignoring the Firestorm

This is the most critical part.

In the face of this firestorm, a typical brand—one stuck in Reactive Control—would have pulled the offending content, issued a public apology, and promised to do better.

American Eagle did the opposite. Their response was one of resolute inaction.

• The CEO Jay Schottenstein's directive to his executive team was to "remain calm and not comment."

• AE didn't craft a panicked apology. Instead, they had a team monitor social media data and survey actual customers to prove their strategy was working.

• When they finally spoke, they offered a calm, confident reply. They stuck to the campaign and reiterated its playful intent: "'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans' is, and always was, about the jeans... Her jeans. Her story."

They did not capitulate. They didn't react.

They trusted their proactive work.

6. The Business-Driving Results

This proactive strategy led to "record-breaking business growth".

• 700,000 new customers over the summer.

• Quarterly Earnings Per Share of $0.45, more than doubling analyst estimates.

• In the earnings call, Schottenstein credited the campaign, stating, "The iconic fall denim campaign with Sydney Sweeney affirms we are the American jeans brand. We saw record-breaking new customer acquisition and brand awareness cutting across age demographics and genders."

This is the power of Proactive Control.

American Eagle's leadership had the clarity, conviction, and data to remain unwavering in the face of backlash.

They knew what was right for the brand.

As Schottenstein stated, "You can't run from fear. We stand behind what we did."

And that's only something you can do when you're clear about how you should respond before a response is needed.

The Antidote: Your Two-Bouncer Policy

The difference between Cracker Barrel and American Eagle comes down to clarity, not their PR teams.

American Eagle has bouncers. Cracker Barrel doesn't.

The only way to escape the reactive trap is to create the Strategic Capacity to do the Germane Load work. You must carve out the "thinking space" to build the Proactive Control system for your brand.

That system takes the form of a Two-Bouncer Policy.

Bouncer #1: The Vision (Filters the 'What')

This bouncer is the output of Proactive Control. He stands at the main gate of your company and filters opportunity.

• The Question: "Does this opportunity, this project, or this meeting get us closer to our intended destination?"

• The Bounce: Strategic drift, new product lines that dilute focus, and wrong-agenda meetings. This bouncer is your primary defense against the Extraneous Cognitive Load that creates overwhelm.

Bouncer #2: The Brand (Filters the 'How')

This bouncer stands at the door of execution. The opportunity may have passed Bouncer #1 (it's strategically relevant), but now it must pass the "how" test.

• The Question: "Does how we execute this—this tactic, this message, this tone of voice—express our unique identity and build preference in a way only we can?"

• The Bounce: Generic ad creative, inconsistent messaging, and the brand-damaging panic of Reactive Control.

Strategy connects today's actions to tomorrow's goals. By nature, it must be proactive, and that requires a system.

It's the ultimate tool for leverage. It's the filter that kills the wrong-agenda meetings and protects your brain's finite resources. It is the only thing that allows you to shift from a Firefighter to a Strategic Planner.

Your calendar is a direct, honest diagnostic of your brand's clarity. A bloated calendar is a symptom of a bloated strategy.

Stop overloading your time.

Start maximizing your strategy.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Your calendar is a diagnostic. It's either a tool for proactive growth or a record of your reactive state. If you're ready to stop the "death by a thousand safe decisions" and escape the Reactive Control trap, grab a free 15-minute slot on my calendar and I'll help you see how you can get your own bouncers.

Let's talk about strategy.

Not the pristine, unread PDF you file away after the annual off-site. Not the five-year plan that's forgotten by the second quarter.

That’s strategy as an academic exercise. A ritual of producing a document.

And when strategy is treated as an academic exercise, it fails.

The main purpose of strategy is to provide a clear and useful framework for decision-making. One, to ensure that all daily activities add up to the outcome you want. And that those activities are the best way to achieve your goal, given your current resources.

It's about ensuring your tactics—like marketing campaigns, product updates, and sales calls—work together. That they push in the same direction. That they add up to something bigger than the sum of their parts.

A Lesson from the Battlefield

The modern idea of strategy is younger than you might think.

The term entered military language in the 1770s. But it was the French theorist, Comte de Guibert, who shaped it into the form we recognize today.

In his 1772 A General Essay on Tactics, he saw that winning a war required more than just winning individual skirmishes. He separated "elementary tactics" (actions on the battlefield) from what he called grand tactics. Grand tactics focus on coordinating big, semi-independent army divisions. Divisions that, even though working independently, aim to reach a single war goal together.

Grand tactics linked the army's daily actions to its long-term goals. It was the bridge between fighting a battle and winning the war.

What Guibert called "grand tactics," we now call strategy.

The Scrapbook vs. The Playbook

When this concept was brought into business, it was simplified.

Historian Alfred Chandler Jr., shaped by WWII usage, created a simple split based on time horizons. He wrote, “Strategic decisions are concerned with the long-term health of the enterprise. Tactical decisions deal more with the day-to-day activities.”

This split—strategy is long-term, tactics are short-term—is where things go wrong.

The real work isn't categorizing tasks into strategy and tactic buckets. It's ensuring you are consciously and consistently moving in the right direction.

Every organization, whether it realizes it or not, finds itself in one of two situations:

1. The outcome dictates the tactics.

2. The tactics dictate the outcome.

This is the most critical fork in the road. Most companies take the second path. They do what seems urgent or opportunistic. Their business becomes a scrapbook of disconnected activities. And their future is simply the accidental sum of those random tactics.

The best companies do the opposite. They start with a clear, defined outcome and build a strategic playbook to achieve it. They call the right plays based on the conditions on the field.

Strategy is the practice of using your playbook to ensure your goals drive your daily actions.

This is especially critical when building a brand.

Here are three examples of brands that traded their scrapbook for a playbook.

1. Volvo: A Playbook Written in a Single Word: Safety

Volvo highlights how focusing on one goal with dedication can build a strong brand.

For nearly a century, their playbook has been guided by one word: safety.

The Origin Story (The "Why")

The strategy began with the founders' mandate in 1927. A 1930s sales handbook declared: "Cars are driven by people.

Therefore, the guiding principle behind everything we make at Volvo is—and must remain—safety". This was far more than a tagline; it was a "constitutional principle" born from necessity. Early imported cars struggled in Sweden's tough climate.

For Volvo, durability and safety were essential for survival.

Product as Proof (The "How")

The Three-Point Seatbelt: Before 1959, seatbelts had a flawed, two-point lap design. And itt often caused severe internal injuries. In 1958, Volvo brought on Nils Bohlin. He was an engineer from Saab's aircraft division, known for his work on ejector seat harnesses. In just a year, he created the game-changing three-point seatbelt.

The "Open Patent" Masterstroke: Volvo faced a choice. They either had to license the seatbelt patent for a fortune or give it away. In an act of "strategic altruism," they made the patent available to all manufacturers for free. They did this specifically to prevent another company from owning it and restricting its use. This choice turned a product feature into a legendary brand story. And secured Volvo's strong reputation for safety.

Data-Driven Vindication: The invention initially faced skepticism. The turning point came in 1967 when Volvo published its "28,000 Accident Report." It used data to provide irrefutable proof that the belt reduced fatalities and serious injuries by 50-60%. The data proved to be the ultimate persuasive tool and led to global adoption.

Marketing as Evidence (The "How It's Told")

The Authentic Message: Volvo's most powerful marketing is an extension of its engineering ethos. The "Volvo Saved My Life Club" functions as more than a traditional ad campaign. It’s a platform for testimonials from people who survived terrible accidents. It transforms technical jargon into tangible, life-saving outcomes. And it builds a level of trust that is nearly impossible to replicate.

The Cautionary Tale: The strength of this identity was proven when Volvo strayed from it. In 2011, the company sought to compete with German luxury brands. They introduced the "Naughty Volvo" campaign for their S60 sedan. On its own website, "Safety" was demoted from the first priority to fourth or fifth. The market reacted with confusion. Publications diagnosed Volvo with an "identity crisis". This episode serves as a textbook example of the danger of abandoning associations customers have with a brand.

The Modern Evolution: Today, Volvo has expanded its definition of safety to remain relevant. In 2021, it connected its heritage to sustainability. It reframed climate change as "The Ultimate Safety Test." arguing that no airbag can protect us from a collapsing ecosystem. This illustrates how a living strategy can evolve and relate a century-old belief to modern issues.

2. Graza: The Playbook for the Modern Home Cook

Graza’s success is a textbook case of a modern disruptor identifying a "gaping hole" in a stagnant market.

Their playbook had a clear aim: to make high-quality, single-origin olive oil an easy and everyday tool for home cooks.

The Strategic Pivot (The "Why")

The idea started with co-founder Andrew Benin's time in Spain. There, he noticed people using olive oil freely as a kitchen staple, not just as a fancy condiment.

His initial plan was to import high-end oils. But a pivotal meeting with the executive chef of Michelin-starred Gramercy Tavern, Mike Anthony, changed everything. Anthony's blunt advice was, "Don't start another boutique luxury olive oil company ... we need good olive oil for everyone".

This course-correcting directive focused the company on the massive opportunity of creating a "palatable premium" product for the mass market.

Simplifying the Complex (The "How")

"Sizzle" & "Drizzle": Graza skipped the confusing terms of olive oil, like "first cold pressed" and "extra virgin." Instead, they made it simple with a clear choice based on use. "Sizzle," made from mature Picual olives, is a mellow workhorse for cooking. "Drizzle," made from young, early-harvest Picual olives, is a punchy, peppery finishing oil. This act of "consumer education disguised as branding" sold confidence and encouraged liberal use.

The Squeeze Bottle Masterstroke: The brand's most potent weapon was its packaging. It was inspired by professional chefs who transfer their oil to squeeze bottles. It offered a genuine functional improvement. It solved frustrations like messy caps and overpouring. And it acted as a "Trojan horse" for the brand's entire philosophy. The playful act of squeezing encouraged home cooks to use it more freely. And visually, it signaled that Graza represented a modern and approachable brand. This unique design made the bottle a "status symbol" on social media. It turned every user's kitchen counter into a quiet advertisement.

Community Tactics for an "Everyday" Brand (The "How It's Told")

The "Home Cook" Influencer Strategy: Graza’s well-known organic blitz boosted its unpretentious image. They didn’t seed their product to elite, Michelin-star chefs to build a top-down brand. Instead, they chose a curated list of nano and micro-influencers. These creators felt like real, relatable home cooks. Their outreach was disarmingly simple, often starting with a DM like, "How much easier would life be if olive oil came in a squeezy bottle?". This "no strings attached" approach built real excitement.

Transparency as an Unpretentious Act: The way Graza handled its 2022 holiday fulfillment crisis was a powerful reinforcement of its brand. A stuffy, corporate brand would issue a formal press release. Graza’s CEO, Andrew Benin, instead sent a candid, direct, and heartfelt email to over 35,000 customers. He took full responsibility for the failure in a human way. This "redemption through honest storytelling" turned a failure into a chance to build trust. It strengthened its image as a simple, unpretentious brand.

3. Mailchimp: The Playbook for the Underdog

Strategy is relative to the competitive landscape.

Mailchimp started as a bootstrapped side project and grew into a $12 billion giant. Its success came from a clear plan focused on one goal: empowering the underdog.

The Strategic Context (The "Why")

To understand Mailchimp's genius, you must look at the email marketing landscape of the late 2000s.

The market was mainly controlled by AWeber and Constant Contact. Users often found their tools "clunky" and "outdated." This made it hard for micro-entrepreneurs, artists, and bloggers to connect. They felt the software wasn't designed for them.

Mailchimp’s strategy grew from the soil of these customer complaints.

Personality as a Moat (The "How"):

The Voice of a Partner: Mailchimp’s brand voice was a radical departure from the B2B-speak of its rivals. Their official goal was to "speak like the experienced and compassionate business partner we wish we'd had." This plainspoken, witty tone made intimidating concepts feel approachable.

Designing for Emotion: This approach is best shown in the product's user experience. The most famous example was the animated "high-five" that appeared after a user sent an email campaign. This choice was both empathetic and strategic. It turned a stressful moment into a shared celebration.

The Freemium Gambit (The "How it Won"):

A Mission-Driven Business Model: For eight years, Mailchimp was a paid service. In 2009, the company launched its "Forever Free" plan, a move uncommon at the time. The move, called "Power to the People," showed their mission to empower the underdog.

Explosive, Profitable Growth: The market's response was staggering. Within a single year, Mailchimp's user base grew fivefold, from 85,000 to 450,000, and its profits doubled. Mailchimp built customer success into its revenue model. The goal was to help free users succeed, so they would eventually move to a paid plan.

A Framework for Action: How to Build Your Playbook

Moving from a scrapbook of tactics to a strategic playbook requires a shift in thinking. Instead of a document you write once, strategy becomes a framework you use to call the right plays every day.

Here's how you can start to build that playbook:

1. Define Your Goal Line: What is the single, non-negotiable outcome you are trying to achieve? Go beyond revenue targets. Define what winning looks like in one clear, simple sentence. (e.g., For Volvo, it was: "Become synonymous with safety.")

2. Audit Your Current Plays: Look at your team's top three priorities this month. Can you draw a straight, undeniable line from each activity back to your defined outcome? Or are they running plays for a different game?

3. Identify "Scrapbook" Projects: What current activities use phrases like "it's a good opportunity" or "it's a quick win"? These are often tactics in search of an outcome and the first sign you're building a scrapbook, not executing a playbook.

4. Create Your "One-Question" Filter: Based on your outcome, what is the single question every new initiative must answer to get a "yes"? This becomes your most powerful tool for deciding which plays to call. (e.g., For Graza: "Does this make high-quality oil more unpretentious and effortless for home cooks?")

The real work is to obsessively use that filter to align every action with your intended destination. The result is a powerful, compounding force. One that uses strategy to turn tactics into a focused, undeniable outcome.

That is how you build a brand that endures.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is your team's hard work adding up to a clear destination, or is it just filling the pages of a scrapbook? It's easy to get caught in a cycle of executing good tactics that feel productive but ultimately lead nowhere. If you're struggling to connect your daily activities to a single, powerful outcome, reply to this email. I’ll set up a free 15-minute call to help you start turning your scrapbook into a playbook.

An idea that survives a meeting unchallenged isn't strong. It's may untested.

This is a dangerous illusion. Feeling aligned in a boardroom often gets confused with validation. This can create a false sense of certainty as a project progresses. But certainty is the enemy of strategy.

It creates the blind spot where a fatal flaw can hide in plain sight.

A small, perfect example of this is OpenAI's new ad.

The ad has a guy asking ChatGPT, "I need a recipe that says, 'I like you but want to play it cool.'"

he serves the recipe. All seems to be going well. But I couldn't help but think the woman tasting the dish was feigning enjoyment. Her look was giving "I'm just going to pretend to like it so I don't insult him" vibes.

It made me think: Wouldn't it be funny if the recipe were bad?

So I went back and looked at the on-screen instructions. And there it was. Two errors that any decent cook would spot in seconds.

You don't add tomatoes, then garlic. You sauté the garlic first. Then add tomatoes.

You don't add lemon juice while a dish is on the heat. You add lemon juice after you turn off the heat.

OpenAI meant to highlight how ChatGPT can fit into people's lives. But it displayed a common business mistake.

The Consensus Trap: Why a Winning Idea Can Be Your Biggest Blind Spot

The real issue here goes deeper than AI.

It’s a classic leadership blind spot that new technology has put on steroids: failing to stress-test your own narrative against reality.

I call this failure "The Consensus Trap."

It's what happens when a team falls in love with its own story.

An idea seems so powerful that a consensus forms around it. Everyone buys in. And once this happens, the story becomes shielded from the hard questions that would reveal a fatal flaw.

This is a widespread threat because it's a systemic breakdown that can rot a business from multiple angles. A story needs to be checked against a few unforgiving realities:

• The Reality of Your Data: Does the evidence truly support the story we're telling ourselves?

• The Reality of Culture: How will this be seen by the community it's meant for?

• The Reality of Expertise: Does this idea ignore a basic rule that any seasoned expert would know?

• The Reality of User Behavior: Does this brilliant solution solve a problem anyone actually has?

When these checks are missing, the results range from embarrassing to disastrous. And this failure often starts deep in the strategy room, even when you're drowning in data.

I saw this firsthand when I consulted Kohl's.

Every year we would hold the Kohl's Symposium, a week-long meeting where we would create the strategy for the next year. It was heavily data-driven, often with three or four thick binders of research we had to digest beforehand.

It was my first year there. In the room were the CMO, the Head of Advertising, the Head of Research, other leaders, and the consumer insights team. By the final day, we developed a powerful story.

On the last day, I raised my hand. "I think we don't actually have the data to prove this point."

The room pushed back: "Yes, we do."

I walked them back through the specific data points, and you could see them realize it. "Oh, crap."

The data told a different tale, but we loved our story. We drifted apart slowly, without even noticing. The last day was a scramble to rewrite the narrative.

Our detour didn't take us far from where we should've been. The end result just required some tweaks. But they were important tweaks that changed the outcome of our strategy.

And we could've missed them all because we almost skipped that final Data Integrity Check.

This breakdown is not confined to boardrooms.

It can happen in public.

And when it does, the consequences can be disastrous.

Walmart: When Commerce Clashes with Commemoration

Remember the uproar about Walmart's "Juneteenth Celebration Edition" ice cream?

It seemed obvious how bad an idea it was from the outside.

But to understand this mistake, you have to see the logic that seemed to make sense inside their walls.

The failure began when Juneteenth became a federal holiday. For a retail machine like Walmart, this triggered a standard process: the Corporate Holiday Playbook.

Their line of thinking was simple: We make themed products for the 4th of July or Pride Month. Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. So, we should create a Juneteenth product. This thinking completely missed the bigger picture.

The fatal error was miscategorizing the event.

Walmart treated Juneteenth as a commercial "holiday" instead of what it is: a solemn "commemoration" of the end of slavery in the U.S. That framing mistake, made at the start, guaranteed an offensive result.

The execution made it worse. The ice cream was a "Great Value" product, a brand known for budget pricing. This cheapened the very idea the product claimed to honor.

When photos of the ice cream hit social media, the public immediately rejected it.

The backlash went beyond the product itself. It became a furious critique of "performative allyship**"**—showing support in a superficial way without taking real action. The phrase "profiting from pain" started trending, capturing how people saw Walmart's motives.

But the story gets worse.

The depth of blindness showed when the public found out what Walmart’s teams had overlooked.

A Black, female-owned ice cream brand, Creamalicious, was already sold in Walmart stores. And one of its main flavors was "Right As Rain Red Velvet Cheesecake." The exact flavor profile Walmart copied.

This news turned disappointment into real anger.

The teams were so focused on creating a product that they failed to look at the products they already sold. And it looked like a deliberate attempt to erase a Black-owned business.

To complete the fiasco, a small "TM" symbol was spotted next to the word "Juneteenth" on the carton. The public saw a corporate giant trying to own a piece of Black history.

Walmart was forced into a humiliating public apology and had to pull the product.

It's a perfect example of a failure to check for cultural perception.

It's a costly mistake that one final Culture Check could have avoided. They just needed to ask one simple question to the right people: "How will the community we claim to honor see this?""

Boeing: When the Business Case Overrules the Safety Case

The failure at Walmart was a PR disaster. But when a company's internal story becomes so powerful that it ignores its own technical experts, the consequences can be devastating.

The story of the Boeing 737 MAX is the ultimate case study in the failure of the Expert Knowledge Check.

The entire 737 MAX program was built on a simple business idea. Facing tough competition from Airbus, Boeing's leaders decided not to design a new plane but to update the trusted 737.

The key part of this idea was that pilots would not need any new, costly simulator training. This was a huge selling point, but it became an unbreakable rule that shaped every decision that followed.

The business story became an echo chamber, a truth so powerful it couldn't be challenged, even by physics.

The collision with reality began with an engineering problem.

The new, larger engines didn't fit under the wings. Engineers solved this by moving them forward and higher up. This change had major effects on how the plane flew, causing the nose to pitch up and increasing the risk of a stall.

Critically, this meant the plane no longer flew like its predecessor, breaking the core promise.

Forced to preserve the "no new training" rule, the engineers turned to a software patch for a hardware problem: the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). MCAS was designed to automatically push the plane's nose down, making the MAX feel like the older 737.

To make sure this new system didn't require training, Boeing made a series of devastating decisions:

• They ignored experts on redundancy. The system relied on a single sensor, a known weak spot on airplanes. An internal engineer questioned this three years before the first crash, but the warning was ignored.

• They ignored their own flight test experts. When testing showed the problem was worse than they thought, MCAS's power was increased fourfold. The initial safety analysis, which called the risk "almost impossible," was never updated for this much more aggressive system.

• They ignored the most important experts: the pilots. To protect the business plan, Boeing deliberately left any mention of MCAS out of the flight manuals. Pilots never knew this powerful system existed. It was a fact they hid to protect their story.

The final, brutal reality check came in the skies over Indonesia and Ethiopia.

A single faulty sensor caused MCAS to trigger in two nearly identical crashes. It made the plane's nose go down repeatedly. The pilots were fighting a powerful, hidden enemy they knew nothing about.

In the second crash, the crew followed the right emergency procedure. But MCAS had already put the plane into such an extreme position that they couldn't physically recover.

Not doing a proper Expert Knowledge Check cost 346 lives. It also caused a 20-month grounding of the fleet and cost Boeing more than $20 billion.

The 737 MAX was only cleared to fly again after the FAA required the very thing that the program was designed to avoid: full pilot training in a simulator.

When we buy into a narrative, even mounds of evidence can blind us to reality.

Quibi: The $1.75 Billion Answer to a Question No One Asked

The failures at Walmart and Boeing show what happens when a plan's execution goes horribly wrong. But an echo chamber can produce another kind of disaster: a flawed plan executed perfectly.

The spectacular, $1.75 billion collapse of Quibi is a masterclass in the failure of the User Context Check.

Quibi acted more like a big gamble than a startup. It was created by two industry giants: Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and Silicon Valley icon Meg Whitman. Their idea was to create premium, "movie-quality" shows with a twist. Each episode would come in "quick bites" under 10 minutes for on-the-go mobile viewing.

The internal story was powerful. It focused on a big, untapped market of commuters wanting quality content for their "in-between moments.""

This belief, backed by the founders' powerful reputations, created a bubble where their idea seemed unstoppable.

Before a single user saw the app, Quibi raised an incredible $1.75 billion. It was the exact opposite of how successful startups work today. It was a massive, fully-formed product built on an unproven idea, with no room to learn or change course.

The entire venture was a solution designed for a user who, it turned out, did not exist. The collision with reality was immediate.

The Content Paradox: Quibi bet everything on "movie-quality" production, committing $1.1 billion to its first-year content budget. This went against how people actually use their phones for video. While Quibi invested in Hollywood polish, platforms like TikTok were exploding by championing the opposite: raw, authentic, user-made content. Lacking the immersive quality of Netflix and the participatory nature of TikTok, Quibi's shows were a solution without a problem.

Anti-Social by Design: In a now-famous disastrous decision, Quibi launched without letting users take screenshots or share clips. This choice was made to please Hollywood partners worried about piracy. It walled off their content from the engine of modern digital culture: the meme and the viral clip. It was something people expected from short-form formats. And they failed to grasp that in today's world, the value of content goes up the more people share it.

Ignoring the Real Competition: Quibi's leaders insisted they didn't compete with free platforms like YouTube and TikTok. This was a fatal blind spot. They failed to understand that all platforms compete for people's time and attention. By charging $4.99 a month, Quibi put up a huge barrier when users already had infinite free content. The market's rejection was brutal: after the 90-day free trial, as few as 8% of users paid for the service.

The result was a total collapse.

Launched in April 2020, the company shut down six months later, in October 2020.

The failure of Quibi is a cautionary tale of what happens when a powerful idea is developed in a bubble. This $1.75 billion lesson reminds us that the important question has shifted from "Can we build it?" to "Does anyone actually want it?"

How to Escape the Consensus Trap

From a flawed recipe to a flawed airplane, the root cause is the same: a narrative that was never stress tested against reality.

Your advantage will be found not in generating more ideas. But in a better process for ensuring your best ideas are built on reality.

Here are three questions to build your "final check" system:

1. Who is our designated "Red Team"? Assign a person or small group the explicit duty to challenge the prevailing narrative. Ask them to poke holes, question the data, and voice the uncomfortable truths. If everyone in the room is a cheerleader, you're flying blind.

2. What reality are we checking against? Before finalizing any decision, explicitly define your "check." Is this a Data Check ("Does the evidence still support this story?")? A Cultural Check ("How will this be perceived by the communities it affects?")? An Expert Check ("Does this idea ignore a basic rule a seasoned expert would know?")? Or a User Check ("Does this brilliant solution solve a problem anyone actually has?")?

3. Are we defending the idea or the goal? Teams inevitably fall in love with their solutions. The final check must force the question: "Is this idea truly the best way to achieve our objective, or are we just committed to it because it's our idea?"

AI, data, and brainstorms can give you a plausible narrative. A rigorous process of checks and balances ensures it is a winning one.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is there a strategy in your business right now that feels great internally but hasn't been pressure-tested against the real world? Our Strategy Clinic is a 90-minute session designed to be that objective, expert "final check" before you commit. Reply to this email, and we can set up a brief call to discuss if it's the right fit for your problem. It's the one meeting that can save you a dozen bad ones.

You closed the quarter.

You’re looking at a spreadsheet. And reviewing the numbers on customer acquisition, sales volume, and repeat purchases. The pressure is already on for Q4.

The board is asking the same question they always do: “How do we get more?”

More leads. More conversions. More transactions.

You’re stuck on a treadmill, perpetually trying to fill a leaky bucket.

This relentless focus on the transaction is the single greatest threat to your growth. It’s the invisible force that makes you feel commoditized. It pushes you into a price war you can’t win.

The most powerful brands understand a fundamental truth.

They aren’t in the business of transactions.

They’re in the business of trust.

The Transaction Trap vs. The Trust Cycle

Every business operates in one of two modes: the Transaction Trap or the Trust Cycle.

The Transaction Trap is where most companies live.

It’s a worldview that sees customers as entries on a balance sheet. The goal is singular: secure the sale.

Marketing’s job is to generate leads, and the product’s job is to be “good enough” not to be returned. The relationship is conditional. It ends ends when the credit card swipe gets approved.

The Trust Cycle is a completely different operating system. It’s a strategic framework built on a simple, powerful loop:

1. The Promise: Through marketing, you create an expectation. You don’t just sell a product; you make a specific promise about the value and outcome it will deliver. You turn a latent need into a focused desire.

2. The Proof: Through your product and experience, you fulfill, or exceed, that expectation. Every touchpoint reinforces your promise being true.

Marketing creates the potential for trust. Your operations actualize it.

When you complete this cycle, you build customer preference.

This strategic asset is the engine of sustainable growth. And you can build it in more than one way.

Three Paths to Building Trust: Service, Product, and System

Here are three top brands that avoided the Transaction Trap. They did this by using the Trust Cycle in unique ways.

1. The Service Model: Zappos

In the late 1990s, the idea of selling shoes online was considered foolish.

E-commerce was new, consumer trust was low, and the friction was immense. How could a customer possibly know the fit, feel, or comfort of a shoe without trying it on?

This was the central problem Zappos was founded to solve. They realized they weren't just selling shoes. They were building trust where it didn’t exist.

Their promise, wasn't merely about selection or price.

It was a daring promise to deliver an unmatched, totally risk-free shopping experience. And to deliver on this, they engineered their entire operation around three pillars of tangible, costly, and irrefutable proof.

First was the legendary 365-day return policy.

In an industry where restrictive 30-day policies were the norm, this was a revolutionary guarantee. It instantly signaled confidence. And it reduced purchase anxiety.

The policy was also psychologically astute. It leveraged the "Endowment Effect." The longer a customer possessed the shoes, the more they felt like their shoes. And it made them less likely to make a return.

Second, Zappos pioneered free shipping, both ways, with no minimums.

This was a strategic decision to replicate and improve upon the physical retail experience. It turned a customer's living room into a private, risk-free showroom.

CEO Tony Hsieh reframed this enormous cost not as a logistical expense, but as a marketing expense. It was a direct investment in the customer experience.

Finally, while competitors hid their contact info, Hsieh viewed the telephone as "one of the best branding devices out there."

They placed their 24/7 toll-free number on the top of every single page. And they staffed their call center with empowered, unscripted agents. Their sole aim was to "Deliver WOW.""

This led to legendary stories that became viral marketing assets. The 10-hour and 43-minute customer service call. The the time a rep overnighted a free pair of shoes to a best man in time for a wedding. And sending flowers to a grieving customer.

More than just nice gestures, they provided the emotional proof of the brand's promise.

The financial results of this trust-based strategy were staggering.

Revenue grew from $1.6 million in 2000 to over $1 billion by 2008. And incredible 75% of sales came from repeat customers.

Zappos found that its most profitable customers were also the ones who returned the most items. They recognized that a smooth, easy return builds the strongest trust.

They turned what other companies saw as a loss into their single greatest driver of customer lifetime value.

2. The Product Model: Miele

Miele, a German appliance brand, stands for quality.

For over a century, they have kept a promise of pure, measurable excellence in their products.

Their motto, "Immer Besser" (Forever Better), has guided them since their first products in 1899.

Miele boldly expresses its philosophy in a core promise: to design and test appliances for a 20-year lifespan. This stance challenges commoditization. And it justifies a higher price with a strong focus on durability.

It is not based on a single feature but on a system of deeply ingrained manufacturing choices.

First, the 20-year claim is supported by specific, transparent, and rigorous testing procedures.

Miele is the only manufacturer in its industry to test its core products to this standard. Their washing machines, for example, get tested for up to 10,000 hours, simulating 5 wash cycles a week for 20 years.

This transforms a bold marketing claim into a verifiable statement of engineering intent.

Second, Miele ensures top quality by keeping a strong grip on vertical integration.

In an era of outsourcing, Miele manufactures critical components in its own factories. This allows them to engineer a complete, holistic system with a 20-year lifespan as the target. It removes reliance on third-party suppliers and the failures they can cause.

Finally, their commitment is demonstrated in a final, costly step that separates them from mass-market competitors.

Miele does not rely on random spot-checks. Instead, every appliance undergoes a comprehensive functional test before leaving the factory.

By making an audacious promise of longevity and engineering their entire manufacturing process to deliver on it, they escape the Transaction Trap.

They built their premium brand not through slogans, but by turning engineering integrity into tangible, irrefutable proof.

3. The System-Centric Model: Caterpillar (CAT)

For a global construction or mining company, a downed piece of equipment can be a financial catastrophe.

The cost is not just the repair bill. It's the idle work crews, the disrupted project timelines, and the potential for millions in contractual penalties. One industry analysis found that the true cost of downtime can be almost eight times the direct cost of the repair alone.

Caterpillar’s entire brand is built to solve this high-stakes problem.

Their promise transcends the physical product. It offers an integrated guarantee of maximum operational uptime.

To deliver on this, Caterpillar has built a formidable and deeply entrenched support ecosystem that it views as an "unparalleled advantage."

The proof of their uptime promise rests on two interconnected pillars.

First is the unmatched physical ecosystem, a competitive moat built over a century.

This includes a network of 160 independent dealers in 193 countries. They ensure a local presence in even the most remote areas. This dealer network relies on a huge global parts distribution system. It’s designed to meet one key goal: delivering 98 percent of parts orders within 24 hours.

It’s a clear, measurable promise. This assurance helps customers trust that a breakdown won’t derail their business for days or weeks.

The second pillar is a sophisticated digital system that transforms the physical network from reactive to proactive.

Caterpillar has over 1.5 million connected assets in the field. It's the largest fleet in the industry, creating a colossal stream of real-time data. This data feeds a predictive analytics engine. It identifies patterns and anticipates component failures before they occur.

This lets dealers move from a "break-fix" model to a better "predict-and-prevent" approach. They can schedule maintenance at the right time to avoid big failures.

The ultimate proof of this partnership model is found in how they leverage this data.

In one instance, a quarry customer wanted to buy more trucks to meet production targets. A Caterpillar advisor reviewed the fleet’s telematics data. They found that the trucks were only loaded to 60 percent of their capacity.

The advisor suggested operator training instead of focusing on a new equipment sale. This way, they could better use their current assets.

This is the Trust Cycle in its most profound form.

The lesson from Caterpillar is that the most durable brand is built by evolving from a simple vendor into an indispensable partner.

They sell an outcome: uptime. And they have built a powerful, integrated system to prove they can deliver it, even when it costs them a short-term sale.

Are You Building a Brand on Trust?

Moving from the Transaction Trap to the Trust Cycle requires a fundamental shift in thinking. It starts with a more strategic line of questioning. Here is a four-step process to diagnose your own brand:

1. Define Your Promise: What is the core problem you truly solve for your customer? Go beyond your product features. Define the specific, tangible outcome you promise to deliver.

2. Diagnose the Doubts: Where does that promise typically break down in your industry, or even in your own process? Identify the specific points of friction, failure, or frustration. Ask, Where are customers likely to lose faith?

3. Engineer Your Proof: How can you design tangible proof at those exact points of doubt? What operational choices, policies, or systems can you build to systematically eliminate that friction? How can youprove your promise is real?

4. Systematize Your Proof: How can you reinforce your promise across every single customer touchpoint? Look beyond a single policy or feature. Ask how your website, your packaging, your sales process, and your post-sale support all work in concert to prove your promise is true.

Your customers are the engine of your business. But that engine runs on trust, not transactions.

Focusing on the transaction is like focusing on the exhaust fumes. It’s a byproduct, not the fuel.

The real work is to obsessively build, maintain, and scale the cycle of promise and proof. The result of this work is the creation of your company’s single most valuable asset: a deep well of customer trust.

This trust functions as a tangible asset. It becomes a competitive moat that protects you from price wars and new market entrants. It’s the engine that turns one-time buyers into repeat customers.

This is how you build a brand that endures.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is your brand a financial asset that builds value over time, or an expense that needs to be constantly fed with ad spend?

If you're not 100% certain of the answer, that's often the first sign of a brand stuck in the Transaction Trap. Respond to this email and I’ll set up a 15-minute call to help you start to pinpoint your single biggest opportunity to build trust.

You’ve seen it happen before.

The marketing team, after months of work, unveils the new brand strategy. The CEO loves it. The deck is emailed to the leadership team with a note: “Team, please review and start using this.”

And then… silence.

The plan is approved at the top but never spreads through the company. The sales team goes back to its old deck. Customer support keeps using their old scripts.

In a few months, the big new strategy is just a new coat of paint in the marketing department. The huge investment has done nothing for the business.

This isn't a failure of vision. It's a failure of integration.

It happens because of a deep misunderstanding of where a brand actually lives.

A successful brand isn't owned by marketing. It's adopted by the entire leadership team and must touch every single department.

Why Your Brand Must Touch Every Department

A common and dangerous idea is that branding only lives in marketing. The reality is that your brand is being built—or broken—in every single customer interaction.

A customer doesn’t have a separate relationship with your marketing, sales, and finance teams. They have one relationship with your company.

Think about their journey. They might see your ad (Marketing). Then, they could talk to a salesperson (Sales). Next, they get the product (Operations) and receive an invoice (Finance). A month later, they might call for help (Support).

If these interactions feel disconnected or out of sync, the customer gets confused.

And a confused customer won't buy. They can't prefer a brand they don't understand.

Every department plays a role in how a customer sees your brand.

Your brand isn't what you say it is. It's what your customers experience.

To build a brand that drives growth, every team must understand how their actions shape that experience.

The Fatal Flaw of the Monologue

The main reason brand strategies fail to spread is because they are treated as a monologue.

This is when a message is dictated from one group and handed down to everyone else. It’s an old way of thinking from a "command-and-control" style of management.

In this model, the brand plan is treated like a finished product: a manual to be sent out. Structurally, the monologue reinforces the exact departmental silos you are trying to break. It keeps the "thinkers" in one department and the "doers" in others. This creates a gap between planning and reality.

The evidence proves this model is a categorical failure. A study by Professor Robert Kaplan and consultant David Norton found that 95% of employees don’t know or understand their company’s strategy.

Sending a plan down from the top simply does not work.

Start the Dialogue with Your Leadership Team

Creating this kind of consistency doesn't mean you need input from every single employee. That isn't practical. The solution starts with your leadership team. Brand consistency is built from the top down, not the bottom up.

The answer is to create a dialogue among your leadership team. Involve your department heads from the start. Make them co-owners.

Choosing to reject the monologue is important. It stops the strong principles of human commitment from taking root. By presenting a finished plan, it robs your department heads of the chance to invest their own labor and fails to create the very foundation of true buy-in.

The psychology behind the dialogue is simple but powerful. Research has proven that people commit to what they help create. This is driven by two key ideas:

• The IKEA Effect: This is our tendency to place a much higher value on things we helped build ourselves. The effort we put in makes us love the result more. A brand monologue robs your leaders of this chance to invest their own work.

• Psychological Ownership: When leaders help create the brand strategy, they feel a sense of ownership over it. The brand is no longer "marketing's brand." It becomes "our brand." This feeling that something is "MINE" is the foundation of buy-in. It motivates them to protect the brand and see it succeed.

This isn't just a "soft" goal. It drives real business results. Research from Gallup shows that highly engaged teams are 21% more profitable.

Equip Teams, Don’t Overwhelm Them

Once your leadership team is on the same page, the next step is to share the strategy with their departments.

One of the biggest mistakes here is overwhelming people with too much information.

A complete brand strategy manual is often a dense, complex document. That’s by design. A proper strategy isn't just for today's problems; it's built to scale with your business.

It must cover all possible scenarios, meaning much of it might not seem relevant right now. But that content becomes critical as your company grows and objectives change. The manual is a durable asset for making high-level strategic decisions.

This is why handing the entire manual over to your teams is a mistake. It's overwhelming and creates confusion, not clarity. When people feel overwhelmed, they often do nothing at all.

A well-designed brand strategy is holographic. Each small piece reflects the whole.

The strategy works as a single, unified system. So, you can trust that when each team executes its part correctly, all the pieces will add up to create the cohesive brand experience you intended.

Good internal communication isn't about giving everyone all the information. It's about giving each team the information they need to do their job well.

• Your customer service team doesn’t need a detailed competitive analysis. But they do need to understand the core brand promises and how to uphold them in every conversation.

• Your sales team needs to know the three key differentiators that help them win deals. Not the specific rules for typography in a press release.

When you keep your communication clear and tailored to each role, it helps your teams deliver a consistent, on-brand experience.

The Evidence: The Price of a Monologue vs. The Power of a Dialogue

JCPenney: The Disaster of a C-Suite Monologue

In 2011, JCPenney was stuck in a "promotional death spiral."

They ran 590 separate sales in a single year.

The board hired Ron Johnson, the genius behind the Apple Store, as a retail savior. Johnson put in place a pure C-suite monologue. It was a radical "Fair and Square" pricing plan that got rid of coupons and sales.

He launched it everywhere without testing it first, reportedly saying, "We didn't test at Apple".

This monologue failed on two fronts.

Inside the company, there was no real training for employees, and the plan came with massive layoffs that cut the staff by 27%. This created a climate of fear.

Outside the company, the plan ignored its customers' psychology. It took away the "thrilling of the hunt" that its core shoppers loved. The result was a disaster.

Total sales fell by 24.8% in one year, and the company lost nearly $1 billion.

HP-Compaq: A Collision of Incompatible Cultures

The 2002 merger of HP and Compaq was a necessary gamble.

Both companies needed to survive the threat from Dell’s hyper-efficient model. But the way it was done was a flawed leadership monologue.

The core of the failure was the deep gap between HP's team-focused, engineering culture (the "HP Way") and Compaq's aggressive, sales-driven style.

The company did a great job planning the merger's operations. However, top leaders had trouble merging the two cultures for the long term. They effectively "declared victory too soon" after the deal closed.

This created a leadership gap. It allowed the two different cultures to go to "internal warfare," which paralyzed the new company.

The internal chaos was a gift to Dell. They used the distraction to become the market leader.

The merger became a brutal change that destroyed the company's culture and hurt tens of thousands of laid-off employees.

IBM: Rebuilding Through an Internal-First Dialogue

In the early 1990s, IBM was a collection of "competing fiefdoms."

Its different teams actively hid information from each other. This paralysis led to a financial disaster of nearly $16 billion in losses from 1991 to 1993.

In 1993, the new CEO Lou Gerstner knew the brand had to be rebuilt from the inside out. He rejected the plan to break up the company, saying its real power was in providing integrated solutions.

To achieve this, he started an internal-first dialogue to create "One IBM".

His most powerful move was to completely change the bonus system. From then on, bonuses were tied to the performance of the entire company, not just one team. This single change touched every department. It forced people to work together and made the "One IBM" brand a financial reality for every employee.

This internal alignment was then turned into a clear "playbook" for sales and marketing. This made sure the new brand was delivered consistently to the customer.

Meta: Using Dialogue to Evolve the Brand's "Operating System"

In early 2022, Meta was facing a stock collapse and intense competition. Its leadership started a cultural overhaul.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the new values as a "cultural operating system" designed to fix known problems.

This was a dialogue with reality.

For example, the old value "Focus on Impact" had created a culture of short-term thinking. Employees were trying to impress managers during six-month review cycles.

To fix this, leadership didn't just change the slogan to "Focus on Long-Term Impact." They hardwired the change into the company's structure. They moved to an annual performance review cycle.

They listened to how the brand was truly working inside the company. Then, they made the structural changes needed to help every team succeed.

A Framework for Action: 3 Questions for Your Leadership Team

The success of your brand depends on how well your leadership team is aligned. To start the right dialogue, sit down with your department heads and ask:

1. Who really owns the customer experience across our company? This question forces you to look beyond departments. Agreeing on shared ownership is the first step to breaking down silos.

2. Are we helping our teams or overwhelming them? Look at your internal communication. Are you giving each team the simple, relevant tools they need to succeed? Or are you burying them in information that isn't for them?

3. How do we turn our brand strategy into daily actions for each department? It’s not enough to talk about values. You must define the specific behaviors that bring those values to life for every team.

When every department head is bought in and every team is equipped, the brand becomes a powerful, unifying force. Internal confusion disappears. Customers get a clear and consistent experience that earns their preference, again and again.

This process highlights the concept of organizational neuroplasticity.

Just as a brain can learn and adapt, so too can a company's brand. A brand is not a static plan carved in stone. It's a living system that can evolve.

The dialogue you create is the mechanism for this learning. This means listening to feedback from your sales team and understanding frustrations from your support team. It allows your organization to get stronger, adapt to the market, and build a more resilient brand over time.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. If you're struggling to get your whole company on the same page, think about the one department that seems most disconnected from your brand's main message. That 'crack in the foundation' is often the hardest to see from the inside. If you'd like to get an expert outside perspective on it, just reply to this email and I’ll set up a 15-minute call to help you start thinking through your roadblock.

A single foundational assumption underpins every business.

We assume that our job is to solve a problem for a customer. And the better our solution, the more successful we'll be. But this overlooks the most critical question: is the problem worth solving?

The truth is, not all problems are equal. Focusing on the wrong one often results in failure.

The difference between a nice-to-have and a necessity depends on the problem you solve.

The Leaky Faucet Trap

The most dangerous mistake a leader can make is to build a brilliant solution to a problem that customers don't care about.

CB Insights conducted a major analysis of over 100 failed startups. They found that the top reason for failure, in 42% of cases, was creating something with "no market need."

This is the essence of the leaky faucet trap.

Every problem your customer faces is either a leaky faucet or a burst pipe.

The Leaky Faucet

A leaky faucet is a nuisance.

It's a low-friction inconvenience that is irritating. But not enough to stop a customer from accomplishing their main goal.

Businesses that fix leaky faucets are always in a tough spot. Fixing annoyances means that they:

• Suffer from long, slow sales cycles.

• Face price-sensitive customers.

• Are seen as "nice-to-have" and get cut when budgets are tight.

• Compete with many others over tiny features.

The Burst Pipe

A burst pipe, on the other hand, is a pressing problem.

It creates significant friction in a person's life. Without fixing it, they cannot get what they want.

Businesses that fix burst pipes become essential. They solve urgent needs, which means they:

• Have shorter sales cycles because customers are in pain.

• Can charge more because they offer a rescue instead of an improvement.

• Are seen as a "must-have" and become indispensable.

• Often create a whole new category for themselves.

This distinction isn't hypothetical. Focusing on a small drip versus a major flood has real-world consequences.

Juicero: Solving a Problem That Didn't Exist

Juicero is the perfect story of a company built to fix a leaky faucet.

It started with an amazing $120 million from top investors like Google Ventures. Its mission was to change home juicing with a sleek, Wi-Fi-connected machine.

Just 16 months later, the company was gone.

At its core, Juicero’s big mistake was simple: it was a brilliant solution to a problem that almost no one had.

The company built a wild, over-engineered machine. The Juicero Press first sold for a shocking $699. It was packed with custom metal parts and a motor strong enough to create "four tons of force." This was all marketing talk to make the machine seem important.

The problem was that "pain" it claimed to fix—the time and mess of making fresh juice—was a tiny issue for most people.

There were already great, simple options, like buying juice at the store. Or a cheaper homemade juicer.

Not many people saw a need to improve their current solutions.

And then a report from Bloomberg made everything fall apart. A simple video showed that you could squeeze the juice packs with your bare hands and get almost the same amount of juice in less time.

Juicero built a masterpiece to fix a tiny drip that most people were happy to ignore. It failed the moment everyone realized the crisis it claimed to solve was a fantasy.A video showed

Canva: The Design Chasm

In the early 2010s, small businesses had a real problem. They wanted to make professional posts and flyers for social media, but their tools were inadequate.

On one side, there was Adobe's Creative Suite.

These tools were powerful, but they were trapped behind two huge walls. The first was cost. A single program like Photoshop could cost $699, and the full suite cost thousands. The second wall was that it was too hard to use. It could take a college student a whole semester just to learn the basics.

On the other side, businesses used makeshift tools like Microsoft Word. This was always frustrating. People would spend hours on a design, only to see it fall apart when they opened the file on another computer.

And word wasn't great for professional printing. It often left an ugly white border and colors that didn't match.

The problem was clear: you could either pay for something too complex and expensive, or use something cheap that made you look unprofessional.

Canva’s solution tore down these walls piece by piece.

To fight Adobe's high cost, Canva was free to start and worked right in your web browser. No expensive software needed.

To solve the complexity problem, it got rid of the confusing menus and gave people a simple drag-and-drop tool.

It didn't make people face a scary blank page. Instead, it offered thousands of professional templates and a large library of photos.

Canva solved this burst pipe by creating a new, simple system for design. It rescued businesses from the high cost and frustration of trying to look good online.

Tinder: Engineering Serendipty

Before 2012, online dating was broken.

It was a burst pipe of frustration and emotional pain. For a whole generation of singles, finding a new connection has become a big challenge.

The big dating sites at the time, like Match.com, felt like homework. You had to write long, resume-like essays about yourself.

This created a problem with two sides. If you sent a message, you faced the painful fear of rejection. If you were a woman, you often faced a flood of unwanted and creepy messages. The whole process was draining and felt unsafe.

Tinder fixed this problem with two ideas.

The first was the "double opt-in." Two people could only talk after they both secretly said "yes" to each other. This one feature got rid of the fear of rejection and stopped the flood of unwanted messages.

The second idea was the "swipe." This simple, mobile-friendly action turned the hard work of looking for a date into a fast, fun, and even addictive game.

By making it less scary and easier to make the first move, Tinder built a system for modern connection.

Finding the Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

If you feel you’re always fighting to prove your worth, you may be selling a fix for a leaky faucet.

To make the shift, you have to learn to spot the real problems your customers have.

Ask these questions about what you sell:

• What happens if they do nothing? If your customer ignores the problem for another three months, what's the real damage? Is it a minor inconvenience (a leak)? Or does a key part of their life feel broken, cost them real money, or prevent them from reaching an important goal (a burst pipe)?

• What words do they use? When they talk about the problem, do they say, "This would be nice to have"? That's faucet language. Or do they use emotional words like "I'm so frustrated," "I'm stuck," or "This is a nightmare"?

• How do they prioritize spending on it? Is your solution a "fun money" purchase, the first thing to be cut when times are tight? Or is it a non-negotiable expense they would protect, like a utility bill or rent?

The strongest brands don't solve any problem. They solve pressing problems.

They have the ability to look past the small drips and search for the hidden crack that is about to cause a flood.

When you solve that problem, you're no longer just another choice in the market. You are the first call they want to make.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Are you spending all your time patching slow drips for your customers while their biggest problems go unsolved? It's easy to get trapped fixing the obvious, low-impact issues. Reply to this email, and let's set up a free 15-minute call to find the "burst pipe" your business solves.

Every great marketing disaster begins with a moment of complete certainty.

The team is gathered, buzzing with excitement over a campaign that’s been made perfect. The data supports it, every detail has been checked, and the entire room agrees on a single, powerful truth: this is the one. It feels unstoppable, a clear path to winning.

But this perfect plan, checked and approved, has forgotten the only vote that actually matters: the customer's.

The Curse of Knowing Too Much

You live and breathe your product.

You've seen all the data. But this deep focus creates a dangerous bias.

You start with customer insights, but then the process turns inward.

Raw truths are filtered through company jargon and goals. Agreement is built as the idea is passed around. By the end, the work is perfectly designed to make your company happy.

The one person who was forgotten? The customer.

The answer requires more than just starting with the customer. You must keep their view central at every stage.

It’s a constant, simple question: "How will the customer respond?"

Not "Do we like this?" but "How will a real person who actually buys our products, seeing this in the middle of their busy day, actually think, feel, and act?"

Three warning stories show what happens when that question gets ignored.

Tropicana's $50 Million Packaging Failure

This was a self-inflicted wound on a healthy brand.

In 2009, Tropicana's Pure Premium line was the top seller of juice, making over $700 million in yearly sales. Its packaging was famous: a carton showing a bright orange with a red-and-white striped straw stuck directly into it.

It was a powerful symbol of freshness.

The Echo Chamber Logic

To "modernize" the brand, its parent company PepsiCo invested $35 million in a total redesign.

Every familiar visual cue was thrown out:

• The famous orange-with-a-straw was replaced by a generic photo of a glass of juice.

• The bold, horizontal Tropicana logo was shrunk and turned 90 degrees, making it hard to read.

• The "Pure Premium" label, a key sign of quality, was made smaller and less obvious.

The company insisted it had done research, but that research likely asked the wrong questions. It failed to test the design in the context of a real, busy supermarket.

The Forgotten Question

The team asked, "Does this look more modern?" But they failed to ask the three questions that actually mattered:

1. The Functional Question: How will our loyal, busy customers, who use patterns to shop, find the product when we've changed every single visual cue?

2. The Emotional Question: How will customers feel when we remove the beloved "orange-with-a-straw," the symbol of trust we've built for decades?

3. The Perceptual Question: Does this simple design still signal "top quality," or does it now look like a cheap, generic store brand?

The Result

The customer response was immediate and a financial disaster. Loyal customers simply could not find the product on the shelf. Their easy, subconscious "grab" became a frustrating "hunt.”

Emotionally, they felt betrayed, expressing feelings of disappointment and loss. Many complaints called the new design "ugly," "stupid," and said it looked like a "generic bargain brand," which destroyed its premium value.

The backlash was so intense that Tropicana President Neil Campbell publicly admitted the company had "underestimated the deep emotional bond" consumers had with the original packaging.

In less than two months, sales dropped by 20%. This represented a $30 million loss in revenue.

They learned a hard lesson: a brand's most valuable asset can be the customer's habit. By making the product hard to recognize, Tropicana shattered the effortless "grab" their loyal customers relied on.

Tropicana replaced a default buying habit with frustrating friction and uncertainty.

The Day They Tried to Kill Coca-Cola

In the mid-1980s, Coca-Cola faced a complex crisis.

For 15 straight years, its market share lead over Pepsi had been steadily shrinking. At the same time, a general slowdown in the cola category meant fewer people were drinking cola overall. To make matters worse, the success of its own Diet Coke was cannibalizing sales, pulling loyal drinkers away from the flagship brand.

Faced with lots of data from the "Pepsi Challenge" that showed a taste preference for Pepsi, executives made a fateful choice. They concluded the core problem was not the market or their strategy, but the sacred 99-year-old formula itself.

The Echo Chamber Logic

The company launched "Project Kansas," spending $4 million on nearly 200,000 blind taste tests. The data was clear:

• The new, sweeter formula was preferred over original Coke by 55% to 45%.

• More importantly, it consistently beat Pepsi by 6 to 8 percentage points.

This created a powerful sense of certainty.

The research did find a small, passionate group—about 10-12% of consumers—who reacted with deep anger at the idea of a change. But inside the echo chamber, this vital emotional data was seen as a rounding error, a loss they could accept.

The Forgotten Question

While 200,000 people were asked, "Which of these do you prefer the taste of?" they were never asked the real strategic question: "How would you feel if this new formula replaced the original, and you could never have it again?".

They had confirmed that people might prefer a sweeter sip. But they had no data on the fierce loyalty and sense of loss their change would cause.

The Result

The launch of "New Coke" on April 23, 1985, seemed to go well at first.

Initially, sales were up 8% over the previous year, and 75% of consumers who tried it said they'd buy it again.

But this was a mirage driven by curiosity. The real crisis was sparked by the removal of the original.

As the last stocks of "old" Coke vanished, the public mood shifted from curiosity to panic. People began hoarding cases.

The company's hotline exploded from 400 to 8,000 calls per day. A hired psychiatrist said callers sounded as if they were discussing the death of a close family member.

Faced with a full-blown consumer uprising, Coca-Cola gave in. Just 79 days after the launch, they announced the return of the original.

They had learned that for a product so ingrained in the culture, the public backlash from having a beloved staple taken away was a force more powerful than any taste test.

How Airbnb Photographed Its Way to Fortune

In early 2009, Airbnb was on the verge of collapse.

Revenue had stalled at a mere $200 per week. The founders were funding the company with a binder full of maxed-out credit cards.

While the company had plenty of listings, the real issue was a basic lack of trust. Potential guests were hesitant to stay in a stranger's home.

The Echo Chamber Logic

The founders' core problem was a classic one: they were trying to solve the problems they thought their startup had, not the ones their customers were actually facing.

They focused on top-of-funnel issues like generating awareness by targeting big events like the DNC. But these efforts failed to create any lasting momentum because the real breakdown was happening at the moment of booking.

They were trying to fix a deep trust issue without first understanding what was causing the uncertainty in their users' eyes.

The Breakthrough Question

The breakthrough came when they joined the Y Combinator accelerator and partner Paul Graham gave them surprising advice: "Do things that don't scale.”.

He told them to stop coding and go meet their users in New York, their biggest market.

This new mindset forced them to look at their own product with fresh eyes.

During a session reviewing their New York listings, co-founder Joe Gebbia had a realization. The problem wasn't the code or the pricing. The problem was that the photos were terrible—dimly lit, blurry, "Craigslist-quality" pictures that made a guest more unsure.

The Result

Armed with this new insight, they did the unscalable thing.

The founders booked a flight to New York, rented a professional camera, and went door-to-door. They personally took beautiful, high-quality photos of their hosts' apartments.

The impact was immediate. In the week following their action, Airbnb's revenue doubled from $200 to $400.

It was the first financial improvement in over eight months. This single act unlocked their entire business. It proved that in a digital marketplace, trustworthy visuals are the core of the product.

How to Keep the Customer in the Room

Many bad ideas would be avoided by simply stepping outside your own view. This goes beyond a single step to become a culture.

Next time you’re in that conference room, pause and ask these questions:

1. Who is the "Red Team"? Assign one person the specific job of poking holes in the idea from the customer's point of view. Their only role is to be doubtful and challenge internal beliefs.

2. What would the 'Empty Chair' say? Do what Amazon does and keep an empty chair in every important meeting. This chair represents the customer. Before deciding, clearly ask, "What would the customer in this chair say about this?"

3. Interpret feedback from five actual customers. Before you finalize a decision, get the concept in front of five people who represent your actual customer base, not just any five people. Your goal is not to simply take their feedback at face value, but to interpret the 'why' behind their reactions. As the New Coke story shows, what people say they prefer in a test is often different from what drives their actual loyalty and buying behavior in the real world.

The best ideas aren't found in a conference room that's sealed off from the real world. They are developed by keeping the customer's perspective in the room at every stage of the process.

Break out of the echo chamber.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is your team trapped in an echo chamber, building things you find interesting but your customers ignore? That gap is where growth stalls. Reply to this email, and let's set up a free 15-minute call. I'll help you get the unfiltered, outside-in perspective you need to make your next move the right one.

Think of your business as an orchestra preparing for a show.

The marketing team plays a beautiful song on the violins—a story of quality and value. But then the sales team's trumpets blare a different tune about discounts. The customer support trombones play a slow, sad song about long wait times, and the billing department is just confusing noise.

Instead of a symphony, the customer just hears noise.

And that noise becomes their idea of your brand.

They don’t hear different departments. They just hear one company that doesn't make sense.

ur customer's toughest moments, not in your best ads.

This is the reality for too many businesses. Leaders focus on the marketing message. They believe it’s the whole performance, while ignoring the mismatched tunes being played by the rest of the company.

The hard truth is your brand is built in every interaction, not in your best ads.

The Silent Killer: Brand Fragmentation

Every company tells two stories.

The first is the one you create in boardrooms and share in your ads. It’s a story about why you’re the best choice.

The second story is the one a customer tells a friend after they've dealt with you. It’s told through real-world experience: Was it easy? Did it work? Did they keep their promise?

When those two stories don’t match, the customer’s story always wins. No amount of marketing can convince a customer your story is more true than their own experience.

This gap between the story you promise and the one they live is Brand Fragmentation. It’s the noise that happens when your departments play different songs.

This creates confusion, and that confusion is a silent killer for your brand.

It breaks trust, one frustrating moment at a time. It forces customers to do the hard work of figuring out who you reallyare. And in a world of endless choices, they won't bother. They’ll just go to a competitor whose story is clearer.

This is what prevents your company from becoming the preferred choice and keeps it as "just another option." This contributes to wasted ad money and is a key reason why so many leaders feel lost.

The problem runs deeper than marketing. It's a breakdown that happens when the entire company isn't aligned.

The cure isn't a bigger marketing budget or a better slogan. It’s a deep promise to make sure the customer's reality is the same across every single touchpoint.

The Cautionary Tale: The Giant's Lost Decade

In the mid-2000s, Microsoft was the clear leader in tech.

Their marketing promise was a future where your digital life was "seamlessly integrated"—all your devices and software working together perfectly. Windows Vista was meant to be the heart of this new world. To sell this vision, the launch campaign for Vista was built around a single word: "Wow.”

The idea was that Vista would "wow" users with breakthrough performance and stunning visuals, delivering a revolutionary experience.

But the reality for customers was messy and frustrating.

This disconnect came from a broken company culture. Internally, Microsoft was at war with itself. Its big teams, like Windows and Office, acted like separate, competing kingdoms.

The problem became so well-known that a famous 2011 cartoon showed the Microsoft teams pointing guns at each other.

And this internal dysfunction showed up in their products.

Windows Vista: The "Wow" That Wasn't

The "Wow" promised in ads met a harsh reality.

Users were hit with "intrusive and frustrating" security pop-ups. The system had widespread problems working with other hardware and software. A "Vista Capable" logo on new PCs was a disaster, born from a lack of teamwork between the marketing, product, and hardware partner teams.

Many of these computers were "woefully underpowered" to run the software, leading to slow performance and breaking customer trust.

The Zune: A Better Device, a Broken Strategy

The problem was even clearer with Microsoft's iPod competitor.

On paper, the Zune had better features, like a bigger screen and a built-in radio. But it was doomed by a fatal flaw from its siloed culture: the Zune software didn't work with Windows Media Player. Millions of Windows users couldn't easily move their music from Microsoft's own media player to Microsoft's new music player.

Microsoft had built a better device, but Apple had built a universe.

The Cost of Fragmentation

The results were huge.

These failures damaged what people thought of the brand. Microsoft became known as a "slow... and uncool follower.” This started a "lost decade" for the company, and its stock price stayed flat for over ten years.

It was a clear and painful lesson: when your teams fight each other, the customer always loses.

The Gold Standard: Simplicity in Action

While Microsoft was stagnating, Apple was building an empire on a single, powerful idea.

Apple’s public mission is "to make the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it". But the real rulebook comes from Steve Jobs’s core belief: "We believe in the simple not the complex".

This belief is more than just a marketing slogan. It’s the company's core way of working. It’s what stops the kind of internal fighting that hurt Microsoft. Simplicity is the one promise that unites every department at Apple.

This obsession is carefully built into every single customer interaction.

Product: Apple is famous for its process. They start with the customer experience they want to create, then work backward to build the tech. This makes sure the final product is easy to use, no matter how complex it is on the inside.

When designing the iPhone, Steve Jobs insisted on a single button because it was a clear sign of simplicity before you even turned it on.

Retail: The Apple Stores are designed to be simple. The clean and open stores encourage you to touch and play with the products. Even paying is simple. By using a mobile checkout system, Apple got rid of the frustration of waiting in long lines.

Support: The Genius Bar offers clear, face-to-face help for tech problems. The goal is to be a cure for feeling overwhelmed by tech.

Marketing: Apple's ads are masters of keeping it simple. They don't list a bunch of tech specs. Instead, they use simple words to show a powerful benefit. The famous "1,000 songs in your pocket" for the original iPod didn't describe the tech; it described the magic.

From the first ad to the support they give years later, every moment is meant to deliver on the same core promise.

All the teams—marketing, product, sales, and service—are playing the same song. This teamwork builds great trust.

It lets them charge more, not just for the tech, but for making things simple.

The Service Legend: Delivering "WOW"

Where most companies see customer service as a cost, Zappos saw it as their single greatest marketing opportunity.

For years, the company built its brand not on selling shoes, but on "delivering WOW through service". This was a core company value and a rule for how they work. It gave power to their support team, which they called the Customer Loyalty Team (CLT).

Zappos famously took the money they would have spent on advertising and put it into the customer experience instead.

As former CEO Tony Hsieh explained, the telephone—an expense most companies try to cut—was one of the "best branding devices out there.” They put their 1-800 number at the top of every single page of their site because they wantedcustomers to call.

This way of thinking was part of their daily operations.

No Scripts or Time Limits: Reps are trusted to use their best judgment. They are encouraged to let their true personalities shine on every call. Their only goal is to go above and beyond, which led to amazing stories like a customer service call that lasted almost six hours!

Empowerment: Reps have the power to make customers happy without asking a manager. They can surprise-upgrade a loyal customer to overnight shipping or even look on a competitor’s website to find a shoe that’s out of stock at Zappos. They might lose one sale, but they build a relationship for life.

Service is the Whole Company: Every new hire, whether they are an accountant or a programmer, takes the same four-week customer loyalty training . This includes two weeks of taking calls from customers. This reinforces their belief that customer service is the responsibility of the entire company .

These famous stories—of reps ordering a pizza for a customer or sending flowers after a sad event—became the company's most effective marketing, serving as powerful proof of the brand promise. They were delivered by the very teams most companies see as being focused on solving problems, not building the brand.

Zappos understood that this customer service interaction was just as much a part of the brand as any advertisement.

How to Unify Your Brand Experience

When a company feels stuck, the first instinct is to chase a new idea—like a new ad campaign or a different message—instead of fixing the underlying system.

The real solution requires a leader to step back from writing a new song and instead focus on fixing the orchestra, acting as the conductor who gets everyone to play in harmony.

Start by asking these questions to cut through the noise:

1. Map Every Touchpoint. List every single way a customer interacts with your company, from the first ad to the final bill. Then ask the critical question: Which of these moments is playing the most off-key note?

2. Define the Core Feeling. What is the small set of core emotions—your emotional targets—that your brand must deliver in every interaction? Is it a feeling of being "safe," "empowered," or "delighted"? This specific set of feelings becomes the guide for every department.

3. Conduct an "Experience Audit." Talk to your sales and support teams. Ask them: "What are the most common customer complaints?" Now, compare their answers to your marketing messages. If your ads promise "simple," but your support team hears "confusing," you've found your blind spot.

4. Arm Your Front Lines. Does your customer service team have the power to make things right? Zappos didn't track call times; they tracked if the rep delivered "WOW.” Your brand is only as strong as your least-empowered employee.

The goal is to make your marketing promise a true picture of the customer's real experience. When the story you tell and the story they live become the same, you build real trust.

That is how you become their first choice.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is your marketing team making promises your other teams can't keep? That gap is where customer trust dies and growth stops. Reply to this email, and I’ll set up a free 15-minute call to help you find your brand's most dangerous blind spots.

Most marketing is a gamble.

You spend time and money on a message, push it out into the world, and hope it connects. But more often than not, it lands with a thud.

You’re either the brand shouting about a solution to someone who doesn't have a problem, or the one telling a lovely story to someone whose house is on fire.

The result is a costly disconnect. Businesses feel like they're guessing, wasting resources on initiatives that don't connect. It’s a primary source of the strategic overwhelm and inefficient ad spend that keeps leaders up at night.

The true problem lies with the map, not the message. Most companies operate with a one-dimensional view of their audience, leading them to bulldoze customers with the wrong approach.

But the best brands see the world in two dimensions. They understand every customer exists at an intersection of two critical axes:

• The Problem Axis: How urgent is the problem you solve for them right now?

• The Relationship Axis: How strong is their preference for your brand?

When you can pinpoint a customer on this grid, you can finally stop guessing and start guiding.

The Bulldozer vs. The Guide

The 1D Bulldozer operates on a single track. On the Problem Axis, it pushes a hard sales pitch at everyone, assuming high urgency. On the Relationship Axis, it pushes brand content, assuming everyone has time for a story. It’s constantly shouting because it's missing half the context.

The 2D Guide, however, first asks, "Where is this person on the map?"

The Guide knows the message for someone with a leaky pipe and no brand preference is completely different than for a loyal fan who is perfectly happy.

The Guide diagnoses before prescribing, which is the foundation of an effective strategy.

Let’s plot this on the map with a master of the craft.

Case Study: Apple's Four Territories

1. Low Urgency / Low Brand Preference (The Uninitiated)

This is a happy Android user whose phone works perfectly. The problem of needing a new phone isn’t pressing, and their preference for Apple is low.

Apple's Strategy: Direct iPhone ads are wasted here. Instead, Apple plays the long game of cultural osmosis. Its products appear in movies. Its "Shot on iPhone" billboards showcase a beautiful result rather than a technical feature. The goal is to gently build brand admiration from a distance, so the preference axis slowly shifts in their favor over time.

2. High Urgency / Low Brand Preference (The Switcher)

This is an Android user whose phone just broke. The problem is now highly pressing. They are forced to consider an iPhone, but their preference is low or even negative.

Apple's Strategy: The marketing becomes intensely practical and reassuring. Dedicated web pages for "Switching to iPhone" address key fears like losing photos and contacts. The Genius Bar serves as a safety net, promising that expert help is always available.

The goal shifts from trying to build love to simply lowering the friction of the transaction and winning the sale at the critical moment of need.

3. Low Urgency / High Brand Preference (The Fan)

This is Apple’s core audience. They already own an iPhone that works fine. The problem of needing a new one is not urgent, but their brand preference is sky-high.

Apple's Strategy: Nurture the relationship. They deliver value outside of a purchase. Free iOS updates make a two-year-old phone feel new. Ecosystem services like iCloud and Apple Arcade deepen the relationship. "Today at Apple" sessions teach them how to get more from the device they already own.

This reinforces their loyalty and makes switching away feel unthinkable.

4. High Urgency / High Brand Preference (The Loyal Upgrader)

This is a current iPhone user with a cracked screen, a dying battery, or just a strong desire for the latest model. The problem is pressing, and the preference is already locked in.

Apple's Strategy: Make upgrading easy and exciting. The annual September keynote is a masterclass in creating urgency. The Apple Trade-In program directly addresses the cost barrier. The entire process is streamlined.

At this stage, convincing them to love Apple is unnecessary. They only require a compelling reason and a simple path to act.

The Map Is a Blueprint, Not a Bullseye

Now, here’s a crucial distinction. This map works best as a blueprint for your entire marketing portfolio, rather than a tool for micro-targeting individual customers in real-time. You can't know the exact moment an Android user’s phone breaks.

Instead, think of this as a blueprint for your entire marketing portfolio. The goal is to ensure you have the right types of messages active in the market simultaneously.

Your long-term brand ads are serving the Uninitiated, while your practical "how-to-switch" content is waiting to be found by the Switcher. Your community engagement nurtures the Fans, and your upgrade offers are ready for the Loyal Upgrader.

The aim is to build a complete system that creates a welcoming path for every type of customer, moving beyond the old model of forcing one message on everyone.

How to Draw Your Own Map

Is your marketing strategy a bulldozer? Are you pushing one message at an audience that lives in four different territories? To gain clarity, you have to see the world as it is.

Ask these questions about your business:

• Where do your customers live? Sketch out the 2x2 grid: Problem Urgency (Low to High) on the vertical axis and Brand Preference (Low to High) on the horizontal. Where do your different customer segments sit? Are you neglecting an entire quadrant?

• What is your long game for the Uninitiated? How are you building a good reputation with people who don't need you today, but might need you in a year? This is the work that separates fleeting brands from iconic ones.

• Are you serving the Switcher? For those with a high-urgency problem but low preference, is your message focused on reducing friction and risk? Or are you trying to tell them your life story when their house is on fire?

• Are you nurturing the Fan? For your loyal customers with no immediate need, how are you delivering value between purchases? Or do you only talk to them when you want them to buy something?

• Are you exciting the Loyal Upgrader? For your biggest fans with a pressing need, how are you making it easy and compelling for them to act? Is the path to purchase streamlined, or are you creating unnecessary hurdles?

Stop pushing everyone down a single path. Start by asking where they are on the map.

The person with an urgent need requires proof and a simple process. The person without one needs connection and value.

By seeing your world in two dimensions, your path to building a more resilient, beloved brand becomes infinitely clearer.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is your marketing strategy a bulldozer, pushing one message at an audience living in four different territories? It's a sign your customer map is one-dimensional. Reply to this email and I’ll set up a free 15-minute call where we’ll explore how you can start moving toward multidimensional marketing.

You’ve spent a lot on advertising.

Your team has crafted a powerful message. Customers know your name. They might even like your brand.

Then, at the moment of truth—standing in a store aisle, scrolling a website, or talking to a salesperson—they choose someone else.

All that time, money, and energy, wasted in the last three feet.

This is the situation that keeps leaders up at night. It’s why you can feel overwhelmed, knowing that after all the work, your company is still just another choice in the market.

The problem isn’t usually your message. It’s the gap between what you promise and how easy you make it for people to buy.

Great brands aren't just built on being remembered. They are built on being available.

This core strategy has two parts that must work together.

• Mental Availability: This is what most marketing focuses on. It’s getting your brand to pop into a customer’s head when they have a need. It’s your creative ads and your reputation.

• Physical Availability: This is the other, often forgotten, half. It’s making your brand easy to find and buy the moment a customer is ready to act. It's your operations, your distribution, and your user experience.

Leaders love to focus on mental availability because it’s exciting. But the world’s best brands know that a brilliant message is useless if the product is a hassle to buy.

A key part of getting customers to prefer you is making it easy for them to choose you.

P&G: The Masters of Being There

No one gets this better than Procter & Gamble. They build billion-dollar brands by mastering both sides of the availability coin. Kirti Singh, an executive at P&G, says this is fundamental to their brand strategy.

In his words:

For P&G, it's not enough that you think of Tide when you think of laundry. They work to make sure Tide is right there on the shelf, in the right size and at the right price, when you’re in the store.

They remove every possible roadblock between your thought and your purchase.

Coca-Cola: The Path from Ubiquity to Emotion

Many marketers see Coke's famous ads, like "Open Happiness," and get the wrong idea.

They believe the brand's success was built on selling emotions.

The truth is the other way around. The emotional branding was the final layer, only made possible after decades of relentless, practical work.

The brand's foundation was laid by its former president, Robert W. Woodruff. His strategy was simple and based in operations: make Coca-Cola "within an arm's reach of desire." This drove a huge global investment in bottling and distribution.

Long before they sold "happiness," they mastered being physically available.

It was this ubiquity that allowed Coke to become part of people's lives. It was present at backyard barbecues and movie theaters—places where people were already happy.

The brand didn't create a feeling from scratch; it just made sure Coke was there when good feelings were already happening. The advertising came later, reinforcing an emotion that was already real for their customers.

Here's the lesson many new brands miss: your first job is to sell the product's value and get it into as many hands as possible. You can only successfully sell an abstract feeling once it reinforces an emotion people are already having at scale.

Wide distribution must come before the high-concept emotion.

Amazon: Weaponizing Digital Availability

This idea is just as powerful online.

Amazon built an empire by making buying things incredibly easy. In the early days of e-commerce, buying something meant filling out lots of forms with your name, address, and credit card number.

Amazon’s famous "1-Click" ordering changed everything. It was a direct attack on the hassle that kills sales.

They knew that every extra step was a chance for a customer to get distracted. By saving user information, Amazon made buying take almost zero effort. Prime shipping did the same thing for the stress of waiting.

They made being a customer so easy that other sites felt slow and clunky.

Amazon’s brand became known for speed and ease, a promise built on mastering physical availability online.

Liquid Death: The Myth of the Hype-Driven Unicorn

It’s easy to look at a new brand like Liquid Death and think its success comes only from its edgy, viral marketing. The common story is that they won because of brilliant ads.

That story is incomplete.

Their marketing made them famous. But their business success came from a step-by-step plan to make the product easier to find. The viral ads created a fast car, but their distribution network was the highway that let them conquer the market.

Their journey offers a powerful, modern playbook:

• Step 1: Prove Demand First. Before making a lot of product, the founder spent just $1,500 on a funny video. It went viral, proved people were interested, and helped secure the money to start production.

• Step 2: Start in the Right Places. In 2019, they didn’t launch in major stores. They started only in bars and tattoo parlors. This put the brand in the hands of the right people and proved it was a cool option in social settings.

• Step 3: Secure an Anchor Store. The buzz from their small launch and online sales helped them land a national deal with Whole Foods in 2020. It was a huge hit, quickly becoming the top-selling water brand on their shelves and proving it had mainstream appeal.

• Step 4: Expand Everywhere. From there, they launched a retail blitz, going from 16,000 stores in 2021 to over 133,000 by 2024. This growth in stores directly matched their growth in revenue.

The genius of Liquid Death was not in choosing branding over distribution. It was in understanding that the two are deeply connected and using one to fuel the other.

How to Close Your Brand's Gap

Is your business making it harder than it needs to be for your best customers to choose you?

Use these questions to check your own "last three feet":

1. Where does the real decision happen? Don't guess. You have to go there, in person or online. Map out the exact moment your customer chooses. Is it on a confusing webpage? In a talk with a salesperson who isn't well trained?

2. What is their "workaround"? How do customers solve their problem now? If their current fix is "good enough" and much easier than buying from you, you don't have a messaging problem. You have an availability problem.

3. How many clicks or steps does it take? Be honest. Count every single step from interest to ownership. Where can you remove a step? Your goal is to make choosing you the easiest path.

4. Are you where they want to be? Your customers are already shopping in places they trust. Are you forcing them to come to you? Are they looking for your product in stores that don't carry it?

Sustainable growth doesn't always come from a flashier ad campaign. Often, it comes from a disciplined effort to make your brand incredibly easy to buy.

When you build a bridge across those last three feet, you don't just get remembered. You get chosen.

But getting chosen once is only the beginning.

The moment after the sale is your brand’s most fragile and important opportunity. This is when the customer is looking for a sign they made the right choice.

The experience of actually using your product is what matters. Physical availability makes that experience possible. It’s what cements your brand in a customer's mind for the future.

This is where a single sale starts to become a powerful buying habit.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Is there a gap between how much customers know your brand and how often they choose it? That gap is costing you sales. Reply to this email, and let's set up a free 15-minute call to find the friction points in your customer's journey.