Happy Sunday, Everyone!

I hope you all have enjoyed the extra hour of sleep (yes, it’s clock change weekend) – it’s hard to believe, but the year is 83% over. BFCM is on the extended forecast. Costco is starting to put out Spring stuff (yes, really - and no, I’m not happy about it).

For me, November marks the end of conference season (this was a particularly busy one - 6 straight weeks of travel) and the unofficial start of 2026. In the past few weeks, over 1,000 people have signed up - so if you’re new, welcome!

This week’s issue is one I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but only recently figured out how to pull together.

Marketing today has become a game of more: more impressions. More reach. More eyeballs. More ads. More platforms. More of the time.

The obsession with “more” permeates every corner of the industry, in one way or another. Every player - from CRMs to ESPs to 3PAs to ad platforms, agencies, creators…even the reporting tools - promises “growth.” Media buyers obsess about how to reach audiences so large they can only be described as abstract (hence the rCPM & andromeda “craze” dominating DTC Twitter (err…X?) over the last few weeks).

Honestly, you can’t *entirely* blame marketers - the platforms we work in every day (Meta, Google, TikTok, YouTube) reward reach. The executives/investors/bankers we report to are categorically obsessed with charts that go up-and-to-the-right. Even our compensation incentives are directly tied to increasing revenue, sales, leads, whatever. The entire industry now revolves around the dual stars of “more” and “growth.”

In some ways, focusing marketing on achieving business results is not a bad thing – the Mad Men era (while great TV) was certainly not all neat scotch & gummy bears. Marketing back in the day had real issues. And, the uncomfortable truth is that much of what we see today is the Hegelian antithesis to that era. The pendulum swung too far toward the “artsy” or “creative” side back then, which (predictably) resulted in the commensurately large swing back to the “analytical” side that we see today.

One of my favorite aspects of travel is the time and space to think. Over the last six weeks, I’ve been on 20 flights (the joys of conference season). That’s a lot of time to think. I spent quite a bit of it pondering where the industry is and (more importantly) where it’s going. On many of those flights, I found myself coming back to a single thought: somewhere in that swing back, something sacred in marketing got lost - the belief that the smaller, deeper and more personal can outperform louder, faster and viral.

Every conversation - whether its a new business pitch or a conference keynote - starts with the same question: How do we get more people to see us?

Almost no one asks the harder, more important one: why would anyone care if they did?

Everything about marketing today focuses on casting a wider net. Meta rewards creative diversity. Google pushes broad match keywords and overly generic ads. YouTube wants to show ads to everyone. TikTok promises virality. But when every brand floods the same sea, reach stops being an advantage and becomes noise. It’s the Times Square effect - a space with a thousand billboards that everyone ignores. And in a noisy market, the brands that win aren’t the ones who shout the loudest; they’re the ones who whisper something true enough that a few people lean in.

The truth is, marketing today isn’t broken because it can’t reach enough people. There are 8B people on the planet. 6B of them have smartphones. In less than a generation, we’ve unlocked the ability to reach just about everyone, at any time, in any place. If marketing is broken, it’s because the things we reach people with no longer move anyone.

It seems that the entire marketing industry has become infatuated by growth and more and reach…which has been my cue to write about less and one. When everyone goes one way, the most logical response is (almost always) to go the other way.

My operating thesis is this: the next era of marketing won’t belong to the brands that reach the most people. It will belong to the ones that matter most deeply to a few, then expand outward from that center of gravity.

Every great brand in existence today began with an obsession about a single person. Somewhere along the way, we all forgot that.

In the race to “personalize at scale,” we’ve built marketing machines that recognize names but not needs. We’ve created systems that know everything about a customer except who they actually are. We call it just about anything - segmentation or automation or (my personal favorite) personalization - except what it really is: a simulation of intimacy.

Too much of marketing today is industrialized empathy without the substance of understanding.

Marketing’s great irony is that the more data we collect, the less personal we become. We have models that can predict behavior but can’t describe belief. We’ve created tools to track everything, except why it matters.

The result is personalization without personality. Brands that sound as if they know you but always leave you feeling as if they don’t care. While the “dead internet” theory is currently in vogue, I think the more apropos one might be the “dead brand theory.”

As harsh as it sounds, that’s the state of most marketing today.

AI is only going to make this worse. Giving today’s marketers AI is the equivalent of handing a toddler the mic for a Taylor Swift concert: you have no idea what’s going to happen, but you’re quite sure it’s going to be both bad + unbelievably loud.

All of this got me thinking: what’s the alternative? What’s the better way forward? How do we stop the endless more/growth/scale epidemic (and yes, I’m aware that I now sound like Kirk Williams in Stop The Scale)?

My humble thought: marketers have to accept that truly exceptional marketing is not about being everything to everyone, but rather about being everything to someone.

That’s the Audience of One philosophy.

It means identifying the single person you exist to serve, not as a persona on a slide, but as a human being with emotions, dreams, fears, contradictions and challenges – then building something (a service, a product, a piece of content, whatever) that genuinely would delight that single person. Even writing it sounds crazy, but that just might be the genius of it.

Zig when others zag. Where most brands chase breadth, the great ones commit to depth. They don’t try to create something that pleases everyone; instead, they obsess about understanding one so completely that the resonance becomes contagious. This is the natural extension of true audience insight + intelligence – taking the data you’ve gathered about your ideal customer and transforming it into something real, personal and human.

As an aside - this isn’t just a nice-sounding theory. As I was talking about his article with a very close friend a few weeks ago, he pointed out that I follow it when I’m deciding whether or not to make investments in early-stage companies. I don’t invest in companies unless the founder can clearly tell me the one person s/he is building for.

That’s the paradox of focus: the smaller your circle of clarity, the greater your field of pull. When you build something resonant enough to move one person substantially, you inevitably attract thousands more who see themselves in that reflection.

Think of the brands that have lasted over decades - Hermès, Apple, Patagonia, Porsche. Each one began not with “the market,” but with a person. That clarity was exclusionary, which is why it worked (see the “Lessons From Luxury” article).

Not one of those brands aimed to reach everyone. In fact, each began with the express goal of mattering profoundly to a single someone. That near-fanatical obsession generated the gravity to attract thousands (and eventually, millions) more.

As I started thinking about this mindset shift, it occurred to me that one of the reasons why it is so difficult is that it runs contrary to the very language of marketing. Everyone in marketing yammers on about markets, segments, funnels, targets, retention. Each one is a linguistic metaphor for extraction - taking, optimizing, retaining and converting. But customers are not targets. Prospects aren’t segments or statistics. Your audience doesn't want to be captured; they want to be understood.

That difference is subtle, but it’s everything.

The brands that really get it aren’t purely transactional. They go beyond demographics, customer journeys and purchase data to understand the stories, identities and aspirations that underpin every commercial moment and brand decision.

Airbnb famously did this when they launched. Brian Chesky famously followed the advice of Paul Graham to “build something 100 people love instead of one million people kind-of like.” That was the impetus for Airbnb to obsess about creating a “10-star” experience for a minuscule group of people – from hiring world-class photographers to take pictures of the homes, to helping hosts create “wow” experiences and build personal relationships with guests. It’s a wonderfully illogical way to do business, which is probably why it worked so well.

That’s the essence of a true customer.

Kevin Kelly famously defined a true fan as someone who will buy everything you make. In brand terms, a true customer is someone who believes everything you stand for.

True customers don’t stay because of loyalty points or retargeting ads; they stay because you’ve become a part of their self-definition. Your brand represents something they are compelled to say about themselves, whether it’s taste, values, intelligence, independence, belonging or something else entirely.

A true customer doesn’t just buy stuff (or services) from you; they integrate your product/service with their life. They amplify your story, evangelize your brand and defend your reputation when you’re not in the room. The best example might be Swifties - Taylor Swift’s legendary fans who will (quite literally) follow her anywhere and defend her against anyone. They’ll wait up all night for a chance to be the first to hear her new albums. They’ll fly around the world to see her shows.

People like that aren’t retained through incentives. They’re retained through brand and belief.

I genuinely believe that belief is the most underpriced asset in marketing. It has the dual advantage of also being (perhaps) the only one you can’t fake in today’s AI era.

It’s why most “loyalty programs” are net losers - you can’t buy belief. No one is going to be loyal to your brand because you threw them a few more reward points or a $5 off birthday card (looking at you, DSW). The only way to get it is to earn it through story, consistency, coherence and experience. Kevin Plank - the founder of Under Armour (disclosure: we’ve worked with both Kevin and Under Armour on many projects) famously said that trust and brand are built in drops and lost in buckets. Every interaction, every experience is a drop in that bucket. Slowly, over time, the bucket fills up.

The brands that have mastered this - Hermès, Patagonia, Porsche, Apple - don’t compete on convenience or price. Their customers don’t buy because the products are always the cheapest or the most accessible; they stay because the brand has become part of who they are. The story the brand tells resonates so deeply, so personally, that leaving would feel like an act of betrayal.

Put another way, the real moat in today’s hyper-connected, always-on world isn’t awareness. It’s identity. When customers see your brand as a reflection of who they are, competitors don’t just have to out-market you; they have to change who that person believes themselves to be.

That’s a near-impossible hurdle to overcome.

There’s a reason you don’t often see Porsche owners buying Priuses.

That kind of loyalty + devotion isn’t built through a campaign or slogan or email; it’s built (as Kevin rightly observed) through consistent coherence - the alignment of what you promise, how you interact and the experience you deliver over time.

For as simple as that sounds, it’s incredibly rare. Most brands today can’t even manage coherence from ad to lander to post-conversion experience; how many (realistically) can deliver a consistent experience over dozens (let alone hundreds or thousands) of interactions? Almost none. It’s a lost art.

That’s the opportunity I see for marketers today.

I genuinely believe some of the most successful brands of the next decade will be the ones that are willing to re-discover the magic from the “Mad Men” days, then blend it with a bit of modern rigor + analytical sophistication.

David Ogilvy built his advertising empire on a single principle: “The consumer isn’t a moron, she’s your wife.” He understood that great advertising is about love, respect and adoration, not manipulation. Great marketing is about getting to know your audience so intimately that you can almost write (or say) what they’re thinking.

Bill Bernbach took it further: “The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.”

His revolutionary campaigns for Volkswagen and Avis didn’t invent new stories; they simply told the truth differently. “Think Small” wasn’t merely clever, it was refreshingly honest. “We Try Harder” wasn’t just a slogan that sounded cool - it was an understandable humility (who doesn’t work harder when they’re second-best?) turned into a rhetorical advantage.

When I read books by Ogilvy or Bernbach, these are the lessons I keep coming back to: they built brands based on their courage to say one thing consistently, honestly and well.

In today’s advertising world, where Meta wants advertisers to give it as many “differentiated” messages and creatives as possible, or Google pushes for the most banal headlines you can imagine, the very idea of doing this seems almost insane. Don’t take my word for it - open up IG or LI or TikTok. Scroll through your feed and count the number of brands that Bernbach would say are telling one truth over and over again.

Today’s marketing is built for platforms that can optimize a message to a billion people, but there are exceptionally few brands that can articulate one truth that matters deeply to one person. Those same platforms want brands and marketers to stay on the proverbial hamster wheel - they want more commoditization. They want less differentiation. More features, fewer stories. Why? Because when everyone sounds the same, the only difference is how loud you can shout - and they make money from people trying to shout louder.

And that’s why I think marketing must get back to true, human storytelling if we are to have any hope of escaping the commoditization colosseum alive.

As with (just about) everything I do, there’s an economic argument in favor of this position, too. If you listen to a marketer long enough, you’ll hear abstract references to “brand equity” or “brand value” or whatever - but almost never will you hear it defined in economic terms.

That’s a mistake.

Brand isn’t an accessory to financial performance. Brand is financial performance, over a longer time horizon and with greater leverage. A real brand does more than attract attention or win accolades; it fundamentally shifts the underlying economics of the entire industry where it operates.

At its simplest, brand strength shows up as pricing power - the ability to charge more than a comparable alternative and have people happily pay it. There’s a reason Starbucks can charge $6 for an Americano, and it’s not because it tastes better.

The effects run deeper than price. A strong brand reshapes every meaningful commercial lever:

• Price: Customers willingly pay more, often for a comparable or inferior product
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• Deal Size: Customers buy more when they’re emotionally invested and identify with the brand. A colleague of mine loves Peter Millar. Why? No idea. But he owns far too many Peter Millar polos
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• Deal Velocity: When people know, trust and believe you, they buy faster – which means less nurturing is required, fewer incentives are needed and you (the brand) get money in the bank faster
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• Lifetime Value: All of this leads to higher lifetime value – lower churn, more repeat purchases, higher willingness to refer, greater advocacy and more grace for mistakes.

The only way to describe this is customers fall in love with the brand. Each one of the five forces above reinforces the others, amplifying value at every stage of the customer journey. While the best marketers know this intuitively, the best investors understand it quantitatively. A business with pricing power, faster sales cycles, higher ticket sizes, a greater share of new customers from referrals and lower churn is simply a better business.

And this isn’t just a B2C phenomenon - it happens all the time in B2B. A good friend of mine often jokes that his agency was built on one guy’s love affair with his agency - everywhere the guy went, he brought in the agency. They delivered excellent work and kept the client long after this guy had moved on to his next role (and brought them in there, too). That one relationship - that one “superfan” - built a multi-million dollar business.

Aside: the other under-discussed truth in branding is that B2B is actually more emotional than B2C, for (at least) two reasons: (1) the stakes are higher – make a bad decision in B2B, and your entire company or career could be in jeopardy; make a bad car purchase, and (at worst) you’re rolling over some negative equity; (2) there’s nothing to fall back on. Take a basic example - if you buy a MacBook Pro and absolutely hate it, you still have a wonderfully functional computer. If you buy crappy consulting services, you have nothing.

The beautiful thing about thinking smaller is that it is universally applicable, even in (arguably: especially in) industries that tell themselves they’re unique or that their customers are different, or their industry dynamics special. None of that matters.

The underlying math of belief is universal. Whether you sell handbags or health care, precision parts or performance cars, the mechanics are the same: focus creates meaning, meaning generates margin and margin enables longevity.

For decades, marketing has treated brand as a noun - a static asset, a logo, an aesthetic. But in reality, brand is a verb. It’s something you do, not something you own. And like any verb, it has force - the ability to move hearts + minds, accelerate decisions and generate financial asymmetry. Put another way, brand is a point of leverage for a business.

The term “leverage” is thrown around way too much (and far too often, incorrectly) or my liking. My definition: leverage is what happens when a small amount of effort produces an outsized effect.

Everything I’ve written to this point can be summarized as brand creating four axes of commercial leverage:

1. Truth: the foundational reality of what you are and what you’re not. It’s what remains when the marketing is stripped away.
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2. Story: the articulation of that truth in human language and emotion. The story is the connective tissue between what you do and what people feel.
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3. Experience: stories are nice, but anyone can tell them. What matters, over the long-term, is the ability to deliver an experience that aligns with that story, time and time again.
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4. Differentiation: the willingness to exclude, offend and stand out in order to matter deeply to a smaller audience.

These inputs aren’t independent; they’re multiplicative. When one declines, the impact to the brand is far greater than the magnitude of the decline.

Belief = Truth × Story × Experience × Differentiation

Belief is the outcome and the core of the brand. It moves money. It amplifies the four commercial levers that define healthy growth:

1. Price Premium: when customers believe, they stop shopping and comparing. You stop competing on price or features, and start competing on emotional appeal and identity.
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2. Deal Size: belief increases scope. A trusted brand can bundle, upsell and expand without resistance. Belief is the reason why Apple - a computer manufacturer - was able to dominate the smartphone market, despite never making a phone before launching the iPhone.
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3. Deal Velocity: belief reduces friction. Customers buy faster when they don’t need convincing
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4. Lifetime Value: belief sustains loyalty. It turns transactions into relationships and relationships into recurring revenue

Together, these four outputs create Commercial Leverage - the invisible engine that distinguishes a brand from a commodity business.

Commercial Leverage = Price Premium × Deal Size × Deal Velocity × Lifetime Value

And, finally, when you connect the inputs to the outputs, you get a full model for modern brand performance:

(Truth × Story × Experience × Differentiation) = (Price × Size × Velocity × LTV)

That’s the new brand equation.

The more you do to increase the value of the left side of the equation (i.e., the things that don’t scale, the old-school, audience-of-one marketing), the greater the rewards you’ll reap on the right side of the equation.

All markets eventually become efficient, except when they intersect with emotion.
Emotion creates inefficiency, and inefficiency creates opportunity. That makes brand the last enduring arbitrage.

The Three Financial Effects of Brand

1. Margin Expansion: Strong brands command price premiums. But the hidden effect is even more powerful: they reduce price sensitivity. That gives leadership optionality - the freedom to prioritize quality, ethics or innovation without risking demand collapse.
   In financial terms, brand strength is operating leverage on reputation.
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2. Volatility Compression: Markets swing, demand shifts, algorithms change. Belief is sticky. When customers, partners and employees trust your story, short-term turbulence has less effect. That stability lowers risk and cost of capital - two variables investors care about deeply.
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3. Capital Efficiency: Brand reduces the cost of acquisition. Each new customer arrives pre-sold, carrying some inherited trust. That compounds over time, turning marketing from an expense into an annuity. This is why companies with strong brands spend less per dollar of growth. Brand is marketing that earns interest.

In a world of generative everything - where sameness can (quite literally) be automated - differentiation through truth becomes the ultimate moat.

Belief can’t be outsourced to AI.

The brands that will outperform in the coming decade will be those that build what capital markets rarely understand but deeply reward: brand + belief.

If you’ve followed this newsletter for any length of time, you know I’m a massive fan of Warren Buffett. I think many of the principles discussed in this issue are what he had in mind when he said:

“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business.”

Pricing power isn’t a function of product or service alone. It’s a reflection of belief, which makes it a reflection of brand.

Marketing today is loud. Every channel clamors for your attention, every platform promises scale, every meeting focuses on growth at all costs. The noise is relentless, and the temptation is to answer it with more of the same.

More ads.
More spend.
More reach.

I refuse to believe that the brands that win tomorrow will be the ones who are the loudest today. The pendulum always swings back - and I think we’re at the point where that swing is beginning. Budgets can’t increase forever. Margins can’t erode forever. Something has to give.

I think “more” is what’s going to give.

I think the sanest way to build isn’t by chasing every possible customer, but by earning a thousand who would never dream of leaving. Clarity about a single someone trumps abstraction about everyone.

The next era of marketing won’t be defined by who can reach the most people. It will be defined by who can move the right ones. Content will be infinite. Attention will be scarce and fleeting. Copycats, knockoffs and commodities will be everywhere. The rare things - the things worth doing - will be the human things: focus, truth, coherence, curation, conviction.

And of those, conviction is the ultimate differentiator. Meaning lives in the margins. To stand for something is to stand apart. In a sea of sameness, that’s priceless.

If you take one thing away from this issue, it’s that maybe - just maybe - we’d all be better off if we played the classics a little more. Focus more of your marketing efforts on being everything to someone, instead of barely something to everyone.

Until next week,

Cheers,

Sam

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