I can hear it now, "What did you think was going to happen?" We say people are tired of scrolling. But people scroll for hours a day, happily, when the content is good. So scrolling can't be the disease. The disease has to be something more specific, perhaps a learned defensiveness. We users have been trained, ad by ad, to treat the feed as a place where we get interrupted rather than a place where we participate.

None of this reduces to a formula.

The most successful businesses have found value where formulas say there isn't any. Why? Because formulas optimize for what's measurable now, when it is more valuable to ask what's true regardless of the moment.

Consider growth for a moment. If you chase it above everything, you'll miss asking: Will this business exist in ten years? A company that grows fast but can't defend what it built is just borrowing time because durability is an important test growth has to pass. Distribution illustrates the same idea from another angle. Superior sales and distribution, on their own, can build a monopoly even without a better product.

What it actually is: A publishing platform that fuses a blog, an email newsletter, and a subscriptions/payments system. Content lives on a public web page and lands in inboxes simultaneously, so creators can publish articles, essays, podcasts, and videos, with Substack handling payments, subscriber management, and analytics so writers can focus on content.

Most marketers still navigate their work with a map that says "the internet is mostly people browsing." Using that map won't get you killed, but it will have you walking toward the cliff. Here is one consequence of the territory beneath us changing in real time.

Some marketing professionals dismiss ethical thought experiments about their work because the scenarios feel contrived. Those reactions miss the point because thought experiments are not meant to replicate the reality of account management, creative briefs, or client retention pressures. They are designed to isolate a single difficult tradeoff so we can examine what we actually believe, and why. There is great value to be gleaned from dismissing the claim of oversimplification, embracing some self-examination, and considering the following scenario.

Valuable content that nobody engages with isn't valuable. It's just content. Sure, you can have a genuinely useful insight, a novel angle, a well-defined audience, and still produce work that goes nowhere. Value that isn't experienced has potential.

There's a very specific kind of slow-motion disaster that happens inside companies, and it almost always looks fine from the outside right up until it doesn't. It all starts with the hard, often grinding timeline a brand traverses to earn trust over the years. Decades, sometimes. It earns it through consistent product performance, honest claims, and experiences that match the promise. Customers encode that trust into their memory, stop inspecting the product with a critical eye towards quality, and buy on autopilot. And that autopilot, that earned habitual confidence, is worth an enormous amount of money. However, that trust and confidence is also an asset that can be quietly liquidated.

Give people a set of tasks, puzzles, arithmetic problems, or simple crafts and interrupt half of them before they finish. Then ask everyone to recall what they worked on. The result was consistent and striking: incomplete tasks were remembered almost twice as well as completed ones. The brain wasn't treating finished and unfinished work equally. It was filing completed tasks away and releasing the mental tension around them. Unfinished ones, it kept running in the background, like an open tab that refused to close.

Most of us doing marketing skip that question. Not because we're all lazy, but because we're too busy doing things we arguably shouldn't be doing. There's a quota to hit, a pipeline to fill, and a board meeting on Thursday. So we write the website copy, design the brochure, and launch the campaign, all without ever sitting down to honestly answer the one question every single customer is quietly asking: Why you?

If you don't know the answer to that one question, then it is entirely unreasonable to think your customer will. Why, better yet, how would they? And saying you are "innovative," "customer-focused," and "best-in-class" is not a correct answer. One could convincingly argue that they are the absence of one.

Every person who disagrees with your pitch, scrolls past your ad, or ignores your email is making a completely rational decision based on who they are and what they see. I used to think that was a failure of the intended audience, but then I realized it was valuable information being woefully underutilized.

Marketing at its core, is a generous act in the form of work that is helping someone solve a problem they actually have and not seeking the shortest path to customers for your products. There's an enormous gap between those two orientations, and almost every struggling brand is stuck on the wrong side of that line. Why is that?

Once you see it, you can't unsee it. They walk onto the stage or into your feed with the posture of someone who has already won. The bio is long. The testimonials come first. Before they've said anything of substance, you already know they've been featured in Forbes, built three companies, and "helped thousands of people unlock their potential." We lean forward into the message to hear more.

Most people remember Darth Vader saying, "Luke, I am your father." He never said it. The actual line is "No, I am your father." But millions of people who have seen the film dozens of times swear otherwise. This isn't a trick or a glitch in the Matrix. It's how human memory works, and if you're in the business of doing the art and science of marketing, this shouldn't stop you from being interested enough to keep reading.

This phenomenon has a name that you've maybe heard before: the Mandela Effect. This is when entire groups of people share the same false memory, with the same unshakable confidence.

Many in marketing are making decisions based on psychological assumptions that don't hold up. Why would we do this? It is not stemming from carelessness, but rather myths spread faster than corrections. You and I have both seen the compelling story get a million shares while the replication failure gets twelve at best. What's that? You'd like specific examples of less credible psychological reasoning we rely on to inform some of our decisions. My pleasure.

Most organizational charts lie about how marketing works through clean boxes and reporting lines, but they hide the real question of where marketing ends and everything else begins. The answer matters because unclear boundaries create confusion and conflict that masquerade as strategy disagreements:

• Sales complains marketing doesn't deliver leads.
• Marketing complains sales don't follow the narrative.
• Product says marketing overpromises.
• Strategy says marketing doesn't understand the market.

Personality conflicts? Maybe a fraction, but they're symptoms of undefined decision rights and a misunderstanding about marketing being the translation layer between strategic intent and market reality. How so?

That is probably obvious.

But asking open follow-up questions is one of the easiest ways to uncover deeper insights about how your marketing campaigns resonate with your target audience. Of course, the principal difficulty with them is coming up with the questions themselves in the moment. I've shared a range of questions that are widely applicable across many marketing research conversations.