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The Missing Middle: What Connects Business Strategy to Marketing Tactics?

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:00:18 GMT

What connects business strategy to marketing tactics?

A business goal tells you where the organization wants to go. Marketing tactics are the things you do to help get there. Marketing strategy is what connects the two—and that middle step gets skipped more often than you might think.

I’ve been in more than one conversation where leadership starts with a legitimate business objective. The organization needs to grow revenue, increase enrollment, enter a new market, improve retention or strengthen its competitive position.

Then, remarkably quickly, the conversation jumps to what Marketing needs to do about it. Maybe we need a new website. More digital advertising. An email campaign. More content. Better social media. Maybe we need AI.

Any one of those things could be part of the answer. But how did we get there?

That question matters because somewhere between the business objective and the marketing activity is a layer of thinking that organizations frequently skip. I think of it as the missing middle.

Business objective → Understanding → Marketing strategy → Marketing tactics

When that middle is missing, organizations can be very busy doing marketing without being particularly clear about why they are doing it.

A business objective is not a marketing strategy

“We need to grow revenue by 15 percent” is a business objective.

It tells us what the organization wants to accomplish, but it doesn’t tell us where that growth should come from, which customers represent the best opportunity, what might prevent them from buying, how the organization is positioned against competitors or what Marketing should do differently to influence the outcome. Those questions begin to move us toward strategy.

The same is true when the objective is increasing enrollment, improving retention, entering a new market or growing an existing customer segment. Marketing cannot translate any of those objectives into meaningful action without first understanding what’s happening within the organization and in the market.

Yet tactics are tempting because they are tangible. You can redesign a website. Launch an advertising campaign. Send an email. Create content. Buy technology. Those activities create visible signs of progress.

Strategy is less visible. It requires asking questions, examining assumptions and sometimes slowing down long enough to determine whether the problem everyone is trying to solve is actually the problem.

Understanding still has to come first

If you’ve read more than one thing I’ve written, you’re probably thinking, “Here she goes again.” Yes, I’m going to say it : understanding has to come before strategy. I know I sound like a broken record, but this is one hill I’m willing to die on. I continue to see what happens when organizations skip that step, and no amount of brilliant strategy—or impressive execution—can compensate for starting with the wrong understanding of the problem.

I once worked with an organization where the initial concern was that Marketing simply wasn’t getting enough done. There were plenty of requests for communications, campaigns, website changes and other marketing activity, so the apparent solution was straightforward: improve execution and produce more.

But once I started asking questions and talking with the people involved, a different picture emerged. Marketing was producing work. The larger challenges involved how information moved through the organization, who owned content, how decisions and approvals were made, and how different departments communicated—or didn’t communicate—with one another.

Producing more marketing wouldn’t have solved those problems. In fact, it probably would have created more activity inside a system that was already struggling to work together.

The request sounded tactical. The problem wasn’t.

This is also why I don’t consider asking questions before recommending a tactic to be slowing things down. Before I spend your money on digital advertising—or anything else—I want to understand what we’re trying to accomplish and what’s preventing it from happening today. That isn’t slowing down execution. It’s what makes effective execution possible.

Understanding belongs between the business objective and the strategy.

Before deciding what Marketing should do, we need to understand customers, competitors, internal capabilities, organizational constraints and what is actually standing between where the business is today and where leadership wants it to go.

Marketing strategy is the connective tissue

Marketing strategy translates a business objective into a set of choices about where Marketing can have the greatest impact.

If the business wants growth, for example, strategy helps determine whether the better opportunity is acquiring new customers, increasing business with existing customers, entering a new segment, strengthening retention or improving conversion. Those are very different growth problems, and they shouldn’t automatically lead to the same marketing plan.

Strategy also forces choices about audience, positioning, value proposition, messaging, customer experience, channels, resources and measurement. It also helps determine what not to do.

That can be difficult because organizations rarely suffer from a shortage of marketing ideas. There is always another platform to join, campaign to launch, technology to buy or tactic someone saw a competitor using.

A good strategy gives you a reason to say yes to some of those things and no to others.

Without it, marketing can become a collection of activities rather than a coordinated effort tied to the business.

The tactic may be right—and still be the wrong place to start

None of this means websites, email, digital advertising, social media or AI are bad ideas. The problem is deciding they are the answer before we have done enough work to understand the question.

A website redesign makes sense if the current digital experience is preventing customers from understanding the company, finding what they need or taking the next step. It makes considerably less sense if the real problem is an unclear value proposition that will simply be transferred into a prettier website.

The same principle applies to advertising. More advertising can increase visibility, but that won’t solve weak positioning. If prospective customers are already reaching your website and leaving because they don’t understand what you do or why it matters to them, buying more traffic may simply mean paying to introduce more people to the existing problem.

Generating more leads may sound like the answer, but not if Sales and Marketing don’t even agree on what constitutes a qualified opportunity. And I’ve seen plenty of organizations invest in better technology only to discover that technology can’t fix a process no one has clearly defined.

The tactic itself may work exactly as designed and still fail to solve the business problem.

That is one reason marketing performance can be so difficult to evaluate. When a tactic underperforms, the immediate assumption is often that the tactic failed. Sometimes it did. But sometimes the organization chose the wrong tactic because it never developed the strategy that should have guided the choice in the first place.

Good strategy doesn’t prevent action. It establishes the right sequence for it.

The missing middle is an organizational problem

I’ve seen organizations where executives could speak confidently about business goals and marketing teams could speak fluently about campaigns, channels and deliverables, yet the connection between those conversations remained surprisingly weak. But the missing middle isn’t Marketing’s problem alone.

Marketing strategy works best when leadership, Sales, Product, Operations, Finance and other relevant functions contribute what they know about the business. Marketing brings customer understanding, market perspective and expertise in how to influence behavior, but it cannot develop a meaningful strategy in a vacuum.

That’s why simply handing Marketing a business objective and asking for a list of tactics doesn’t work. Leadership can define where the organization needs to go, but Marketing still needs the context and understanding required to determine how it can help get there. Building that strategy requires input and engagement from the relevant stakeholders across the organization, each contributing what they know about the business.

If that conversation doesn’t happen, the missing middle doesn’t disappear. It gets filled with assumptions.

Start With the Right Questions

There will always be pressure to move quickly, and AI will only make it easier to move from a business objective to a polished list of recommended tactics in seconds. That makes the discipline of understanding even more important.

Before asking whether you need a new website, another campaign, more digital advertising or the latest technology, spend some time on the questions that connect those activities to the business:

What are we actually trying to change?
What is preventing that from happening today?
Which customers or audiences matter most?
What do they believe about us now?
Where do we have an advantage?
What internal realities could prevent us from delivering what we’re promising?
How will we know whether Marketing influenced the business outcome we started with?

You may still end up deciding that you need the website, the advertising or the email campaign.

But now you know why.

That’s the difference between executing marketing tactics and building a marketing strategy that actually moves the bu

Well, They’re Wrong. When Feedback Contradicts what Leadership Believes

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:42:10 GMT

What happens when the feedback you asked for contradicts what leadership believes?

Years ago, I was sitting in a conference room with an executive team while an outside agency presented findings from employee and customer research. We were working through a larger brand project, and the agency interviewed customers and gathered confidential feedback from employees to understand how people actually experienced the organization.

At one point, the presenter summarized a consistent theme in the employee feedback. One of the executives, who had been standing at the back of the room listening, interrupted her, “Well, they’re wrong.”

The presenter paused and explained that there really wasn’t a right or wrong answer. She wasn’t making a recommendation or offering her opinion. She was reporting what employees had told her about their experience with the company.

He repeated the same response: “They're wrong.”

I had wanted independent research because I had concerns about the direction we were taking. At that point, though, the findings weren't about proving anyone right or wrong. They were information we needed to understand.

We were sitting in a room full of senior executives, and no one challenged him. No one defended the research or pointed out that whether we agreed with the feedback wasn't really the issue. The employees had told us how they experienced the organization, and that information deserved to be understood. Instead, the conversation moved on, and one person's refusal to consider the findings ultimately helped shape what happened next.

I still think about that exchange because it captured something I’ve seen in organizations more than once. We ask customers, employees or other stakeholders what they think, but sometimes what we really want is confirmation that they see the organization the same way we do.

When they don’t, the gap can be uncomfortable.

But that gap is often where the most useful information is.

Perception isn’t something leadership gets to declare

Leaders can decide what they want an organization to stand for. Marketing teams can develop positioning, messaging and brand standards intended to communicate that idea clearly. They can articulate the culture they want to create and the experience they want customers and employees to have. What they cannot do is simply declare that people are experiencing the organization that way.

If customers consistently describe your company differently from the way you describe it, that doesn’t automatically mean your customers misunderstand you. If employees describe the culture differently from leadership, telling them they are wrong doesn’t change their experience. In both cases, the difference between intention and perception is information.

That doesn’t mean every piece of feedback is equally accurate or useful. One angry customer does not necessarily represent the market, and one unhappy employee does not define an organizational culture. Good research requires context, patterns and judgment. But when consistent themes emerge, dismissing them because they conflict with what leadership believes wastes the very insight the research was designed to uncover.

Research is not a validation exercise

Organizations spend a great deal of time and money gathering information. We conduct customer interviews, employee surveys, market research, brand studies, focus groups and competitive analyses because we want to make better decisions. But research only has value if we are willing to learn something we didn’t already know.

If we go into research only willing to hear what we already believe, we aren’t really seeking understanding. We’re seeking validation. That distinction matters because strategy is built on what we believe to be true. If those assumptions are wrong, incomplete or outdated, the strategy built on top of them may be perfectly logical and still fail.

This is why I always say that understanding has to come before strategy. I know I repeat it, A LOT, but I continue to see what happens when organizations skip that step. Understanding isn’t simply gathering information. It requires being willing to discover that what we believe about our organization may not be what other people experience.

The value of uncomfortable feedback

There is a natural human tendency to defend what we know. Leaders have years of experience, institutional knowledge and responsibility for decisions that customers and employees may never see. Sometimes there are perfectly reasonable explanations for why an organization operates the way it does. But an explanation does not erase a perception.

An explanation doesn't erase a perception. If customers don't understand your value proposition, telling them they should understand it doesn't solve the problem. The same applies inside the organization. Employees may experience a process very differently from the way leadership intended it to work, just as the market may continue to associate your brand with something you've been trying to move away from. In each case, the perception itself is telling you something worth understanding.

The productive question is not, “How can they be wrong?”

It is, “What is creating this perception, and what does it tell us?”

What creates the perception may turn out to be a communication problem, an operational issue, a cultural disconnect or a gap between what the organization promises and what it delivers. Further investigation may even show that the feedback really is an outlier. That doesn't mean accepting every comment as absolute truth. It means remaining curious long enough to understand what's behind the feedback before deciding what it means or what to do about it.

Leadership requires enough confidence to be curious

I think this becomes particularly important for senior leaders because power changes the room. The more authority someone has, the easier it becomes for other people to stop questioning their assumptions. People learn when disagreement is welcome and when it isn’t. That makes curiosity a leadership discipline, not simply a personality trait.

When evidence contradicts what we believe, our instinct may be to question the evidence, defend what we know or dismiss the information altogether. But leadership requires resisting that instinct long enough to ask a different question: What are we missing?

That question creates room for examination. The research methodology may need to be challenged. There may be context the respondents didn’t have. The organization may have changed while the market’s perception hasn’t caught up. Or the people closest to the business may be seeing something leadership has stopped being able to see. You don’t know until you ask.

Understanding requires the possibility of being changed

If you ask people what they think, you have to be prepared for the possibility that their answer won’t match what you believe. That doesn’t require surrendering your judgment to a survey, a focus group or a handful of customer interviews. Leaders still have to evaluate the quality of the information, consider the broader context and decide what really matters. But there is a difference between exercising judgment and protecting an assumption.

The purpose of research is not to tell us that we were right all along. It is to reduce the distance between what we think is happening and what is actually happening, so we can make better decisions.

The research may confirm our instincts or tell us we need to adjust the strategy. It may also require the humility needed to acknowledge that the organization we intended to create is not exactly the organization other people are experiencing. That can be uncomfortable information.

It can also be some of the most valuable information a leader receives.

You May Not Have an AI Capability Gap.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:53:40 GMT

It May Be a Vocabulary Translation Gap.

There is a strange thing happening to experienced leaders as AI becomes part of everyday business. We're being told, correctly, that we need to learn an entirely new technology. At the same time, we're being surrounded by an entirely new vocabulary to describe it.

Context engineering. Problem framing. Constraint specification. Evaluation criteria. Iterative refinement. Human-in-the-loop review.

If you've spent your career in marketing, strategy, operations or executive leadership, it's easy to hear enough of those terms and wonder whether you're further behind than you thought.

Then someone explains what they mean, and sometimes the response is simply:

Wait. That's what we're calling that now?

There's an important distinction getting lost in the conversation about AI adoption:

AI fluency and AI vocabulary are not necessarily the same thing.

Apparently, I've Been Calling It a “Word Bubble”

I work extensively with AI across much of the work I would normally do as a marketing executive: researching markets and competitors, comparing positioning and messaging, analyzing information, identifying patterns, exploring strategic options, preparing presentations, organizing research and developing content.

There's a particular format I frequently ask AI to use when I want to take that work and put it into something I can edit, save or use as a document. Except I didn't know what that format was called. So, I've been calling it a “Word bubble.” Recently, I learned that it's called a document-style Writing Block.

Apparently, “Give me the Word bubble” is not industry terminology.

Who knew?

What's even more interesting is that I haven't always called it the same thing. I've used “Word bubble” and several variations of it, and AI has consistently figured out what I meant because it had enough context to understand what I was trying to accomplish.

That's actually a pretty good example of AI fluency. Effective AI use isn't necessarily about finding the perfect words. It's about communicating enough meaning and context for the system to understand what you're trying to achieve.

New Technology Doesn't Always Mean New Thinking

I've spent roughly 30 years working in marketing while technology has changed continuously. In the late 1990s, I helped create an internal web page at Ericsson when companies were still figuring out how this new digital environment fit into the way we communicated and worked. Since then, I've worked through the expansion of the internet, digital marketing, websites, SaaS, marketing automation, social media, analytics, MarTech and now AI. Every shift required learning, and every shift brought new terminology.

Sometimes that terminology was necessary because something genuinely new had emerged. Software as a Service, for example, described an important change in how software was delivered and consumed. But not every new term represents an entirely new capability.

Recently, I was asked how I prompt AI to create an executive presentation. I stumbled for a moment, not because I don't know how to do it, but because I wasn't entirely sure what the question was asking me to call it.

I don't have a magic prompt. I approach the assignment much the same way I've approached complicated marketing and business problems for years.

What are we trying to accomplish?
Who is the audience?
What do they need to understand?
Why is this complicated?
What information matters?
What are the constraints?
Where are the hot buttons and landmines?
What does a successful outcome look like?

With AI, I also have to consider what I know that it doesn't.

If I don't provide relevant organizational history, customer knowledge, internal sensitivities or practical limitations, I can't reasonably expect AI to account for them.

It turns out many of those things have names in the emerging AI vocabulary.:

Understanding the assignment may be called problem framing.
Providing the necessary background becomes context engineering.
Explaining what can and cannot be done becomes constraint specification.
Looking at what comes back, challenging it and refining it becomes human-in-the-loop review.

Those terms aren't wrong. Shared terminology can be useful. But hearing the terminology before understanding what it describes can make familiar thinking sound far more foreign than it actually is.

For example, I've spent my career asking about constraints – but I just may have called them hot buttons and landmines .

When a Vocabulary Gap Looks Like a Capability Gap

This matters because unfamiliar vocabulary can distort someone's assessment of their own capability. It can also distort how other people assess them.

An experienced executive may hear “context engineering” and think, I don't know how to do that. Someone else hears the hesitation and thinks, They don't understand AI. Both conclusions may be completely wrong. Ask instead: What does AI need to understand about this business situation before it can give you a useful answer?

That same executive may have thirty years of experience answering that question. Experienced leaders know that the same recommendation can be brilliant in one organization and disastrous in another. They know customer expectations, budget realities, organizational history, internal relationships and strategic priorities can completely change the right answer.

That experience doesn't automatically make someone proficient with AI. There are genuinely new tools, capabilities and risks to learn. BUT… there's a significant difference between “I don't know how to do that” and “I didn't know that's what you called what I'm already doing.” We shouldn't confuse the two.

AI Gives Experience a New Place to Work

AI can often get something 80% of the way there remarkably fast. That's real productivity. The remaining 20% may require something different: recognizing that a technically sound recommendation won't work in this organization, that a presentation is answering the wrong question or that a logical argument won't persuade this particular audience.

That's where organizational knowledge, experience, discernment and judgment still matter.

For experienced leaders, that's part of the opportunity. AI doesn't require us to abandon the ways we've learned to think. It gives us a new place to apply them.

Learn the Technology. Learn the Translation.

Experienced leaders absolutely need to learn AI. We need to understand what it can do, experiment with it, recognize its limitations and risks, and determine where it changes our businesses, teams and roles. But we shouldn't assume every unfamiliar term represents a capability we don't possess.

When we encounter another new AI term, perhaps the better question is:

Is this something new I need to learn, or is this new vocabulary for something I already know how to do?
Sometimes the answer will be, I need to learn this. And other times you’ll realize: “Oh. That's what we're calling that now.” And that observation is useful too.

Because the goal isn't to SOUND fluent in AI. T he goal is to become fluent in using it. Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

Although I am going to try to remember that it's called a document-style Writing Block. No promises, because honestly, “Word bubble” has kind of grown on me.

Can AI replace an entire marketing department?

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:51:44 GMT

Can AI replace an entire marketing department?

No. But it can dramatically change what a marketing department should spend its time doing.

AI can do an extraordinary amount of work that once required significant human time. It can research a market, summarize hundreds of pages of information, analyze data, identify patterns, organize notes, draft content and help turn a pile of disconnected ideas into something useful.

I use it every day for those very things.

So, when executives look at those capabilities and ask whether AI could allow them to operate with fewer people, I don't think that's an unreasonable question. Leaders should be looking for ways to improve productivity, reduce unnecessary costs and use technology to help their organizations work more efficiently.

BUT... I think there's a more important question to ask before deciding which positions, or departments, AI can replace: “What work are you automating, and what organizational capability might you accidentally eliminate along with it?”

That distinction matters.

AI Can Automate Marketing Tasks.

It Can't Replace Marketing Expertise.

Marketing departments produce websites, emails, presentations, social media posts, advertising, research, reports, sales materials, videos and content. AI can already help produce many of those things faster, and its capabilities will continue to improve.

But producing marketing materials is not the same as having marketing expertise.

Marketing requires understanding why customers buy, what prevents them from buying, how competitors are positioned, where the organization has an advantage and whether customers perceive that as an advantage. It requires understanding the business well enough to recognize when the problem everyone is trying to solve maybe isn't actually the real problem.

If a CEO looks primarily at the output of a marketing department, AI can make replacing much of that work seem pretty straightforward. If the CEO understands the organizational capability behind that output, the calculation becomes very different.

AI can dramatically increase an individual's productivity, but that doesn't mean one person using AI suddenly possesses the collective expertise of an entire marketing function. AI can help you do more with what you know. The greater risk is what you don't know to ask, challenge or provide as context in the first place.

AI Doesn't Eliminate the Need for Judgment

AI can absolutely SUPPORT judgment. It can surface patterns, compare options, flag inconsistencies, model scenarios and even make recommendations based on criteria we've given it. But that's not the same as judgment. Judgment requires deciding what actually matters in context, including information that may be incomplete, contradictory, emotional, political, experiential or simply was never entered into the system. It also involves something we don't talk about enough: accepting accountability for the decision.

I spend a lot of time questioning AI, asking for clarification, challenging assumptions and pointing out context it couldn't possibly know unless I provided it. And sometimes my response is a quick, "Nope. That's not it."

A recommendation can follow accepted best practices and still be completely wrong for a particular company and a message can be beautifully written, but miss what customers actually care about. I’ve seen a strategy make perfect sense on paper and fail because the organization doesn't have the people, technology, budget or organizational commitment to execute it.

Imagine asking AI to develop your company's marketing strategy. You provide your products, target audiences, revenue goals, competitors and budget. Within minutes, you could have a remarkably polished strategy sitting in front of you.

But what if your largest customer is threatening to leave, Sales doesn't trust the leads Marketing sends them, the CRM data is unreliable, or your customers describe your value completely differently from the way your leadership team does? These aren't unusual circumstances or extreme examples. They're the kinds of realities organizations have to navigate every day.

Now the answer changes.

That's the part of business that doesn't always fit neatly in a spreadsheet, database or AI prompt. Organizations have histories, customers have emotions, teams have relationships and leaders have competing priorities, all while markets continue to behave unpredictably.

And there's another issue that's equally important: the person using AI needs enough expertise to evaluate what comes back. AI can generate a marketing strategy in seconds. That doesn't mean the strategy is right. Without marketing expertise, customer knowledge, organizational context or enough experience to challenge the recommendations, an output can look impressively complete while still being fundamentally generic and wrong for the company.

AI only knows the context you give it. Someone still has to be able to look at the answer and say, "That's technically reasonable, but it doesn't fit this organization." Or, "We're solving the wrong problem." Or simply, "No, that's not what I mean."

AI can produce an answer. The person using it still has to know whether the answer is any good.

Think of AI as a Table Full of Puzzle Pieces

One of the best ways I've found to describe my own use of AI is to think about working on a puzzle. I tend to dump the pieces onto the table. Some are research. Others are experiences, conversations, customer insights, half-developed ideas, things I've observed over twenty-plus years and thoughts that may not initially seem related.

AI is very good at helping me sort through them. It can group pieces that appear to belong together, identify patterns I haven't noticed and help me find the edges of the puzzle so the picture becomes easier to see. Sometimes it even notices a piece I've been staring at and asks, "Doesn't this belong over here?"

That's incredibly valuable.

But AI doesn't automatically know what picture I'm trying to build. Sometimes, once the pieces start coming together, I realize the picture isn't what I thought it was going to be either. That's where the interaction becomes useful. AI isn't doing my thinking for me. It's structuring my thoughts and giving my thinking something to work with.

Research, Synthesis and Discernment Are Different Activities

That puzzle analogy helped me recognize an important distinction in how we use AI.

Research answers: What is known? AI can dramatically accelerate our ability to gather information and understand a business landscape.
Synthesis answers: What belongs together? AI is remarkably good at finding connections, organizing information and helping us recognize patterns.
Discernment asks: What actually matters?
That's where experience becomes important. A leader has to determine which information deserves attention, which pattern is meaningful, which recommendation fits the organization and which technically correct answer should be ignored.

If AI can perform the research and produce the first draft, it's tempting to conclude that the person who used to perform those tasks is no longer necessary. But perhaps we've been looking at the wrong part of their job. Maybe the real value wasn't typing the words. It was knowing what needed to be said.

The Real Opportunity Is Leverage

I don't think we should protect every task people currently perform simply because humans have always performed it. Some work SHOULD change. For example, repetitive work should disappear where it makes sense, and some processes may require fewer people than they did five years ago. But, that's what technology has always done.

There's a significant difference between eliminating unnecessary work and eliminating the organizational knowledge, customer understanding and professional judgment that made the work valuable in the first place.

If AI can handle more of the production, perhaps experienced marketers should spend less time producing and more time understanding customers, evaluating opportunities, challenging assumptions, working with Sales, interpreting data and helping leadership decide where the organization should go next.

That's not protecting Marketing from AI. It's using AI to move Marketing toward higher-value work.

To be honest, there are times when working with AI actually takes me longer than simply doing the work myself. If I need a summary, AI saves me tremendous time. But if I'm developing an idea, I may go back and forth repeatedly, challenging language, questioning conclusions, adding context and occasionally discovering that something I thought was a minor observation is actually the most important idea in the entire piece.

The first draft gets faster, but the thinking gets deeper. That's the opportunity I see in AI: not replacing the expertise we've spent decades developing, but giving that expertise greater leverage. So yes, executives should absolutely be asking where AI can improve productivity and reduce costs.

But before eliminating a role, a team or an entire department because AI can perform many of its visible tasks, ask one more question: "Are we eliminating work that AI can perform, or are we eliminating an organizational capability we'll eventually discover we still need?"

Those are very different decisions. And knowing the difference is exactly why human judgment matters MORE, not less, in the age of AI.

For the Love of Clear Communication, Please Tell Me What You Do

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:59:03 GMT

For the Love of Clear Communication, Please Tell Me What You Do

I recently read a company description that was so full of industry jargon, product language, and technical terminology that by the time I reached the end of the first paragraph, I still had no idea what the company actually did.

And I'm a marketer.

I've spent my career working with organizations in telecommunications, semiconductor manufacturing, SaaS, financial services, commercial real estate lending, higher education, and technology. Complex businesses don't intimidate me. I actually enjoy figuring out how they work.

But if I have to read your opening paragraph three times, Google four industry terms, diagram the sentence, and ask AI to clarify what I think you're trying to say, we've wandered a little too far from the point.

Complex Businesses Need Clear Communication

Somewhere along the way, many organizations started believing that sounding sophisticated was more important than being understood. It isn't. In fact, I would argue the opposite. The more complex your business is, the more important clear communication becomes.

I've seen companies explain relatively simple services in language that sounds like it was written by a committee determined to use every buzzword from the last five technology conferences. By the end, I know they're innovative, scalable, AI-powered, customer-centric, next-generation, and transformational.

I still don't know what they do. That's a problem.

Your Audience Shouldn't Need a Translator

Your customers shouldn't have to decode your website. Neither should prospective employees, investors, business partners, board members, or journalists trying to understand your company. The reality is, you have roughly four to eight seconds to convince someone they're in the right place before they decide whether to keep reading or move on.

Think about that for a moment.

In less than ten seconds, someone has already decided whether to stay or move on. They haven't explored your website yet and haven't read your "About Us" page. They're simply trying to answer one valid question: "Am I in the right place?"

If your homepage can't answer that question quickly, you've already made people work harder than they should. People don't leave a website because your business is too complex. They leave because your communication is.

Clarity Demonstrates Expertise

Clear communication isn't about "dumbing things down." It's about respecting your audience enough to explain something well. Ironically, I've found that the people who understand their business the best are usually the ones who can explain it the most simply.

That's not because their business is simple, but because their understanding is deep. Anyone can hide behind jargon. Explaining a complex business in language another human being immediately understands takes real expertise.

Marketing Begins with Understanding

Marketing isn't about impressing people with vocabulary. It's about helping people understand enough to take the next step. If they don't understand what you do, they're not going to appreciate how innovative your technology is, how differentiated your solution is, or why your approach is better than everyone else's.

Clarity comes first. The details can follow.

So yes, please tell me about your innovative, scalable, AI-powered, next-generation ecosystem. I'm genuinely interested.

But first... For the love of all things good and holy...

Please tell me what you do.

What's the best technology platform for our company?

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:45:57 GMT

What’s the best technology platform for our company?

THEM: “What’s the best technology platform for our company?”

ME: I don’t know yet.

And if everyone is being honest, neither does anyone else until they understand what you’re trying to accomplish and the organization that has to accomplish it.

What’s the best CMS? What should our MarTech stack look like? How should we use AI? Which CRM should we implement?

I can give you a list - I've been in Martech since the list was under 10 solutions. Heck, AI can give you an exhaustive list in about 30 seconds. But that doesn’t mean anything on those lists is the right solution for your organization. So, I ask a lot of questions.

Anyone who has worked with me knows that I ask a lot of questions. Sometimes I even feel the need to warn people in advance. I’m not trying to be difficult. I’m trying to clearly understand the situation.

What are we trying to accomplish?
What technology is already in place?
What resources and internal capabilities do we have? What has been tried before?
What worked? What didn’t?
What do the people who have been inside the organization for years already know that I don’t?

Most importantly, are we all being transparent about the challenges that could keep us from getting where we want to go?

I don’t ask questions because I’m indecisive. I ask because I don’t believe in recommending a solution for the sake of giving an answer.

The question I’m really trying to answer is: “What are we trying to accomplish, and what do I need to understand about this organization before I can responsibly recommend how we get there?”

Because I can assure you that the answer isn’t waiting in a list of the top ten MarTech platforms. It takes time to understand the business, the people, the technology, the institutional knowledge, and the challenges that may not be obvious from the outside.

Could I recommend a platform without doing that work?

Sure.

With all my years of experience, I could throw out a laundry list of platforms and solutions. But two years later and a lot of money spent, the organization may still have a clunky system that doesn’t solve the underlying problem that no one talked about when we first started. So now we get to spend even more money fixing it

Don’t get me wrong. I love technology. It can create extraordinary opportunities for organizations. AI can too. But neither technology nor AI eliminates the need to understand the business first.

So, what’s the best technology platform for your company?

I don’t know yet.

But I’m going to ask enough questions to responsibly help you figure it out.

The Most Expensive Words in a Meeting

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:24:20 GMT

These are the most expensive words in a meeting...

"I understand."

Or at least we think we do. Because sometimes everyone understands...until they don't.

So why do intelligent, experienced, capable people sit quietly in meetings when they don't understand something?

I don't think it's because they aren't curious. I think somewhere along the way we've confused knowing with competence. So people learn to perform understanding.

I know— I used to be one of those people.

Someone is presenting. An acronym gets thrown out that I don't recognize. Everyone else seems to know what it means.

So I nod and think:

Maybe I missed something.
I should probably know this.
Everyone else seems to understand.
I'll figure it out after the meeting.

The presentation continues. Everyone keeps nodding. The meeting ends. And everyone leaves with their dignity intact and possibly six completely different understandings of what the hell they just agreed to.

We've all been there.

The problem isn't that people don't care. It's that many of us have been conditioned to believe asking a question reveals a weakness. So instead of being curious, we become quiet. When I was younger, I wanted to prove I belonged in the room. Today, I care more about getting it right.

If someone says, "AEM," I might stop the conversation and ask, "I'm sorry...what does AEM stand for again?" Sometimes I laugh, "of course. Adobe Experience Manager. I knew that. I just wasn't connecting the acronym."

Other times, I discover it isn't an industry acronym at all. It's an internal project, process, or system everyone inside the company understands and no one outside does. Those moments have taught me that asking a thoughtful question doesn't slow progress.

It creates clarity.

Some of the most expensive organizational problems don't begin with bad strategy. They begin with assumptions no one challenged because everyone assumed someone else understood. I've never asked a question to slow a meeting down. I ask because I'm trying to create clarity.

Are we talking about the same thing?
Are we defining success the same way?
What does this decision actually mean for the people responsible for executing it?

Because once the meeting ends, execution begins.

I'd rather spend five extra minutes creating clarity than spend five months fixing a misunderstanding.

The smartest executives I've worked with weren't the ones who always had the answers. They were the ones comfortable enough to ask one more question—not because they lacked competence, but because they cared more about getting it right than appearing to already know.

Maybe the most valuable words in a meeting aren't, "I understand."

Maybe they're: "Help me understand."

Does Your Website Really Need an SSL Certificate?

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:53:23 GMT

Yes. You absolutely do.

You visit a website and, before the page even loads, your browser tells you: “Your connection is not private.” What do you do?

If you’re like most people, you probably leave. That browser warning is one of the most visible reasons your website needs an SSL certificate. But SSL is about much more than avoiding an alarming message. It’s a fundamental part of protecting information exchanged through your website and maintaining the trust of the people who visit it.

What is an SSL certificate?

An SSL certificate helps create an encrypted connection between a visitor’s browser and your website, protecting information while it travels between the two.

Technically, today’s secure websites use TLS (Transport Layer Security), the successor to the older SSL technology. However, “SSL certificate” remains the term commonly used throughout the website industry.

When the secure connection is properly configured, your website uses HTTPS rather than HTTP.

That encrypted connection can help protect information submitted through your website, including contact forms, login credentials, payment information and other personal data.

Does every website need an SSL certificate?

Yes. A modern business website should have a valid SSL certificate, even if it doesn’t sell products or accept payments online.

Any website can exchange information with its visitors. A simple contact form, newsletter signup or customer login may involve personal information that should be transmitted securely.

There is also a more practical business reason: visitors expect websites to be secure.

If a browser warns someone that your website isn’t secure, many visitors aren’t going to investigate why. They’re simply going to leave.

What happens if a website doesn’t have an SSL certificate?

Without a properly configured SSL certificate, visitors may receive security warnings, information transmitted through the website may not be adequately protected, and the website can lose credibility with potential customers.

Modern browsers make website security increasingly visible to users. When someone encounters a warning such as “Your connection is not private,” the technical explanation behind it probably doesn’t matter very much. The message they receive is simpler:This website may not be safe.

That’s a significant trust problem for any business.

How does an SSL certificate protect customer information?

SSL/TLS encrypts information while it travels between a visitor’s browser and the website’s server, making that information much more difficult for an unauthorized party to intercept or alter.

This is especially important when visitors submit information such as:

Names and email addresses
Contact form information
Usernames and passwords
Account information
Payment or financial information
Other personal data

Encryption also helps protect the integrity of information while it is being transmitted.

Does an SSL certificate help SEO?

Yes, HTTPS is a Google ranking signal, but having an SSL certificate alone will not significantly improve a website’s search rankings.

Google has used HTTPS as a ranking signal for years, so website security remains part of a sound technical SEO foundation. But SSL shouldn’t be viewed as an SEO shortcut. Search visibility depends on many factors, including useful and relevant content, website performance, usability, authority and overall technical health. HTTPS is simply something Google—and your visitors—expects from a modern website.

Do ecommerce websites need SSL certificates?

Yes. Websites that accept payments need secure encryption to help protect payment information transmitted between customers and the website.

Businesses that store, process or transmit payment card information may also be subject to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

An SSL certificate alone does not make a website PCI compliant. PCI compliance involves broader security requirements. But securely transmitting payment information is an essential part of protecting customer data.

Does an SSL certificate make a website GDPR compliant?

No. An SSL certificate can help protect personal information during transmission, but SSL alone does not make a website GDPR compliant.

Privacy compliance involves much more than HTTPS. Businesses may need to consider how personal information is collected, processed, stored, shared and retained, along with other privacy and security requirements. Encryption is one piece of a much larger data-protection strategy.

Does HTTPS mean a website is completely secure?

No. HTTPS protects information traveling between a visitor and a website, but it does not protect the website from every cybersecurity threat.

SSL/TLS does not replace:

Secure website hosting
Software and plugin updates
Strong passwords and access controls
Website backups
Malware protection
Responsible management of customer data
Even malicious websites can obtain SSL certificates and use HTTPS.

The presence of HTTPS tells you the connection is encrypted. It does not guarantee that the organization behind the website is trustworthy.

How can you tell if your website has an SSL certificate?

The easiest way is to visit your website and confirm that its address begins with https:// and that your browser does not display a security or connection warning.

Website owners should also make sure their SSL certificates remain valid and renew properly. Many modern hosting platforms manage SSL certificates and renewals automatically, but it’s still worth confirming that everything is working correctly.

Test more than your homepage. Older pages, subdomains or incorrectly configured links can sometimes create security issues even when the primary website appears secure.

The Bottom Line

Yes, your business website needs an SSL certificate.

It protects information transmitted through your website, supports visitor trust, provides part of the technical foundation search engines expect and is particularly important when your website collects personal or payment information. Your customers may never know what SSL, TLS or HTTPS actually means. They don’t need to. They simply expect your website to work—and they expect the information they give you to be protected.

If the first thing their browser tells them is “Your connection is not private,” you’ve created a trust problem before you’ve had an opportunity to say a single word.

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The Missing Middle: What Connects Business Strategy to Marketing Tactics?

What connects business strategy to marketing tactics?

A business objective is not a marketing strategy

Understanding still has to come first

Marketing strategy is the connective tissue

The missing middle is an organizational problem

Start With the Right Questions

Well, They’re Wrong. When Feedback Contradicts what Leadership Believes

What happens when the feedback you asked for contradicts what leadership believes?

Perception isn’t something leadership gets to declare

Research is not a validation exercise

The value of uncomfortable feedback

Leadership requires enough confidence to be curious

Understanding requires the possibility of being changed

You May Not Have an AI Capability Gap.

It May Be a Vocabulary Translation Gap.

AI fluency and AI vocabulary are not necessarily the same thing.

Apparently, I've Been Calling It a “Word Bubble”

New Technology Doesn't Always Mean New Thinking

When a Vocabulary Gap Looks Like a Capability Gap

AI Gives Experience a New Place to Work

Learn the Technology. Learn the Translation.

Can AI replace an entire marketing department?

Can AI replace an entire marketing department?

AI Can Automate Marketing Tasks.

It Can't Replace Marketing Expertise.

AI Doesn't Eliminate the Need for Judgment

Think of AI as a Table Full of Puzzle Pieces

Research, Synthesis and Discernment Are Different Activities

The Real Opportunity Is Leverage

For the Love of Clear Communication, Please Tell Me What You Do

For the Love of Clear Communication, Please Tell Me What You Do

And I'm a marketer.

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Complex Businesses Need Clear Communication

Your Audience Shouldn't Need a Translator

Clarity Demonstrates Expertise

Marketing Begins with Understanding

But first... For the love of all things good and holy...

Please tell me what you do.

What's the best technology platform for our company?

What’s the best technology platform for our company?

Could I recommend a platform without doing that work?

So, what’s the best technology platform for your company?

The Most Expensive Words in a Meeting

These are the most expensive words in a meeting...

We've all been there.

It creates clarity.

Maybe they're: "Help me understand."

Does Your Website Really Need an SSL Certificate?

Yes. You absolutely do.