Resources
Writing for people running consumer brands.
Writing on AI search, brand, customers, competitors and advertising. Some work through a problem. Some cover something that just changed.
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Listening tools tell you volume. They do not tell you what people said.
A mention count can be technically correct and completely useless at the same time. Four ways that happens, found by reading every mention behind a single number.
9 minute readReddit lost 86% of its ChatGPT citations in four days. Nobody at Reddit changed anything.
The most-cited source on ChatGPT Search became one of the least-cited in under a week, without publishing anything differently.
6 minute readFive ways Indian consumer brands sell, and what each one changes
Nearly every article about customer data, retention and attribution silently assumes one route to market. Here is what changes when yours is different, including when it is several at once.
7 minute readAI search
How AI assistants decide which brands to name, and how to be one of them.
Answer engines do not rank you. They quote you.
Optimising for a ranking gets you a position in a list. Optimising to be quoted gets you named inside somebody else's sentence, which is a different job.
8 minute readWhy AI-referred visitors convert four times better
A channel producing a fraction of the volume and several times the conversion rate deserves more attention than it gets. Most brands are not even measuring it.
5 minute readYour buyer decided before they ever reached you
For twenty years the first thing a buyer did was arrive. Now the first thing they do is ask, and get an answer that may not include you.
6 minute readBrand
Keeping a brand recognisable when many people, and now software, write for it.
Your brand voice does not survive the handoff
Every brand book is a description. What you need is a specification, and the difference is whether a stranger can apply it without asking you a question.
7 minute readThe brand questionnaire nobody fills in
Every engagement starts with a document that assumes the client has three uninterrupted hours. They do not, and the work starts anyway.
6 minute readTranslating your campaign is not regional marketing
Translating your English copy is not vernacular marketing. It is English marketing with the words changed, and it reads that way.
6 minute readConsistency is not sameness
The most common brand failure is not inconsistency. It is a brand so tightly policed that nothing memorable survives review.
5 minute readCustomers and growth
Who your customers are, and where growth comes from when paid gets expensive.
You already own your segmentation. It is in your orders table.
Three columns you already have, a spreadsheet, and an afternoon. The hard part is not the maths, it is deciding what each group gets.
8 minute readCAC is up 40 to 60% since 2023. Spending more is not the answer that is left.
When the cost of the same customer rises by half, the options are to accept worse margins, spend less, or stop relying so heavily on the channel. Most brands pick the first by default.
7 minute readMarketing does not have a data problem
Every quarter another dashboard gets commissioned to answer a question the last dashboard already answered.
5 minute readThe second purchase decides everything, and nobody owns it
Most consumer brands can tell you their acquisition cost and their repeat rate. Very few can tell you who is responsible for the thirty days in between.
5 minute readHow you sell
Stores, marketplaces and quick commerce. What each route to market changes about what you can know and what you can do.
You sell through stores, so you assume you have no customer data
Almost every conversation about customer data assumes an e-commerce backend. Brands that sell through stores hear that and correctly conclude none of it applies to them, then wrongly conclude they have nothing.
6 minute readNobody notices when a regular stops coming
The most valuable customer you will lose this year will leave without anyone noticing, because nothing in a store is watching for absence.
5 minute readYour buyer is the retailer. Your customer is the shopper.
A brand selling through stores has to persuade two entirely different people, and the one who pays you is not the one who uses the product.
5 minute readWhen the platform owns your customer
You can be doing crores a month on a marketplace and have no way to contact a single person who bought from you.
6 minute readWatching the market
Competitors, conversation and timing, without drowning in dashboards.
A competitive deck is out of date the day it is delivered
Competitive research is usually run as a project. The research is fine. The format is the problem.
6 minute readThe moment you missed was already on the calendar
Two weeks before a festival, somebody asks what you are doing for it. That question is the whole problem, and it is answerable a year in advance.
6 minute readA hashtag tells you when, not what
Adding the biggest tags in your category mostly buys impressions from people with no interest in it. The direction a tag is moving is worth more than its size.
5 minute readAdvertising and data
Where advertising technology is going, and what to do about it now.
Agentic media buying: what to hand over, and what to keep
The question is no longer whether agents will run media. It is which decisions you are willing to not be in the room for.
6 minute readThe cookie is gone and nothing single replaced it
Everyone waited for one replacement. Several partial ones arrived instead, which turns out to be workable, as long as you own a base of customer data to plug into them.
6 minute readRetail media is a $196B market where attribution actually works
A channel where the platform can see the purchase is structurally different from one where it has to infer it.
5 minute readAttribution was always estimation
Marketing spent a decade treating a modelled number as a measured one, then treated its decline as a crisis rather than a correction.
6 minute readRunning a marketing team
The operating questions that decide whether any of the above actually happens.
Know First, Act Faster
We do the research most platforms skip, then run the campaigns it points to.
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