When thinking about the assets you’re going to create as part of your marketing mix—whether images, video, words, audio, whatever—make sure you are using different pieces to come from different angles. Each piece can appeal to a different audience—or different facet of your audience.

Is playlist design the new branding exercise?

a new study, researchers found that when background music at a workplace is out of sync with what workers need to do their jobs, it can affect their energy, mood – and even performance.

Public Regard curates playlists as part of their design process.

via ScienceDaily

Consumers are sophisticated, they know when they’re being marketed and sold to.

Even though people want to buy things to solve their problems and satisfy their desires, we also have powerful filtering mechanisms that shift attention away from messages that are “selling” to us.

Rather than a direct benefit-oriented sales approach, an indirect method is used to spark interest, build trust, establish shared identity, and prove authority before the offer is made.

You might say all those pieces of the indirect method are part of brand building.

via Leading Expert

We should all strive to approach our work with this belief from Khalilah Olokunola

Today I consider myself an Impact Architect. I only build that which brings impact.

It rhymes with the concept of being a superstar in your role that sports teams (go Celtics!) talk about.

Every little thing it does is magic, because…

It reduces decision friction.

Or, as Why We Buy says:

[because] eliminates our brain’s natural tendency to overthink a decision.

Instead, it signals the mental heavy lifting has already been done, so the brain shortcuts to accepting what comes after as a valid reason. And we’re more likely to comply when something’s justified.

A classic example:

Based on my kids, real-time generative AI produced entertainment should be the preferred medium for Generation Alpha

Common request format: I want {novel iteration} of {common format}

They try to find something that matches the (multimodal style) vision in their head

(Generations are still garbage)

We talk about this with clients a lot, and currently have a company thinking about switching to us because their current partner relies too heavily on promos.

The danger isn’t in discounting itself. It’s in conditioning. When buyers consistently see 20% off, they don’t view it as a bonus — they start viewing full price as a penalty. Over time, your standard pricing feels inflated, and loyalty shifts from brand to bargain.

The balance will (likely) get harder in our post-tariff world.

Sales and promotions are tools in your toolkit. But they shouldn’t be the introduction.

via Buyology

It’s hard for people to imagine, sometimes, something that hasn’t happened yet.

So many things that people told me would never happen, have happened.

-Danny Heifetz

Said as part of a conversation about how people expend so much effort to say something can’t happen instead of just asking “what if it could?” and facing whatever fear that brings.

It may not work. But what if it did?

It’s not brand OR performance marketing.
It’s brand AND performance marketing.
Only question is the balance between the two.

You see the efficiency in direct URL type in. You see the efficiency in organic search. All of those pop as traffic sources and sales sources when we have the investment in upper funnel.

I’m not worried about us performance marketing the brand to death because we are properly activating the campaigns at every layer of the consumer’s journey, the upper funnel, the mid, consideration, and then the lower funnel, and they all work together well.

Kristen D’Arcy