Category: Your Business is Your Brand
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Ramp: The Best Experience Is the One You Don’t See
Ramp, Eric Glyman, and the position they built by accident and never named A note before we begin: I have been watching Ramp for a while now, and I think highly of what Eric Glyman and his co-founders have built. Getting a finance product to the point where customers describe it with relief takes years…
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The One Room Where You Still Believe Words
Most of us learn a simple rule before we can read: when words and actions clash, children often take their cue from what adults do. You can say “be gentle” in your calmest voice while you slam the cupboard, but the slam is the stronger lesson. You can tell them to sit still at dinner…
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Simile’s $2 billion raise: The CERN of Saying Things
TLDR: I read the study behind Simile, the AI startup that just raised $200 million to simulate human beings. The founders interviewed 1,000 people for 2 hours each and built AI agents that fill out surveys the way those people would. Their own paper grades the copies against survey answers and says so, carefully. The…
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“We left about a billion dollars off the table.”
Patrice Louvet runs Ralph Lauren. That sentence is his, from a 44-minute interview about the brand, and he delivers it the way other CEOs report a record quarter. A billion dollars of real revenue, real customers holding real money, and the company walked away on purpose. Every positioning conversation happens on one side of a…
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The Empirical Case That Marketing Never Owned Positioning
Six cases from the public record, the science on why the newest one won’t work, and a thirty-minute exercise called The Refusal Line that shows you who owns your position. For years I have watched companies fire their Chief Marketing Officer after a positioning failure, hire a replacement with a better résumé, and expect the…
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How Language Formed — And Why Professional Vocabulary Collapsed
I went looking for something small and fell through the floor. The small thing was a question I couldn’t shake. How did we ever agree on what words mean? Not grammar, not spelling. The deeper thing underneath those. When I say “chair” and you picture a chair, some machinery is running that neither of us…
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Two decks that share a word and share nothing else
The word “positioning” describes two different disciplines. One is a language craft. The other is an operating model decision. They share a word and almost nothing else. The word alone is worth money: attach it to language work, and the price goes up without the work changing. I have watched CEOs spend six figures on…
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The End of Doing Your Own Banking
A POV on how retail and small business customers will manage money in North America over the next three to five years, and what it means for banks, challengers, and fintechs. The airline analogy that says everything Air Canada owns Aeroplan. It is Air Canada’s single most defensible customer relationship. On Point Loyalty’s 2026 ranking…
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Alex Smith × April Dunford — one hour on positioning, taken apart line by line
An hour of two people who agree with each other, congratulating each other for disagreeing with people who aren’t in the room. What follows is what actually happened, not what they think happened. 1. The setup — what the conversation is announced as Alex Smith opens with a frame. He is the “no bullshit strategy”…
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Fin: The Man Who Hated Bots Now Sells the Most Personal One
I have been following what Intercom, now Fin, has been building for years. Eoghan McCabe’s willingness to destroy a functioning business to rebuild it around a conviction is rare, and it deserves to be taken seriously. This analysis exists because one question keeps surfacing when I watch companies at this stage: what business are you…
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The Report That Surveyed the Wiring
An autopsy of JKR x Kantar’s “Be Distinctive Everywhere: The Experience Edition” (2026) There’s a report going around. JKR and Kantar launched it at Cannes in June 2026, the same week Sharp and Ritson finally shared a stage. The headline is everywhere on LinkedIn: only 28% of brand equity is built by paid media. 71%…
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Six Doors, One Room
I watched the brand growth debate over the past week. Six people walked up to the same empty room and stopped. The one who got closest got there thirty years ago. For a whole week, I read the same argument made by different people, and the same thing kept bothering me each time. Not the…