Michael McFadden

"I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things." Mother Teresa – at Silverthorne, CO

Brands often treat customer LTV as a single blended number. Total value averaged across everyone. Huge mistake. That average is hiding almost everything worth knowing. The real intelligence shows up the moment you break it apart. Look at lifetime value by cohort, and you can see whether the customers you acquired this year are actually worth more or less than the ones from two years ago. Look at it by first-purchase channel, and you learn which acquisition sources bring in customers who stay versus customers who vanish. Look at it by the campaign that first brought someone in, and you start to see which of your marketing actually built the business versus which just moved revenue for the short term. A blended average can't tell you any of that. It can only tell you what “sort of” happened in the past. Whereas the segmented view tells you where to put the next dollar. This is the difference between measuring for a report and measuring to make a decision.

The A/B test you ran last week has a surprising origin. In the 1930s, advertising ran almost entirely on gut instinct and creative ego. Then George Gallup joined a major agency as its director of research and started doing something radical. He went out and measured what people actually read and remembered, rather than what the creatives assumed. He replaced opinion with evidence. The audience personas in your strategy deck, the recall studies, the whole discipline of testing a message before you scale it, much of it traces back to the methods he pioneered. David Ogilvy, who worked under him early on, called it the most defining experience of his career. The tools got better. The core lesson never changed.

In 1982, David Ogilvy sent a memo to his entire staff with a single instruction. Read Roman and Raphaelson's book on writing. Read it three times. Not once. Three times. This was one of the most celebrated figures in advertising history telling his people that the highest-leverage thing they could do was get better at plain writing. The principles in that book are almost aggressively simple. Write the way you talk. If you wouldn't say it out loud to a colleague, don't put it in the copy. Use active voice, because it creates momentum and makes someone accountable for the action. Cut the deadwood, the filler phrases that take up space and say nothing. Put the most important thing first, before you clear your throat with three paragraphs of context. Decades later, most marketing writing still violates every one of these. That's the opportunity. Clear writing is a proxy for clear thinking, and clear thinking is rare enough to be a genuine advantage. If you're early in your craft and want one thing to obsess over, make it this. Learn to write like a human being.

A lot of marketing leads with the wrong subject. Awards won, years in business, the size of the team, etc. The problem with that is nobody cares. Not because those things aren't real accomplishments, but because your customer isn't sitting there thinking about you. They're thinking about their own problem, their own goals, their own hesitation about whether this is going to work for them. The moment your message changes from "here’s what we've done" to "here is exactly what you get," everything sharpens. The right people lean in. The copy lands harder. And conversion rates predictably rise. So lead with the outcome the customer walks away with.

Here's something most clients don't realize about a good agency. They often know something isn't working before you do. They’re closer to the data and watching the signals daily (at least they should be). That creates a responsibility that people underestimate. Character is what determines whether we tell you the moment we see it, or wait for a more comfortable time to bring it up. The comfortable time never actually comes, and the problem only grows in the meantime. The partners worth keeping are those who tell you the bad news early, with context, even when it's an awkward conversation. That’s a massive differentiator between good and bad agencies.

Data is a competitive advantage if you know how to use it, and a massive distraction if you don't. Many companies believe more data automatically makes them smarter. The difference comes down to a few questions most teams never slow down to ask. What’s the actual source of this data? What’s it genuinely telling me, and how much confidence do I have in that signal? What other variables could be influencing the number that I'm not seeing? Teams that can answer these questions turn data into real intelligence about their customer. But teams that can't just drown in their dashboards and call it strategy.

Automation doesn’t fix broken processes, it simply accelerates them. Before adding agents and automations, slow down and build a clear process, establish what good looks like, and create a way to measure quality. Otherwise, you’re just reaching chaos faster.

When a company suddenly stops growing, everyone loves to blame the marketing. But it's rarely just the marketing. After enough of these situations, you start to see the same handful of causes underneath almost every plateau. Distraction is the most common one. Too many channels, too many product lines, too many initiatives, and nothing executed all the way through. Then there's a shallow understanding of the customer. They can tell you who buys, but not why, and that failure corrupts every decision downstream. Sometimes it's infrastructure that can't support your ambition. Sometimes it's operations, and I always want to meet the people running inventory and fulfillment, because we can't do our job if they can't do theirs. And sometimes it's leadership, where the approach that worked at one size simply doesn't scale to the next. But all these problems show up as slowing growth. So marketing gets the blame. And if you point to the wrong problem, good luck solving the issue.

Pricing is about attracting the right customers. Without a clear understanding of your ideal, high-lifetime-value customer, promotions and discounts can quickly become a race to the bottom. The strongest pricing strategies use price, shipping, and promotions intentionally to bring in customers who create long-term value, not just short-term revenue.

Imagine a business owner who says they want to grow 20% next year without discounting at all. Both goals feel reasonable. Held together, on the current timeline, they might even be impossible. But this is where a lot of planning breaks down, because two conflicting goals get treated as a forced choice: pick one, kill the other. That's usually the wrong idea. Conflicting goals often just mean some variable needs to move. Maybe the timeline extends slightly. Maybe you find creative promotions that move product without hurting the brand. Maybe a new product launch opens room that discounting would’ve filled. This is why the answer is rarely to abandon one goal, but to find the adjustment where both can be true.

Companies set one growth number and then spend the year explaining why they missed it. A single target is a setup for disappointment, because it pigeonholes everything in a way that isn’t realistically possible.   The better approach is two targets. An obtainable number you're genuinely confident you can hit. A stretch number that would represent a great year. Each target needs its own plan: the specific hires, spend, and moves required to reach it. That way, when the year unfolds faster or slower than expected, you already know which levers to pull.

Imagine a brand runs a promotion because they need a lift this quarter. It works, so they run it again… It works again, so it becomes a monthly thing, and then a customer expectation, and then the only time anyone buys. Eighteen months later, they're a discount brand without initially realizing it. That's such a common trap. Discounting works, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. The short-term lift is real and measurable, and it trains your customers to wait for the next sale instead of paying full price. But there’s a way to implement these discounts without harming your brand. Nordstrom runs disciplined sales twice a year, on a schedule, and built a separate outlet channel so the discount behavior lives somewhere other than the core brand. That’s just one of many examples. The question every brand needs to answer honestly is which one of these approaches they're doing. Are you running a discount strategy on purpose, with limits and a plan? Or are you accidentally becoming a discount brand? Because once your customers learn to wait for the deal, that expectation is very hard to unwind. Decide on purpose before the market decides for you.

In the 1920s, Americans didn't eat bacon at breakfast. It wasn't a cultural habit, it wasn't a morning staple, and nobody was asking for it. Then a PR firm working on behalf of a pork producer commissioned a study of 5,000 physicians and asked a simple question:  “Is a hearty breakfast or a light breakfast better for your health?” The doctors said hearty. The firm publicized the findings widely, tied the concept of a hearty breakfast directly to bacon and eggs, and distributed the message through newspapers across the country. Within a few years, bacon at breakfast had become an American institution. The product didn't change at all. What changed was the framing.  A deliberate decision to connect an existing product to an existing belief through a message that felt credible, timely, and useful. That's category creation. Not a better product. Not a bigger ad budget. A clear point of view, delivered through the right channel, to the right audience, at the right moment. The fundamentals of how you build demand haven't changed since the 1920s. Only the channels have.

Here's an uncomfortable test for many eCom brands. Strip away all the paid media, and ask what's actually left. For a surprising number of businesses, the honest answer is…drumroll… not much. They run every performance channel well, and the revenue comes in. But the growth is entirely rented, and the moment the ad spend pauses, so does the business. That's a break-even paid channel wearing the costume of a brand. Warren Buffett understood the real thing better than most marketers ever have. The value of a brand is the delta between what someone will pay for a commodity and the higher price they'll happily pay because it's yours. That difference is what makes a business sustainable and worth investing in. Marketplaces like Amazon make this harder, because a customer can compare you side by side with ten alternatives in the same instant. Conveying brand value in that moment takes something performance ads alone can't build. At some point in a company's growth, you have to invest in brand so you're not stuck in hand-to-hand combat on performance channels forever.

The hard road isn’t a detour… the hard road is the strategy. Real growth comes from investing in what your customers truly need before the market fully recognizes its value, even when it means building, hiring, and committing resources before the revenue arrives.

There's a framework I was introduced to decades ago.  One that still explains why people buy better than almost anything I've seen since. It comes from David Aaker, one of the sharpest brand minds out there. People buy for three kinds of benefits: functional, intellectual, and emotional. Functional is what the product literally does for you. Intellectual is what you believe it does, the reasoning you can articulate for the choice. Emotional is how it makes you feel about yourself. The purchase happens on the accumulation of all three, not any single one. World-class brand marketers love to chase the emotional, and they're right to, but you still have to satisfy the functional and the intellectual, or the emotional pitch falls flat. But here’s the thing… Which of the three a brand is missing usually traces back to who built it. An engineer-founder tends to nail the functional and intellectual and completely miss the emotional connection. A visionary-founder often speaks pure emotion while underweighting the functional and intellectual proof. Sometimes the benefit is truly absent. More often it exists and is simply missing from the messaging.

The best referral programs start with a product people genuinely want to share. That’s it. When a brand solves a meaningful problem and creates real value, referrals happen naturally because customers become the proof.

Brands think they know what they're selling. They can describe the product, list the features, explain how it works. What they often can't tell you is what the customer is actually buying. For example, there's a filtered shower head company that sells filtration technology. But that's not what moves product. What moves product is beauty, vanity, self-care. Seeing yourself in the mirror after a shower that doesn't strip your skin and hair. Completely different angle. Different creative, different photography, different headlines, different emotional hooks. The brands that figure out the difference between what they make and what the customer is actually purchasing… that's where the real growth is. But many brands never stop to ask the question.

Picture a brand that promises transformation. Big claim, confident creative, and a strong visual identity. Then the product arrives, and the experience is fine. Nothing wrong, but nothing close to what the ad suggested. That might seem trivial, but this is where trust breaks down. Rubicam called it promising in disappointment instead of promising in delight. The difference is often just a single word in a headline, a claim pushed one degree further than the product can actually support. Customers don't forget when reality doesn't match the promise. They tell people. This is why the best creative doesn't just attract attention. It sets an expectation the product can exceed.

A premium liquor brand was shooting a campaign, and they hired a world-class cinematographer just to film a pour. Seems like overkill at first glance. But every frame of that film reflected exactly what the brand stood for: craftsmanship, precision, the kind of quality that's worth paying for. This liquor brand didn’t cut corners on their positioning, something many brands do. Every decision, from the cinematographer they hire to the packaging material they choose to the customer service script they write, gets run through the same filter. Does this reflect what we stand for? It's a harder standard to maintain than it sounds, especially as a company scales and the people making small decisions multiply. But from a customer resonance perspective, it’s 100% worth it.