"Wide Awake & Wondering": Leadership, Marketing Insights, and the Groove for Those Who are Insatiably Curious"
Strategy, Storytelling and Insights from Life Lessons
Why Now? What’s In It For You?
I’ve always been drawn to the intersection of brand leadership, people insights, and what drives marketing behavior—how companies grow, why consumers make the choices they do, and what brands do you trust as opposed those where one would call BS on the brand proposition and its authenticity. I write to refine my own voice and share the best of what I have learned with you: marketers, investors, leaders, friends and mentor program participants. Over the years, I’ve had conversations with founders, executives, those I have hired and peers across multiple industries, and a few questions come up over and over again:
What makes a brand’s authenticity truly stick in people’s minds?
What would you prove to investors what’s worth prioritizing in shifting consumer behavior in an unpredictable time?
What’s the most overlooked factor in building a high-performing team?
How do you balance data-driven decision-making with creative intuition?
These are the conversations that fuel me each day when I wake up. So, I’m starting this Substack to put some of these ideas down in writing—sharing insights, exploring trends, and sparking discussions around the topics I’m most passionate about. I hope you’ll find ways to give visibility to those who deserve recognition and can help you and your teams’ on their journey.
Brand Leadership & Growth
At its core, brand leadership is about trust viewed through authenticity. The best brands aren’t just recognizable; they create emotional connections simply and quickly that drive loyalty and long-term success. I’ve spent years studying (and working with) brands that get it right—and even more that miss the mark. Let’s discuss what separates them, from strategic positioning to customer experience and beyond.
People Insights & Consumer Behavior
One of the biggest mistakes in marketing is assuming people are rational decision-makers. The reality? People buy based on emotion, habit, and context just as much as price and features. They are often responding to whatever moment they just came out of more than knowing where they’re headed. I love diving into the psychology behind why people behave the way they do—how attention shifts, what makes messages resonate, and what we can learn from behavioral science to build better brands with more positive impact on the communities they serve, build and often create.
Marketing, Storytelling & Influence
Marketing has never been just about selling—it’s about storytelling, influence, and understanding culturally relevant moments. The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like a brand that gets you. I’ll be celebrating businesses who can connect with audiences in ways that feel authentic, relevant, and built for the long haul. It ain’t easy and in a more fractured world gets more difficult every day to attract attention greater than the few seconds a goldfish may give your brand.
The Questions I Have Been Asked in the Last 30 Days
Beyond brand and marketing, I also get a lot of questions about career growth, leadership, and decision-making:
What and who do you pay attention to without chasing every new thing?
What’s the best way to build a career in marketing and strategy?
How do you develop a strong personal brand when reluctant to do so?
What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
What’s the biggest mistakes you’ve made and what’d you learn?
I welcome your examples and will bring visibility to your career arc in future posts.
So if any of this resonates, hang around. Subscribe. Reply. Stay tuned. Let’s have the conversations even the harder ones.
If you read this far, I’ll wrap up every post with a reason to smile. Here’s a photo of my brother Lyle and I from around 1978 where I think I cut my own hair before our Mother took us to Kmart to get our picture taken. Not shown clearly is my Cracker Jack string necklace I made that morning. Enjoy! In all my years of public speaking I used to open with an embarassing photo of myself, I found the exercise relieved any stress or nervousness before I took the stage in front of hundreds of strangers from Shanghai to Bangkok to Silicon Valley to New York City.
