Writing
These are the Open Folders newsletter articles, published on Substack, newest first. I write about the parts of marketing most of us were never taught. Each entry links to the Substack post and to a plain markdown copy you can paste into an AI tool.
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The people who hire CMOs have already changed the role
Fourth and last in a four-part series on the 2026 marketing leadership reports: what recruiters and the listings data say the chief marketing role now asks for, and a three-line exercise for writing your own spec.
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CEOs like their CMOs. Not their marketing
Part of a four-part series on the 2026 marketing leadership reports: a read of 14 of them, one mechanism (ease of measurement has become the proxy for effectiveness, 71.7% of marketers say it directly influenced their budget allocation), three rational moves that shrink the seat, a deliberate disconfirming set, and Europe as the counterexample that ranks branding first on the same broken instruments. Includes a Monday two-count test and a full source list.
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Why first-time CMOs lose the arguments they're right about
Third in a four-part series on the 2026 marketing leadership reports: roughly seven in ten S&P 500 CMOs are in the role for the first time, and they lose arguments they're right about because the climb never tested throughput, how much of what they know reaches a decision in rooms that don't share their vocabulary. Rejects both breadth models and the soft-skills fix, with an hourglass as the mechanism. Includes a Monday three-things test.
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The CMO Role Is Vanishing Before You Get There
First of a four-part series on the 2026 marketing leadership studies: CMO careers keep landing upward while the enterprise CMO seat itself disappears (31% of the S&P 500 has no enterprise marketing chief), and the decade of crisis coverage diagnosed the person when the seat was the patient. Includes a Monday mandate-match test for any marketing leader.
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7 Positioning Frameworks, One Battle for the Mind
Traces seven positioning frameworks across 52 years (Kotler's STP, Ries and Trout's battle for the mind, Ulwick's ODI, Moore's template, Play Bigger's category design, Dunford's canvas, Whitler's board-level framework) and argues they answer different questions rather than competing.
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A Brief History of Jobs to Be Done
Where JTBD theory came from and how it split into four practitioner tools (Christensen, Ulwick's ODI, Moesta's Forces of Progress, Klement's application).
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Evolution, Not Revolution
The lineage of every major marketing strategy framework (positioning, jobs to be done, mental availability, market segmentation, the 4Ps) traced back to its actual origin.
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Not everything that moves in the mind moves in the market
Why buyers can notice, like, prefer and intend to act without doing it: the gap between intent and action, the four kinds of friction in it, and what marketing can do about each.
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How markets actually grow
Why company growth gets harder when you manage visible demand as if it were the whole market.
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Why Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM
Your buyers aren't evaluating vendors. They're validating a choice they already made.
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92% of Companies Price Without Asking the Buyer. Here's What It Costs.
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5 Things That Could Be Breaking Your Marketing
Locate the break before you prescribe the fix.
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The cost of waiting isn't visible today. But it's real.
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The data is right. The conclusions are wrong.
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We optimize everything except the question
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Your marketing dashboard is working exactly as designed. That's the problem.
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If I Gave You $50K, What Would You Do With It?
Marketing trained the CFO to ask exactly that question. We were never ready to answer it.
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The dashboard is green. The business is bleeding out.
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Why Marketing Gets Held Accountable for Growth With One Lever to Pull
Authority or input. Know which one you have.
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Measure Narrow. Reward Narrow. Promote Narrow. Hire Narrow.
How demand capture, tool fluency, and short feedback loops narrowed the definition of a marketing leader and shrunk marketing.
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A Blameless Series of Reasonable Decisions Destroyed Marketing's Credibility
What does your marketing dashboard answer well?
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The job teaches what the job requires
We designed jobs that teach one narrow part of marketing, then told the people in those jobs they were learning by doing.
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The Say-Do Gap Isn't an Execution Problem
WARC's Multiplier Playbook maps the blockers precisely. Five of them need a different tool.
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Marketers Mastered the Platform. The Discipline Was Never on the Syllabus.
How useful credentials helped marketing teams learn the sliver
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Most of marketing was never opened
Hire narrow. Train narrow. Promote narrow. Lead narrow. Repeat for 15 years.
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