In this episode of Poetry and Marketing, I read you a haiku about branding:

If my love for thee

Could be expressed as a brand,

Of course it’s Apple.

Apple is the brand business owners mention nine times out of ten when I ask, “What brand would you want to emulate?” But here’s the catch: Apple, Nike and others in that echelon are legacy brands, built over decades with billions in investment. Most of us don’t have that runway.

So instead of chasing the impossible, I make the case for setting realistic benchmarks. I talk about why it’s smarter (and far more useful) to look at local or regional brands doing great work, especially those serving similar audiences. Let’s be aspirational, yes...But let’s also be grounded in reality.

In this episode of Poetry and Marketing, I’m sharing a haiku I wrote just this morning:

Marketing planning

Needs more than authority;

It needs a leader.

I use this poem as a jumping-off point to talk about something I see all the time in small and mid-sized businesses: a massive leadership gap in marketing.

I walk through a typical (and deeply flawed) setup where a young, often underprepared marketing manager is thrown into the deep end, reporting to a CEO or a VP of Sales with no real marketing background. These folks may have authority, but they’re not equipped to lead. And that disconnect? It’s killing marketing outcomes.

If you’ve ever wondered why marketing feels like a mess or why you’re not seeing results, I think this episode will help connect the dots. It’s not about blaming anyone, it’s about recognizing the underlying issues and starting to fix them.

In an age of advanced analytics it's surprisingly easy to lose the scent of what's really important: results that matter to the company's bottom line. If you want to be successful in pay per click, you need to focus on the needs of the customer before the cost of the campaign; otherwise you're just paying to get more people to content that doesn't work.