The book
Everyone Hates Marketing!
(But you’ll love this no-nonsense strategy that actually works.)
Four out of five CEOs don’t trust or are unimpressed with their marketing leadership. Three out of four marketing leaders don’t believe they’re empowered to do the job they were hired for. This is a book about that, and about the framework that fixes it.
Why it exists
A book written because two groups of people stopped believing each other
In 2006 I was a 25-year-old marketing director in Atlanta who raised my hand and said “I think I can fix it” about a failing flagship brand. I did, and that work is still on shelves at Target and Walmart more than two decades later.
Then I spent eighteen years running an agency on the other side of the table, watching the same breakdown happen again and again from the opposite chair. This book is what I learned sitting in both.
It doesn’t defend marketing. It explains why it keeps failing you, and hands you a way to demand better.
The four promises
Four rules I set myself before writing a word
They’re printed in the prologue, phrased as promises, with an explicit invitation to hold me to them as you read. Which is a slightly risky thing to put in print.
01
No philosophy from 10,000 feet
It deals with the actual problems of running marketing in a small or midsize business without experienced marketing leadership. Specific actions, and when to take them.
02
A framework, not a lecture about your budget
No cliché advice about how you aren't spending enough, or why you should throw out everything the business has ever made. One framework, actionable at most any size.
03
Thirty thousand words, no jargon
Short and readable for busy executives, in language any of them can follow without a glossary. Writing it mostly meant cutting things out.
04
Written by a person
I point out where AI might help you in your own work, and disclose that beyond a human editor, the book is all mine: my stories, my ideas, my quarter-century of practice.
What’s inside
Seven chapters, and what each one leaves you holding
Chapter One
The Mountain and The Compass
Two central concepts that will carry you through this book
Understanding the upward climb from market fit to sale to retention, and why a funnel is the wrong picture. Plus I introduce The Compass; the framework the rest of the book hangs off.
Chapter Two
Understanding the Ecosystem
Who are the people in your neighborhood?
Four exercises: The Disappearing Act, an Ecosystem Map, a Johari Window and a SWOT, done in that order, and for a reason.
Chapter Three
Getting Inside the Minds of Your Customers
How can we meet them where they are?
A five-stage interview script you can run yourself, the SAWHOATA analysis, and how to build a persona that sounds like an actual human being.
Chapter Four
Investment
What are you willing to spend and what do you want in return?
Why budgeting as a percentage of revenue doesn't work, the three broken methods most companies use instead, and the lifetime value maths that replaces them.
Chapter Five
Success
Where are we going and how will we know if we've gotten there?
Goal-setting that isn't debatable, why you should never run more than five goals, and the I2O Method, four numbers that measure marketing without an attribution war.
Chapter Six
Ingredients
The building blocks of our success
The nine roles every revenue leadership group needs, why one person can hold several chairs, and what an empty chair is telling you.
Chapter Seven
Execution
How we accomplish what we said we were going to accomplish
Every common tactic defined in plain English, mapped to the stage of the mountain it actually serves, then The Rule of Four, a test each one has to pass.
What you can steal from it
Five things you’ll still be using next quarter
Most business books give you a vocabulary. These are the bits with actual moving parts.
The Compass
The strategy framework. Ecosystem at the centre; Investment, Success, Ingredients and Execution pointing outward, each with a tangible and an intangible half.
Mount Revenue
Six stages of the buying journey, replacing the funnel. You win by removing friction between stages, not by pouring more in at the bottom.
SAWHOATA
Strengths, Adores, Weaknesses, Hates, Opportunities, Aspirations, Threats, Anxieties. A SWOT with the outside looking in.
The Rule of Four
Every tactic must align with a business goal, match a persona's behaviour, target a stage of the journey, and fit the budget. Fail one, it's off the plan.
The I2O Method
LTV, CAC, Pipeline Assist Score and Marketing Influenced Revenue. Measures marketing's influence without anyone fighting over who owns a lead.
Read it if
- You run a business and you can’t tell what your marketing money bought.
- You’ve fired an agency and you’re still not certain what went wrong.
- You’re a marketing leader who’s good at this and keeps getting overruled.
- You’re about to hire your first marketing person and want to know what to ask for.
Skip it if
- You want a how-to on running ads or doing SEO. This is a strategy book. It’ll help you decide whether to do SEO, not how.
- You already have a marketing strategy everyone in the building agrees on, and numbers you all trust.
If that second one is genuinely true, you’re rarer than you think.
Before you buy
Read the first part free
The prologue and chapter one: the four promises, and The Mountain and The Compass, which are the two ideas everything else hangs off. If they don’t change how you think about your own marketing, the rest won’t either, and you’ve saved yourself the price of a paperback.
No email address, no form. It’s a PDF and it’s yours.
Download the excerptPDF · 11 pages · 1 MB
Reader tools
The worksheets are free
The exercises in the book, the Ecosystem Map, the Johari Window and the SAWHOATA grid, come with templates. There’s also a persona-building GPT trained on the method in chapter three, so you can draft one and then argue with it.
Tools & resourcesThirty thousand words.
You’ll be done this weekend.
And if you’d rather skip to the part where someone applies it to your business, that conversation is free.