Empathy is not a soft extra in marketing — it is the mechanism by which strategy becomes relevant to real people. This guide contrasts what data shows with why empathy explains, moving beyond the dashboard to human context, jobs-to-be-done and the emotional tensions that drive behaviour.
Posts Published byPlex
Decision Discipline in Marketing
High-stakes marketing decisions happen where certainty is impossible — markets shift, customers change, competitors react. This strategic guide dismantles the illusion of precision behind dashboards and attribution models, introducing certainty indexes and risk–return thinking to bring discipline to strategic decision-making.
Beyond the Tagline: Repetition vs Strategic Positioning
A manifesto on why the obsession with repetition undermines strategic positioning. Repetition operates at the level of execution; meaning operates at the level of strategy. Sustainable brand growth comes from consistently reinforcing a clear positioning across varied executions — not from repeating an identical line until it sticks.
The Invisible Rulebook: The Architecture of Expectations
Not all category norms carry the same weight. This paper maps the architecture of expectations — laws, taboos, mores and folkways — and the three questions behind every purchase: what is this, how does it work, why should I trust it? The best companies treat norms as choices, not constraints.
Strategic Deviation: Category Norms, Structure and Boundaries
Every market runs on an invisible rulebook of category norms. Customers rarely articulate them, companies rarely write them down, yet everyone behaves as if they exist. This paper maps the structure and boundaries of those norms — and shows when deviating from them becomes a strategic advantage.
Architecting AI Advantage: From Productivity Tool to Competitive Weapon
A structural playbook for the C-suite on moving from AI dabbling to durable commercial advantage. AI use is not AI advantage: adopting general-purpose tools creates the illusion of speed while masking relative decline. Advantage does not arrive in one cinematic moment — it arrives in waves.
The Effectiveness Blueprint: Where Should the Marginal Rand Go?
Where should the marginal rand go? This paper dismantles the media-versus-creative binary behind the efficiency trap: budgets shift toward what is easiest to measure, not what drives long-run returns. It reframes media as the delivery system and creative as the multiplier to unlock sequential growth.
Influence Architecture: 50 Thinkers Who Shaped Modern Marketing
An executive playbook synthesising the 50 thinkers who shaped modern marketing. Rather than championing one guru, it organises disparate academic theories and practitioner playbooks into five pillars of influence — foundation, mechanics, architecture, the human and the system — one navigable strategic architecture for the modern executive.
Rescuing Innovation: Why Meetings Kill New Ideas
Organisations don’t lack breakthrough ideas — they evaluate them in environments structurally designed to reject them. This paper unpacks the three vectors of meeting hostility — structural compression, psychological friction and decision traps — and shows how to redesign the modern boardroom so creativity survives evaluation.
Platform Systems: Marketing on Digital Platforms in 2026
A detailed operating guide for systems planning. As AI becomes the organising logic of platform advertising and nearly 80% of global ad spend flows into retail media, paid search and social, this guide reframes channel planning as one interacting system of demand creation, capture, trust and conversion.