ABOUT
Twenty-five years helping brands figure out what they actually stand for — and then say it consistently enough that buyers, and now machines, remember.
I founded 10Louder, a strategy consultancy focused on competitive positioning, brand strategy, integrated media, and analytics. The Brand Truth Workshop is our productized offering — the same ten-step method we've run for industrial software companies, medical device manufacturers, law firms, restaurant chains, dialysis networks, and skincare brands.
I teach Digital Marketing Strategy and Performance Management at SMU CAPE in Dallas, which keeps me honest. It's difficult to teach a framework to professionals, college and grad students who will ask why it works, and then use a weaker one with clients.
I wrote Signal Over Noise, a 120-page playbook on how AI systems read brands, synthesised from more than thirty-five academic and industry sources. It's assigned in my own course and available free.
Marketing sits at the intersection of economics, psychology, culture, technology, design, and persuasion. The interesting work is in spotting patterns across those domains and connecting things other people treat as separate.
In practice that means most client problems sit upstream of the brief. A messaging problem is usually a positioning problem. A positioning problem is often a business model problem. Fixing the channel when the issue is the strategy is expensive and it doesn't hold.
Your marketing is downstream of a decision you haven't made.
The other thing worth saying: I'll disagree with you. A consultant who agrees with everything is charging you to feel validated. The value of an outside voice is that it has no stake in your internal politics and can say the thing everyone in the room already suspects.
I speak on brand strategy in the AI era, competitive positioning, and why most marketing problems are brand problems. Conferences, executive teams, and university programs. Get in touch with dates and audience.
Signal Over Noise is used as course material in the SMU Digital Marketing Strategy program. If you teach marketing, branding, or strategy and want to use it, it's free — email me and I'll send the PDF plus the discussion framework I use in class.
10Louder is the parent consultancy. The Brand Truth Workshop is one thing we do; we also work on integrated media, analytics, and fractional CMO engagements. The team is globally distributed.