Everyone thinks they’re a marketer.

The CEO has an idea. The finance manager has an idea. Someone's teenage daughter discovered Instagram over the weekend. Suddenly everyone has a revolutionary marketing strategy that will transform the business.

In this episode, Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson draws on stories from marketers across Reddit and LinkedIn, to examine why marketing attracts unsolicited advice, why "good ideas" are often worthless, and how marketers can respond when non-marketers mistake their opinion for expertise.

He covers:

• Why everyone thinks they’re a marketer
• How marketers can professionally (and unprofessionally) respond to uninformed suggestions
• Why marketers receive so much unsolicited advice
• Some of the strangest client requests marketers have received
• Viable ways to channel stakeholder ideas without taking on much larger workloads
• The role of evidence, execution, and accountability in marketing decisions
• What marketers really wish they could say to non-marketers

This episode features examples from Reddit, LinkedIn, client work, and the collective trauma of the marketing profession.

Helpful Links:

Find Jack:

- On LinkedIn

- At his personal website

Follow The Push:

- On LinkedIn

- On YouTube Music

- On TikTok

- On Instagram

Brand strategy is easily derailed.

All of a sudden, the whole company invites itself into the room, sales invents three new offer names, the CEO wants the brand to feel “premium”, and nobody can accurately explain what the business does.

In this solo episode, Jack Ferguson answers brand strategy questions from Reddit that cover a spectrum of issues that arise within companies.

He covers:

• How to stop brand strategy meetings turning into philosophy club
• What to do when your positioning, USP, and messaging get a “nobody cares” response from the market
• How to know whether your positioning is effective
• The impact of changing a brand name on brand equity
• How to think of a personal brand vs a company brand
• Ways in which “premium” positioning falls apart
• How to know whether you need a rebrand or refresh
• What to do when sales, marketing, leadership, and customer success all describe the brand differently
• Brand Architecture issues after mergers and acquisitions
• Prerequisites to altering brand assets like your logo

Helpful Links:

Find Jack:

- On LinkedIn

- Website

Find The Push:

- On LinkedIn

- On YouTube Music

- On TikTok

- On Instagram

- Website

Most companies blame execution when growth plateaus.

So they start doing more outbound, making better ad creative, creating new landing pages, building sharper sales scripts, and tightening the alignment between sales and marketing. But often, the problem isn’t execution, it's market understanding.

In this episode, Jack Ferguson hosts Buyer Researcher Ryan Gibson to help you understand when poor growth is an execution problem and when it is a market understanding problem.

Using examples from SaaS, enterprise software, startups, and B2B sales environments, they explore how buyers make decisions, why status quo bias is stronger than many realise, and why customer feedback alone is seldom enough to glean broad market insights.

They cover:

- How Amazon use qualitative data to break the tie of a GTM decision

- The % of revenue Salesforce reinvests back into their GTM

- How to get feedback from buying committees you don’t ordinarily get access to

- How to know if you have a market understanding problem or execution problem? (incl. real examples of each)

- The lead and lag indicators that indicate a company lacks the market understanding to effectively grow

- The issues with using surveys for quantitative research

- How you can use AI to complement your market research efforts

- Low cost approaches to doing B2B market research

- Ways to get your company to start investing in market understanding

- How to get market and buyer truths

- What strong resistance to pricing tells you

- How qualitative conversations uncover what dashboards and CRM data can’t

- The benefits and drawbacks of relying on sales teams for market understanding

- What conditions need to be in place for large B2B companies to change providers

- The limitations of relying on customers for market insight

Helpful Links:

Where to find Jack:

- LinkedIn

- Website

Where to find Ryan:

- LinkedIn

- Content Lift Website

Where to find The Push:

- LinkedIn

- YouTube Music

- Instagram

- TikTok

- Website

In Part 3 of this series, the rubber hits the road.

After breaking down brand diagnostics and strategy in the previous two episodes, this episode moves into what gets built: brand assets, how to prioritise them, and how they compound (or don’t) over time.

Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson is your host.

He discusses:

• Which brand asset is the most important, and why
• What Asset Hierarchy is and how to think about it
• The trade-offs between ease of consumption and distinctiveness
• When a name change is strategically justified, and when it’s not
• What separates a strong brand name from a weak one
• How to think about building vs identifying distinctiveness
• How to maintain equity during brand refreshes
• What it means to “smash your brand”

Helpful Links:

Find Jack:

- On LinkedIn

- At His Personal Website

Follow The Push:

- On LinkedIn

- On Instagram

- On YouTube Music

- On TikTok

- At The Push Website

A Brand Strategy is often dismissed as ‘fluff’ because it’s poorly defined, inconsistently applied, and confused with tactics, communications, advertising, or visual identity.

In Part 2 of this series, we move beyond the theory of brand as a function of memory and why buyers buy to define specific strategic outputs, explain how they’re informed, and model scenarios in which they’re used. This episode presents a unifying idea of brand strategy that holds up for marketers and remains accessible to non-marketers.

This episode covers:

• How brand strategy operates as a set of outputs that shape decisions across an organisation
• Scenario modelling across two distinct operating environments: a B2B accounting firm and a high-urgency B2C retailer
• How an effective brand strategy aligns incentives, operating models, and capability, not just communications and advertising outputs
• Why most competitive advantage comes from structure, not messaging or creativity
• A practical test to determine whether something is strategic or tactical
• The core outputs of brand strategy, how they’re informed, and how they’re used
• The role of memory, association, and expectation in reinforcing or violating brand strategy

Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson hosts this episode.

Helpful Links:

Where to find Jack:

- Find Jack on LinkedIn

- Find Jack at his Website

Where to find The Push:

- Follow The Push on LinkedIn

- Subscribe to The Push on YouTube Music

- Follow The Push on TikTok

- Follow The Push on Instagram

- Visit The Push Website

Resources Mentioned:

- RSPCA Commercial

- Budweiser + Jay Z Commercial

- 2013 Budweiser Super Bowl Ad

Most definitions of ‘brand’ focus on what a company produces, like logos, names, and design systems, but fail to explain what brand is, how it drives commercial outcomes, and how it is measured.

In Part 1 of this series, we define brand comprehensively while keeping it accessible to marketers and non-marketers alike. From that foundation, we break down how brand shows up in real buying situations, how it influences decision-making through different memory systems, and how it can be measured through awareness, salience, distinctiveness, and risk.

In Part 1, we discuss:

• What is happening in the mind during a purchase decision
• The role of working memory in evaluation vs long-term memory in reducing risk
• Why most brand interactions never make it past sensory filtering
• The relationship between brand building (long-term memory) and activation (working memory)
• Sensory, working, and long-term memory, and how each shapes brand outcomes
• The commercial implications of brand: awareness, perception, and risk reduction
• Brand Distinctiveness vs Brand Differentiation
• How category entry points trigger brand recall in real-world situations
• The practical discussion of how brand heritage affects commercial outcomes
• Why diagnostics are the foundation of any credible brand strategy
• The difference between internal (team/founder) and market diagnostics, and why both matter
• Why most definitions of brand are incomplete, and what is commonly missed
• A unifying definition of brand grounded in perception, memory, and behaviour
• The ontology of brand: its tangible existence

Hosted by Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson.

Where to find Jack:

- LinkedIn

- Website

Where to find The Push:

- The Push on LinkedIn

- The Push on YouTube

- The Push on TikTok

- The Push on Instagram

- The Push Website

Most revenue growth actually comes from rising demand, and brands that recognise early can move to service it.

In this episode, Jack Ferguson breaks down where marketers create the most value inside a business: identifying emerging demand and helping organisations innovate to meet it.

Drawing on Mats Georgson’s Demand Point Constellation Theory, and using examples from Uber, McDonald’s, Intuit, Swiffer, and others, Jack explains how marketers can uncover these demand points through real-world observation and customer insight.

This episode covers:

• What a Demand Point Constellation is and why it matters

• How Uber won with the Demand Point Constellation

• How McDonald’s discovered the real job of a milkshake

• How Intuit and P&G watched customer behaviour to drive product innovation

• Why marketers should think like demand detectors inside organisations

• Practical ways to uncover demand through social listening, ethnography, and customer conversations

Helpful Links:

Jobs to be Done Framework

Where to find Jack:

LinkedIn

Website

Where to find The Push:

LinkedIn

YouTube

Instagram

TikTok

Website

Buyers don’t experience brands as funnels. They encounter them mid-scroll, mid-conversation, mid-doubt, mid-purchase, to name a few examples. So why does marketing still plan as if people move predictably from awareness to purchase?

This episode's guest Jelena Veselinovic joins host Jack Ferguson to rally against this phenomenon while drawing on 25+ years of marketing experience, including 18 years at Coca-Cola and 3.5 years as Head of Brand Marketing at Miro.

Now operating as a fractional Head of Brand, she blends classical marketing science with a philosophical background to challenge the deterministic assumptions still embedded in boardrooms. If the world behaves probabilistically, effective marketing must evolve accordingly.

We cover:

• How Honey’s overnight collapse is the best case study on brand promise risk
• Why Costco removes marketing traps and caps margins
• How Coca-Cola institutionalised product as their brand core
• How Newtonian cause-and-effect thinking misreads buyer behaviour
• Why marketing is better understood as shaping conditions rather than controlling behaviour
• How brands lost narrative authority to reviews, creators, and AI
• Why deterministic marketing is both disrespectful and ineffective
• How to build brands that thrive upon contact with reality

Helpful Links:

- Determinism

- Quantum Mechanics

- The Quantum State of Branding Article

- Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam Video

Where to find Jack:

- LinkedIn

- Website

Where to find Jelena:

- Rewire Your Mind Substack

- LinkedIn

Where to find The Push:

- LinkedIn

- YouTube

- Instagram

- TikTok

- Website