18 Leaders Loop skills on marketing & brand. Read each one, then prove it with a short Skill Check to build toward your Leaders Loop Credentials.
Most marketing budgets are aimed at strangers. The quieter, more profitable game is the one that starts the moment someone becomes a customer, and lifecycle marketing is how you play it without drowning people in email.
Attribution tells you which touchpoint got the click. It does not tell you whether the sale would have happened anyway, and confusing the two is how marketing budgets quietly drain into channels that change nothing.
The old labels, above the line, below the line, digital, offline, are an accident of accounting, not a strategy. Here's what they actually mean, what the evidence says about reach versus targeting, and how to split a budget without guessing.
Outbound marketing interrupts people to get attention. Inbound earns it, by publishing something they actually want. The shift sounds small; the operating model it demands is not.
Most loyalty programs reward the customers who'd have stayed anyway. The harder, more valuable question is what actually keeps a customer buying, and whether a points scheme has anything to do with it.
These four words name one underlying idea: the most persuasive marketing doesn't come from you, it comes from other people. The skill is knowing which kind of "other people" to invest in, and what each one actually owes you back.
Most launches fail quietly: not because the product is bad, but because nobody can say what it is, who it's for, or why anyone should switch. Product marketing is the discipline that fixes that, and it's mostly about choosing words before you spend money.
Four letters that have run marketing meetings for sixty years. Used well, the marketing mix is a checklist that stops you fixing the wrong thing; used badly, it's where strategy goes to die.
A logo is something you own. A brand is something your customers carry around in their heads, a set of expectations that makes them pick you, pay more, and forgive the odd mistake. Brand strategy is the deliberate work of shaping what's in there.
Three words sort almost every marketing channel you have: do you own it, did you earn it, or did you pay for it? Get that sorting right and the rest, SEO, ads, PR, social, stops looking like a pile of disconnected tactics.
Three levers that keep customers coming back, bundling more in, fencing some of it off, and making the next visit a habit. Used well they compound; used badly they just make people feel trapped. Here is the difference.
PR isn't free advertising and it isn't spin. It's the slow, deliberate work of managing the relationships an organisation depends on, and reputation is the receipt those relationships leave behind.
Most brands fight to be the best answer to a question buyers already ask. Category design is the bet that you win bigger by getting buyers to ask a different question, one your company is built to answer.
Performance marketing harvests demand that already exists. Brand building creates the demand to harvest later. The argument is about how to split the money between them, and the data has a strong opinion.
Most marketing chases a crowd. Account-based marketing does the opposite: it picks a short list of companies that are worth winning and treats each one as a market of its own.
Four letters per metric, one chain of cause and effect. CPM buys attention, CTR measures whether it lands, CPC prices the click, and CPA tells you what a customer cost, until attribution quietly lies to you about the last one.
Awareness is whether a buyer thinks of you at the moment they're deciding. Positioning is what they think you're for. Get those two right and most of marketing falls into place.
You can't sell the same thing, the same way, to everyone. STP is the discipline of choosing who you're actually for, and earning one clear word in their head before a rival does.
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