Narrative First. Always.

Every enduring business, whether it’s a one-person shop on a quiet street or a global enterprise operating across continents, begins with a story.

Not a tagline. Not a positioning statement. A story in the truest sense: a clear and coherent understanding of why it exists and what value it creates in the world.

This is the part of business strategy that most leaders underestimate. Not because they don’t value storytelling, but because they confuse narrative with marketing.

Narrative is not the thing you write to market the company.
Narrative is the thing that gives the company the right to be marketed.

Without a narrative, a company becomes a collection of activity rather than a coherent organism.

• It is the foundation beneath every decision a business makes.

• The organizing principle for how it behaves.

• The lens through which customers understand it.

• The compass that prevents drift.

Narrative is the root system of your business. Everything else (brand, product, marketing, sales, culture, customer experience) grows from it.

Narrative isn’t a creative exercise.
Narrative is a strategic one.

It requires conceptual clarity, operational truth, customer empathy, and a deep understanding of the forces shaping your market. It requires fluency in your category not the category you think you’re in, but the one customers mentally place you in. It requires the discipline to articulate not just what you sell, but what change you enable, what problem you relieve, what outcome you produce, and why that outcome matters today.

Small businesses understand this intuitively.

• A bakery doesn’t talk about flour and ovens. It talks about warmth, ritual, nourishment, connection.

• A bike shop doesn’t sell components. It sells movement, belonging, joy, identity.

A good local business knows its narrative because it lives close to the people who rely on it.

Unfortunately, as businesses grow, this clarity often fades. The distance to customers increases and the complexity of day-to-day operations multiplies.

Internal language drifts from customer engagement (customer language, if you will).

Teams accumulate different interpretations of what the company is “about.”

Unfortunately, when this happens (and it does happen), marketing efforts become hollow.

Sales improvises its way through deals. Product builds features without context. Leadership makes decisions without a shared north star.

The company becomes louder, but less legible.

Narrative first is not a philosophical suggestion.
It’s an operational mandate.

It is the work a company must complete before it can expect anything else to work.

Your narrative shapes everything:

• How you prioritize

• How you build

• How you hire

• How you price

• How you communicate

• How you earn trust

• How customers understand your value

• How your team understands their purpose

A well-defined narrative is not just a brand asset. It is a strategic accelerant.

It reduces friction, collapses confusion, and aligns the entire organization around a single shared meaning.

A company with a strong narrative becomes inevitable.

A company without one becomes forgettable.

If your team can’t explain what you do in a single breath, your customers won’t spend one on you.

The Importance of First Impressions

I still remember the first “serious” bike I ever bought. Not the one that showed up at birthdays, but the first bike that made me feel like I was choosing a direction, maybe even choosing a version of myself. It wasn’t the most expensive bike, it certainly wasn’t perfect. Of course, it was a mountain bike. I spent weeks researching it, test riding it, hanging out it in the shop, trying to make sense of what made this frame different from that one, and why this level of Shimano was so much more important than that one.

You probably remember your moment, too. The shop. The lighting. The smell of rubber. The simple, unmistakable sense that you were stepping into a larger world and (whether you knew it or not) putting in place the first stone of future decisions.

It’s easy to say that first bike doesn’t matter anymore. People upgrade quickly now. The industry appears to change dramatically every year. Riders are exposed to endless videos, endless reviews, and opinions. However, even in all of that noise, something quiet and deeply human still happens: your first serious bike becomes the reference point you don’t realize you’re using.

Whatever it was about that bike, it left an imprint. Not on the kind of rider you became, but on the kind of bikes you continue to choose.

We’re not as rational as we think. We carry preferences forward. We carry loyalties forward. We carry the geometry, the responsiveness, and the personality of that first real bike forward, even when we swear we’re starting from scratch and buying into a new category.

This, right here, is why the industry finds itself in a strange place. So much of the first-bike experience now happens online.

A bike is a physical experience first, and a digital decision second. We’ve inverted something essential.

We don’t feel the bike. We don’t pick it up. We don’t ride it around the shop. We don’t test its personality.

We scroll through specs. We watch someone else ride the bike we’re thinking about buying. We read reviews written by people we’ll never meet. We see pictures. We compare charts.

That’s why local bike shops matter, despite everything happening around them. Not because they’re romantic or nostalgic, but because they’re one of the few remaining places where a rider can walk in and be surprised by something. You can’t be surprised by a bike on a website. I mean, you can, but it's not the same thing.

You can be surprised by a bike sitting quietly on a shop floor, by a frame you never considered, by the way a bike feels the moment you sit in it, or the way shifts feel and sound.

Today, group rides, even more than shops, have become rolling ecosystems of discovery.

When someone new joins a ride and the only bikes they see are the same brand, the same style, the same tires, the same everything, their sense of what’s possible becomes limited before it ever has a chance to expand.

When a group ride is diverse, when someone rolls up on something unexpected - say a handmade steel frame, a gravel bike that looks like it’s carved from a single piece of metal, an old mountain bike with a modern rebuild - it quietly gives permission for curiosity.

...and I've come to believe this:

It’s curiosity that invites someone in, and it's community that convinces them to stay.

Together, they’re what grow cycling.

What Is A Narrative Operating System?

Most companies don’t fail because their product is weak. They fail because their story is.

A Narrative Operating System (Narrative OS) is the framework that ensures your story is not accidental, inconsistent, or fragmented … but intentional, coherent, and compounding.

It’s the system that turns “what we think we’re saying” into “what the market actually hears.”

At It’s Core, a Narrative OS Does 3 Things:

1. Creates Clarity

It defines the true value your business delivers, why it matters, and how it fits into the world your customers live in.

It aligns leadership, teams, product, and go-to-market around the same north star so the story stops shifting with every deck, campaign, or meeting.

2. Reduces Narrative Risk

In a world where AI writes too much, too fast, and too off-brand, your narrative becomes fragmented, fragile, and erodes trust.

A Narrative OS establishes guardrails, messaging frameworks, and chain-of-custody so your voice stays consistent no matter who writes, what tool they use, or how fast the company grows.

3. Accelerates Market Momentum

When your story is clear and protected, execution becomes easier. Marketing is sharper. Sales conversations convert faster.

Products ship with purpose. Partners know exactly how to talk about you.

Everything compounds because everything connects.

Why A Narrative OS Matters Now

AI has changed the speed of communication, but not the fundamentals of persuasion.

Teams are producing more content than ever … yet this is most often delivered with less alignment, less coherence, and more narrative drift … all of which further erode trust.

A Narrative Operating System brings order to that chaos. A Narrative Operating System is the foundation of trust.

It gives your company a durable story architecture that can flex across channels, teams, and use cases without losing its integrity.

TL;DR

A Narrative OS is how modern companies protect their voice, scale their story, and create compounding advantage in the market.

If you don’t build it deliberately, it builds itself, and that’s rarely the version that wins.

We Don’t Need Less Cycling Stuff. We Need More Cycling Community

Rick Sutton is right: we’re drowning in cycling gear.

There’s more choice, more brands, and more noise than anyone can reasonably navigate. But “less stuff” isn’t the real cure. The problem isn’t oversupply. It’s underconnection.

The gap isn’t in the showroom. It’s in the space between a bike purchase and a rider’s first real experience of belonging.

Sondre Norland, CEO of BikeFolder, captures this perfectly: people buy bikes because they want community, activity, connection, and experience. But the moment they roll out of the shop, they’re on their own. No map. No invitation. No pathway into organized cycling or community rides.

You bought a bike. Congratulations. Now what?

Most newcomers don’t fall out of love with cycling. They fall out of place.

We’ve built an industry great at selling equipment and terrible at welcoming people.

Roll up to any club ride.

If you’re new, under-geared, or still finding your fitness, the experience can be brutal. Not because cyclists are unfriendly, but because the system has no structured on-ramps. No “start here.” No gentle pace groups. No continuity from “I bought a bike” to “I belong here.”

Gyms figured this out decades ago. Indoor cycling did, too. Cycling, real-world on the road and on the trails, generally hasn’t.

The real crisis isn’t too much gear. It’s too few invitations.

There are too few community entry points, routes built for beginners, welcoming first experiences, and places where a rider can show up and feel seen, safe, and supported.

Sondre’s pilot in Norway — connecting someone’s newly registered bike to local clubs offering beginner-friendly introduction sessions — is the type of bridge the industry needs. It turns a product purchase into a pathway. It transforms “stuff” into “experience.”

It’s a small step with massive implications:

• More riders become real riders.

• More people ride consistently.

• More communities grow.

• More shops thrive.

• More casual participation events exist and flourish.

• More families, friends, and workplaces begin to ride together.

The industry keeps looking for a commercial fix. But the real fix is cultural.

If we want more people riding, buying, upgrading, joining, showing up, and sticking around, the answer is painfully simple:

• We need more community, not more inventory.

• More connection, not more carbon layups.

• More time on bikes with others, not more SKUs.

• More clubs with open doors.

• More local rides with real structure.

• More ways in.

Cycling doesn’t grow because products get better. Cycling grows because people feel like they belong.

When they do, everything else including sales, participation, loyalty, advocacy, follows naturally.

Rick is right to say our gratitude should be higher than our expectations.

But gratitude grows fastest when we’re outside together. Riding, laughing, learning, welcoming new riders, and remembering that the reason we all started wasn’t gear.

It was community.

Until the industry understands this, truly understands it, we’ll keep misdiagnosing the problem. Not too much stuff. Not too many brands. Not even the boom-and-bust cycles.

The real issue is connection. The real opportunity is belonging.

Cycling doesn’t need fewer brands. It needs more bridges.

... and more people waiting at the other side to say,

“Hey! We're glad you’re here. Come ride with us.”

The Post Marketing World

Businesses operate under a simple assumption: if you wanted growth, you increased your marketing.

More campaigns, more channels, more ads, more spend.

If something doesn’t work, you test another variation. If the story isn’t landing, you try a new headline. If demand slows, you scale budgets, expande audiences, and pushe harder.

Every part of the modern marketing system relies on one belief: That attention was something you could buy.

That belief is now collapsing.

People aren’t rejecting advertising. They’re simply no longer noticing it. The scroll has become reflexive. The filters, both mental and technological, are stronger than any creative optimization. Great ads drown in the same sea as mediocre ones.

For SMBs and growth-stage companies, it’s even harder. Markets are noisier. Categories are more crowded. The cost of being heard is rising faster than the budgets required to keep pace.

We’ve reached a saturation point. Marketing, as a discipline centered on broadcasting, has lost its leverage.

Growth-stage leaders feel this first. They follow the conventional playbook. Hire a demand-gen manager, spin up ads, launch content, buy software, run experiments … and yet the outcomes feel thin. Not is wrong, exactly. It just feels shallow. Perhaps even hollow.

A trickle of engagement here. A small deal there. Activity that looks like progress, but never compounds.

It’s not a failure of execution. It’s a failure of context.

We are living through the end of the “marketing solves everything” era.

Not because marketing is unimportant. Quite the contrary. Marketing remains essential, but the era is ending because the environment that made traditional marketing effective no longer exists.

Consumers have shifted from being reachable to being selectively permeable, and they carry this behavior (perhaps better phrased as preference) throughout ALL buying processes (home, work, etc.).

• Communities have replaced channels as the source of trust.

• Signals matter more than slogans.

• Proof matters more than positioning.

• Humans are actively choosing meaning over messaging.

Simultaneously, businesses, especially small and growth-stage ones, are carrying more weight than ever:

• Limited resources

• Compressed timelines

• Competitive pressure

• Investor expectations,

• A market that no longer responds to the tactics that once worked.

In this landscape, the post marketing era, companies aren’t simply fighting for attention.

They’re fighting for permission. Permission to be considered, to be believed, to be chosen, to be remembered.

And permission cannot be purchased. It must be earned.

This Is The Fundamental Shift:

Marketing no longer precedes trust. Trust precedes marketing.

This means marketing cannot begin with tactics, campaigns, content velocity, or funnels.

It must begin with clarity. It must begin with the truth of what a company is, why it exists, what it promises, and why that promise matters.

This is the world Sightline is built for.

• A world where marketing is not the megaphone, but the mirror.

• A world where narrative isn’t an accessory to strategy, it is the strategy.

• A world where companies grow not because they say more, but because they understand themselves more deeply.

And in this world, the companies that thrive are not the companies that market the best. They are the companies that explain themselves the best.

Consistently. Clearly. Confidently … and in a way that no competitor can copy, because it’s rooted in who they are, not what they sell.

You can no longer buy your way into attention or hack your way into trust. You must deserve both.

Brand IS Performance: The Answer to SMB’s Marketing Budget Dilemma

“With our budget, should we invest in brand or performance?”

“Can we justify brand when every dollar needs to prove short-term (immediate) ROI?”

Different clients, same root question: If we can’t do it all, what’s the smartest way to allocate our marketing spend?

The conundrum lies in a simple fact: It’s not a choice for SMBs and growth-stage organizations.

Brand is Performance. It’s what makes your clicks cheaper, your conversions faster, and your churn lower.

This isn’t opinion. The data validates this, too:

• Effectiveness analysis shows that over-rotating toward pure performance reduces ROI over time, while a more balanced mix (around 40–60% brand spend) can lift ROI by 25–100%. (WARC, Analytic Partners, System 1, Prophet, Beta.ai)

• Harvard Business Review is direct: Separating brand and performance “unnecessarily damages the effectiveness of both.”

• Studies across performance channels show that higher brand awareness directly increases ad CTR, branded search volume, and conversion efficiency, a multiplier effect performance dollars alone can’t create.

So, what does this mean? How should smart SMBs and growth-stage companies actually operate?

• Use performance to test messages, offers, creative, and intent.

  • Safety Tip: Don’t fall into the A/B Test Trap

• Use brand to create trust, memory, and meaning, the ingredients that make performance work better.

• Use AI for efficiency, iteration, and insight, but never for the parts of your story that define who you are.

• Understand that your “budget question” isn’t brand or performance. It’s brand + performance.

Your competitive edge won’t come from better targeting or more aggressive investment.

It’ll come from sharper positioning, aligned values, and deeper connection to your community.

The A/B Test Trap

We’re A/B testing emails, landing pages, and paid social. Why aren’t we getting meaningful results?

Everyone loves to say they’re “data-driven”…

Unfortunately, most SMB marketers don’t have enough data to be data-driven. At least not in the way the big brands do.

According to a recent MarketingProfs/Unbounce survey (Oct 2025), 51% of SMB marketers cite lack of resources, and 49% say they don’t have enough traffic for statistical significance when running A/B tests.

Presented another way, that’s just about half the market chasing insights that math can’t confirm.

So, what happens when:

• Countless “tests” never reach confidence thresholds?

• Endless tweaks to buttons, subject lines, or hero copy occur, and no one’s sure what really works?

When you don’t have scale, you’re not running experiments. You’re gathering insight.

You’re testing direction, not certainty.

Instead of chasing 95% confidence, chase 100% clarity on what you’ll do next.

Every test should lead to a decision, even if (and when) the data isn’t perfect.

At SMB scale, agility beats accuracy.

Learning velocity, not volume, is what compounds efforts and drives your business forward.

Small samples still tell valuable stories. Learn to listen differently.

What if Your Strategy is Missing the Thing People Want Most?

Lately, the most meaningful conversations we’ve been having aren’t about marketing plans or GTM playbooks. They’re about community.

Not community as a campaign.

Not community as a retention tool.

But community as the core. Community as the reason someone sticks around, tells a friend, or feels something when they interact with your brand.

The companies winning right now aren’t just launching features.

They’re creating connection … and they’re doing it with intention.

If you’re not actively shaping your narrative, someone else will do it for you.

And if that narrative doesn’t foster belonging, trust, and participation?

You’ll lose the very people you’re trying to serve.

Now is the time to treat your narrative like your most valuable product.

Because in a world where everyone’s automating content, people crave meaning.

Your story, and how it invites people in, is the edge your competitors can’t copy.

So here’s your prompt: What story are you telling right now that makes someone feel like they belong?

If you’re not sure, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Start with your narrative.

Build with intention.

Lead with community.

The Most Overlooked Stage of Your Brand Is the One That Decides if You’re Remembered

We talk a lot about brand awareness. About getting on the radar, getting into the conversation, getting on the shortlist.

We talk about conversion. About landing the deal, signing the contract, making it official.

…all while we’re really hoping to be talking about retention and advocacy.

But there’s a moment between decision and advocacy that gets glossed over, if not ignored entirely.

A moment that determines whether you deliver on the brand promises you spent months and millions building.

Onboarding.

Onboarding isn’t a support process.

It’s not a cost center.

It’s not a glorified checklist.

It’s your brand’s first real chance to prove it meant everything it said.

Most Onboarding Is Built Like a Manual, Not a Memory

Most companies treat onboarding like they’re writing a technical manual:

• Step 1: Confirm login

• Step 2: Watch training

• Step 3: Meet your CS rep

• Step 4: “Let us know if you need anything.”

It’s linear. Transactional. Soulless.

Which is strange, because this is the moment your customer is most open to you, the moment they’ve been waiting for.

They’re curious. Hopeful. Excited. Nervous.

They want to feel something.

Instead, they get a drip campaign and a support doc.

The Brand Doesn’t End at the Sale. It Begins.

Your brand is not your ads.

It’s not your pitch deck.

It’s not your font, your colors, or your elevator speech.

Your brand is the experience your customer has when they choose you.

Therefore:

• If your onboarding is forgettable, your brand becomes forgettable.

• If your onboarding is chaotic, your brand becomes untrustworthy.

And if your onboarding is cold and mechanical, your brand becomes… just another vendor.

What If You Treated Onboarding Like the Opening Scene of a Film?

What if onboarding wasn’t a step-by-step to-do list… but the opening scene of their transformation, where their real story begins?

What if you:

• Scripted it like your brand voice depended on it (because it does)?

• Resourced it like it was your greatest opportunity to differentiate (because it is)?

• Optimized it like your future advocacy, referrals, and upsells depended on it (because they do)?

Because here’s the thing:

You don’t win customers at the close. You win them in the first 90 days.

In the Next 18-36 Months, Onboarding Will Be a Key Differentiator

It’s already happening.

As product parity increases, marketing noise grows, and people seek out connections and community, experience is becoming the new moat.

Companies that understand onboarding as brand infrastructure will:

• Reduce churn without slashing price

• Create loyalty without gimmicks

• Activate advocacy without having to “ask for it”

They’ll win because of how it feels to become a customer. Not in spite of it.

So, Ask Yourself:

• Does our onboarding feel like us?

• Are we making new customers feel smarter, more confident, and genuinely excited?

• Or, are we just moving them through a system?

Because, in the story of your brand, onboarding isn’t a transition.

It’s the transformation.

A Quick Exercise

Want to evaluate your onboarding through a brand lens? Here’s a quick exercise.

Gather your leadership, CX, and marketing teams and ask:

1. What does our customer feel in their first 7 days with us?

2. What do they say to their team after their first onboarding session?

3. Where does the onboarding experience currently break the narrative we sold them?

Then go fix it.

Not because onboarding is broken, but because your brand story deserves to be complete.

What The First Twelve Narrative Assessments Taught Me About B2B Storytelling

From pre-funding teams to public companies, the patterns are the same.

After completing the first twelve narrative assessments, here are the five truths I keep seeing … and how to use them to build a narrative that actually moves revenue.

1) Your Origin Story Is Your Competitive Moat

The strongest differentiation isn’t a feature list. It’s the specific struggle that forced you to invent a better way. Competitors can clone products quickly; they can’t clone why you had to build yours.

What we find: teams bury the “oh-no” moments (near-failures, hard pivots, breakthrough realizations).

Do this: document three moments you’d tell a friend over coffee — the risk, the turn, the lesson — and make them the spine of your About page, sales deck, and founder videos.

2) Stop Being the Hero of Your Own Story

Most B2B content casts the company as Luke Skywalker. Your buyers don’t need Luke; they need Yoda.

What we find: pages filled with “we, we, we,” while customers are offstage.

Do this: rewrite one core asset using a guide frame:

• Hero: your customer

• Villain: the status quo risk they can’t ignore

• Gift: your method, not just your product

• Path: the smallest next step to progress

3) Raw Material Beats Polished Fiction

AI can accelerate; it can’t substitute for source material.

What we find: teams skip interviews and jump to manufactured copy that sounds like everyone else.

Do this: run 3–5 customer interviews before writing a word. Ask, “What changed after we started working together?” and “What almost made this fail?” Transcribe, highlight verbs, build your message map from the phrases customers actually use.

4) Measure More Than Vanity

Likes aren’t a strategy. Tie story to revenue through four levels:

• Awareness (remembered): aided/unaided recall, branded search, direct traffic lift

• Engagement (held attention): time on page, scroll depth, reply rate on outreach

• Conversion (moved revenue): demo requests per asset, pipeline sourced, win rate lift for deals exposed to narrative assets

• Advocacy (others tell it): testimonial volume, case-study reuse in sales, referrals

Do this: pick one metric per level, baseline it this month, and review it with sales every two weeks.

5) Small Teams Can Build Systems That Scale

You don’t need an army; you need an operating system.

What we find: “random acts of content” produced by 3–5 overstretched people.

Do this: install a light narrative OS:

• Pillars: 3 themes you’ll own for 12 months

• Story Arcs: repeatable outlines (Problem → Stakes → Shift → Proof → Path)

• Characters: founder, customer, practitioner—each with distinct POV

• Cadence: a simple waterfall (anchor post → sales enablement → social threads → email) that ships weekly without breaking the team

Start This Week (90 minutes)

1. Origin sprint (30 min): founders list the three “oh-no to aha” moments that founded the company.

2. Interview sprint (30 min): schedule 3 customer calls; lock in the questions; set a transcript template.

3. Measurement sprint (30 min): choose one metric per level; add to a shared dashboard with sales.

The Bottom Line

Most companies try to win with volume. More posts, more pages, more noise. The teams who grow faster install a narrative operating system: clear origin, customer-as-hero framing, real raw material, revenue-linked metrics, and a small-team cadence that compounds. It’s not about publishing more. It’s about knowing exactly what story you’re telling, why it matters to this audience, and how every asset advances that story toward measurable outcomes.

If you want a pragmatic, 12-month roadmap built for a 3–5 person team, Sightline’s Narrative Assessment maps your origin, reframes your story around your customer, and installs the operating system to scale it.

When You’re Ready: To replace “random acts of content” with a narrative that sells, let’s talk!

Conversation Pieces vs. Conversations That Matter

Trek Bicycle’s new CheckOUT is a conversation piece. It’s been a hundred+ post topic on multiple threads with cycling friends, so it’s accomplishing one goal as it’s clearly engineered to turn heads and be talked about.

It does make me wonder, though. Is this the kind of conversation the cycling industry needs right now?

Everyone keeps hearing the same refrain: the industry is struggling. Sales are soft, inventories are swollen, and even the largest brands are adjusting expectations. At the same time, many new bike announcements continue to push further up-market with hyper-niche, $8,000+ (Trek) and $20,000+ (Specialized) machines that few riders will ever buy.

This raises the bigger question: who are these products really for? And, what story do they tell about the future of cycling?

The Juxtaposition

The same day Trek’s new model was launched, that evening, I was at a community screening of Together We Ride: Minority Mountain Bikers In The Heartland. It’s a short film about cycling, the connections it creates, and the exclusivity that is inherent in the sport.

What struck me most wasn’t just the film itself, but the conversation in the room before and after the screening: People want to ride. They want to connect. But, too often, they can’t. Price and availability are real barriers.

These moments were a stark juxtaposition. On one side of the industry: a high-profile launch celebrating a bike most people will never even consider owning. On the other: a community conversation showing how much demand there really is if only cycling were more accessible.

I walked back to my car asking myself, “Why does the industry continue pouring its resources into the wrong side of the story?”

A Conversation We’re Avoiding?

• What if the real opportunity isn’t in making the elite, performance tier even more elite and capable, but in expanding the base of riders who can even imagine owning a decent bike in the first place?

• What if the gap isn’t a lack of cutting-edge performance, but a lack of accessible, reliable, and inspiring entry points into cycling?

• What if the industry’s strongest lever for growth isn’t technology or exclusivity, but narrative—reframing cycling as something attainable, joyful, and essential to everyday life?

Looking at the Market Differently

When we compare the U.S. market with global patterns, another question surfaces: Why do we keep treating high-end bikes as the centerpiece of the story, when the largest and most valuable markets globally are built on affordability, accessibility, and sheer volume of participation?

In much of the world, cycling doesn’t even consider the “n+1” indulgence. It’s simply a daily choice for mobility, health, or community. Why aren’t we paying closer attention to this?

Who Could Lead the Way?

Some brands are already hinting at what this could look like, leaning into style, affordability, and connection in ways that resonate with riders just starting out. But is that enough?

Why can’t a mainstream brand take the leap and commit to a wider audience? Not just through price point, but through community-building and narratives that make cycling welcoming to everyone? (Not feeling welcoming, but actually welcoming)

And if not, what does that mean for the industry’s long-term health, beyond endless cycles of (some degree of) boom and then bust?

A Narrative Crossroads

The truth is, there are no easy answers here. High-end bikes will always have a place. Innovation at the performance level does influence and impact overall product development, and it does drive culture in important ways.

However, maybe it’s worth asking: are we leaning too hard on those dynamics, while missing the opportunity to grow cycling into something much larger, more inclusive, and more sustainable?

What would happen if brands shifted even a portion of their energy from building conversation pieces to sparking conversations that matter … those about access, about community, about the millions of people who could become lifelong riders if only the industry met them where they are?

That’s not just a product launch. That’s a market-shaping narrative … and maybe that’s the conversation the industry really needs to be having right now.

Is Attention To Detail Your Competitive Edge?

We are moving so fast we aren’t noticing the cracks forming under their feet.

Projects are launching half-baked. Content is flooding inboxes. On the surface, this all looks like momentum. Underneath, however, the cost of missed details starts compounding, having very real impacts via errors, rework, and reputational hits. What looks like “speed” today becomes tomorrow’s mess.

The problem isn’t that we’re not doing enough. It’s that we’re doing too much, too fast, with too little care.

The Psychology of “More, Faster”

Our brains aren’t wired for this volume.

• Cognitive load theory shows humans can only juggle a limited amount of new information before performance collapses (Sweller, 1988).

• Stanford research on multitasking found heavy multitaskers are actually worse at switching tasks and filtering distractions than people who focus (Stanford, 2009).

• University of California research on attention span shows the average person now pays attention to a single screen for only about 47 seconds, compared to ~2.5 minutes in earlier eras (University of California, 2024).

Pile on AI and automation, and the problem only accelerates. We start trusting machine outputs without scrutiny, diving further into a bias called automation bias (Parasuraman & Riley, 1997). That’s how small errors slip through and snowball into expensive failures and it dates all the way back before the turn of the century … what’s old is, sadly, new, again.

The New Scarcity: Quality

The irony of the AI era is this: as output explodes, quality collapses.

Which means the rarest thing in the market is no longer speed. It’s precision. It’s trust.

Consumers and businesses are already reflecting this shift:

• Edelman’s Trust Barometer reports people reward brands they believe are consistent and reliable over those that just move fast (Edelman Trust Barometer 2024).

• McKinsey’s 2024 survey found that while 75% of companies adopted AI since 2020, only 23% reported actual quality improvements, most cite inconsistency and rework (McKinsey, 2024)

• And while younger generations (Gen Z, Millennials) value flexibility and digital-first experiences, they are fierce judges of quality. A brand that feels careless or sloppy loses them instantly (Deloitte Global Gen Z & Millennial Survey 2024).

In other words: the market is drowning in “good enough.” What people will pay for, what they will return for, is what’s done exceptionally well.

Doing Less, Better

This isn’t a call to abandon progress. It’s a call to cut ruthlessly. Do fewer things, but with deeper attention.

Because in a world where AI can generate 10,000 words in a blink, the human edge won’t be speed—it will be the judgment to know what matters, and the craft to deliver it without compromise.

The companies, teams, and individuals who thrive won’t be the ones producing more. They’ll be the ones whose work people actually trust, remember, and return to.

So here’s the challenge: What could you strip away this week, so the work you do actually lasts?

My First Step

For me, it’s meetings. Specifically, meetings without a clear agenda and defined outcomes. They’re speed disguised as progress. By stripping them away, I’m freeing time and focus to do fewer things, but with the depth and quality that actually move the needle.

Why Your B2B Stories Need Rounded Edges

You know how rounded buttons just feel friendlier than sharp-cornered ones? How certain websites feel instantly trustworthy while others make you want to click away?

(Dive much deeper on rounded v. sharp design here: Journal of Consumer Research)

The same principle applies to B2B brand narratives. Stories have sharp edges are more likely to make buyers pull back. Stories that have rounded edges are more likely to make them lean in.

…and most of us are telling stories with way too many sharp edges.

Stories Have Edges Too

Think about the last sales deck you saw. Was it packed with "cutting-edge solutions" and "best-in-class platforms" and enough acronyms to fill a dictionary? Every one of those phrases is a sharp edge. They poke. They prod. They create distance.

It’s quite ironic. B2B loves to talk about "cutting-edge" when people instinctively prefer rounded edges.

Now, think about the time someone told you a story about Sarah who used to spend her Sundays catching up on work but doesn't anymore. Something different happened, right? You relaxed. You pictured Sarah, maybe you saw a bit of yourself in her story. No poking. No prodding. Just curiosity about what changed for Sarah.

That's the difference between sharp and rounded narratives. One makes your brain work. The other makes your brain care.

Sharp vs. Rounded: A Tale of Two Pitches

Here's what sharp looks like: "Our AI-powered solution delivers operational excellence through advanced automation capabilities."

Did you feel that? That's your brain working overtime to decode what this actually means for you. It's all edges and they are abstract, aggressive, and alienating.

Now here's rounded: "Remember when your team had to manually process every invoice? That's gone now."

You had a different feeling, right? It's a question, not an assault. It’s an invitation to see yourself in the story.

That’s the power of smooth edges. They draw you in rather than sharp ones, that push you away.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

You're not selling to spreadsheets. You're selling to humans who happen to use spreadsheets. And humans, whether they're CFOs or interns, are drawn to what feels safe, approachable, and familiar.

When you round your narrative edges, something measurable happens.

• People actually finish reading

• They move through your sales process faster

• They share your story with colleagues because stories travel while specifications are archived in your inbox

The companies winning complex B2B sales aren't the ones with the sharpest edges. They're the ones who figured out that "cutting-edge" is exactly the wrong metaphor when you want someone to come closer.

The Rounded Revolution

So how do you know if your narratives have too many sharp edges?

Here's a simple test: Would your customer say it that way? If not, you've found a sharp edge.

"We're leveraging synergies" is sharp. "We're working better together" is rounded.

"Best-in-class solution" is sharp. "The thing that actually works" is rounded.

"Digital transformation initiative" is sharp. "Finally fixing that annoying manual process" is rounded.

The beautiful thing about rounded narratives is they're actually easier to create.

You don't need a thesaurus or an MBA. You need to listen to how your happiest customers describe what you did for them.

They never say "operational excellence." They say "I get home on time now."

The Question That Changes Everything

Every piece of content you create, every deck you design, every email you send has edges. The question isn't whether you're telling your story. The question is whether you're telling it in a way that invites people in or keeps them at arm's length.

The reality is sharp narratives feel like work. They require decoding, translating, and processing … and no one has time for more work.

They exhaust buyers before you even get to the value.

Rounded narratives feel like conversation. They flow naturally from problem to solution to transformation. They create connection instead of distance.

So, What?

Take a look at your latest sales narrative. Count the sharp edges. Get a notepad and put a tally down for each piece of jargon, each abstractions, each aggressive claims. Then ask yourself: Would Sarah tell it this way?

In the end, nobody wants to grab onto something with sharp edges. Not buttons, not brands, and definitely not B2B solutions.

Companies that understand this aren't trying to be cutting-edge anymore.

They're too busy closing deals with their well defined rounded stories.

The Jevons Paradox In Marketing

The Jevons Paradox says: when efficiency improves, consumption rises.

It’s happening in marketing right now.

AI makes content cheaper, faster, easier.

However, instead of clarity, we get noise.

Efficiency doesn’t create signal. It amplifies chaos.

That’s why I’ve been working on something I’m calling The Narrative Advantage:

• Deep, authentic, data-driven storytelling.

• A clear, defensible narrative that turns efficiency into impact.

Without The Narrative Advantage: Efficiency just scales noise.

With The Narrative Advantage: Efficiency scales your story.

I’m getting ready to release the first version.

Want an advance copy? DM me over on LinkedIn, or fill out our Contact Us Form and I’ll share it with you.

Brand in the AI Era: 5 Practices Every Executive Must Master to Stay in Control

You’re not just marketing anymore. You’re programming belief into, and building trust within, an AI-driven world.

Generative AI has changed the mechanics of how your brand is perceived, repeated, and reshaped in the market.

The more AI is involved, the more your message depends on the systems, models, and prompts you feed it.

If you’re in the C-suite, you can’t delegate this entirely to marketing. The health of your brand is now a leadership issue. It’s about control, trust, and long-term market relevance. It’s about infrastructure strategy as much as messaging.

From our client work, we’ve identified five core practices that determine whether a brand thrives or drifts in the AI era.

Each one is actionable for your organization, starting right now.

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1. Build Your Narrative Infrastructure

Your story can’t just be in your team’s heads or your brand guidelines. It must live inside the systems that are now informing and/or generating your content and communications.

What it Means: Your tone, context, value propositions, and positioning need to be embedded in AI tools, CMS workflows, and marketing automation platforms so that whether it’s a human, a chatbot, or a summarization tool, your story doesn’t drift.

Action Steps:

• Audit every system that touches your content: CRM, email, chat, support scripts, sales enablement. Identify where narrative elements live (and where they don’t).

• Build an AI-ready brand guide that includes model-friendly instructions and example prompts.

• Train your internal teams on using these instructions across tools and how to address errors / issues when they (inevitably) arise.

Key Question: If I prompted every AI tool we use, would I get the same brand story every time?

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2. Establish a Content Chain of Custody

If you can’t answer who created a message, what data trained it, or how it was validated, you’re gambling with your credibility. Your hard earned trust is at risk.

What it Means: Chain of custody isn’t just for compliance. It’s central to trust. Audit logs and metadata about content creation, approval, and publishing must become standard practice.

Action Steps:

• Require all AI-generated content to include a creation log (who/what produced it and when).

• Track prompts, training data sources, and revisions for every significant asset.

• Create a validation step before publishing to ensure accuracy and brand alignment.

Key Question: If a customer challenged the authenticity of our latest communication, could we prove its origin?

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3. Develop Model-Aware Messaging

One voice everywhere? Dead. AI tools don’t behave identically. Your brand will sound different in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or a proprietary LLM unless you deliberately adapt.

What it Means: Your story must be consistent at the strategic level but tailored to the quirks, strengths, and constraints of each model your teams use.

Action Steps:

• Test your core messages in multiple models. Document differences in tone, completeness, and accuracy.

• Create model-specific “tuning” instructions to preserve brand voice.

• Review and refine regularly as models update.

Key Question: Do we know how our brand’s language changes between the AI tools we already rely on?

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4. Treat Strategic Prompting as a Brand Skill

Your best copywriters are now as proficient with prompts as they are with creating content. If they can’t lead the model, the model will lead your message … and you’re potentially cooked!

What it Means: Prompting isn’t just a creative task. It’s a brand defense mechanism. The right prompts, the right training data / content, help AI generate content that aligns with your voice and your story without needing heavy revision.

Action Steps:

• Train marketing, sales, and comms teams on brand-specific prompt frameworks.

• Maintain a library of approved prompts for high-value content types.

• Assign prompt QA responsibility to a senior team member.

Key Question: Who in our company ensures AI tools follow, not rewrite, our brand’s intent?

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5. Embed Trust-First Frameworks in Every Message

Clarity. Transparency. Consistency. These are today’s (and tomorrow’s) brand survival strategies.

What it Means: Trust-first frameworks build resilience into your communications so they hold up under scrutiny, fact-checking, and resharing.

Action Steps:

• Establish non-negotiable brand principles for accuracy, disclosure, and transparency.

• Review messaging against these principles before approval.

• Make trust a KPI in brand health reporting.

Key Question: Is trust something we hope to earn, or something we’ve systematically designed into every communication, every engagement?

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The Leadership Imperative

These five practices aren’t just marketing tactics. They’re operational disciplines for an AI-driven business landscape.

The risk isn’t that AI will get your messaging slightly wrong. It’s that without these systems in place, your brand becomes a series of unverified, inconsistent messages that compound very quickly over time.

If you want to own your narrative in the AI era, start here:

• Pick one practice.

• Assign ownership.

• Build a baseline this quarter.

Remember: Those who do it well won’t just cut through the noise. They’ll own the conversation.

If you’re ready to tackle this issue, we’re ready to help.

AI Is Marketing Infrastructure. Are Your Brand Systems Ready?

Last week, I shared AI Is Scaling. Trust Isn't. The second in my three-part series.

TL;DR Recap: Your voice doesn’t need to be the loudest. Just a clear one that people believe, and trust.

This week, in the final piece of the series stemming from my analysis of America's AI Action Plan, I highlight the five core practices I believe are critical for brand resilience in the AI era.

America is building the future of AI. Are you building the brand systems that can survive it?

The AI Action Plan calls for:

• Expanded energy grids and hyper-scale data centers

• Open deployment across government, defense, and private enterprise

• Global export of the American AI stack as a strategic asset

The goal is speed and scale. The risk is message collapse.

Here’s what brand leaders must understand:

• This isn’t just about power and chips. It’s about meaning.

• When AI becomes the default interface for how customers, employees, and partners interact with your company, your brand becomes a system function.

• If that system isn’t anchored in a coherent story, built with prompt-level safeguards, and governed across tools and teams—you’re not communicating. You’re broadcasting noise.

I believe brand resilience in the AI era depends on 5 core practices:

1. Narrative Infrastructure: Your story must scale across AI agents, not just people. That means brand rules, tone, context, and strategic positioning embedded in every system.

2. Content Chain of Custody: Who created this message? What trained it? How was it validated? You need answers. You also need audit logs.

3. Model-Aware Messaging: Your brand language must adapt to the constraints and quirks of each model you use. It’s not “one voice everywhere” anymore. It’s “one story, tuned to the platform.”

4. Strategic Prompting: Your best copywriters are now prompt engineers. Equip them to lead the message—not just clean it up after the fact.

5. Trust-First Frameworks / Playbooks: Clarity. Transparency. Consistency. These aren’t copywriting tactics. They are officially survival strategies.

You’re not just marketing anymore. You’re programming belief into an AI-shaped world.

And those who do it well?

They won’t just cut through the noise. They’ll own the conversation.

AI Is Scaling. Trust Isn’t. This is a Communications Crisis

What’s the point of brand awareness if no one believes what you say?

Last week, I shared The Invisible Risk in AI Policy: What Happens to the Brand?

TL;DR Recap: Whether we like it or not, AI is rewriting the rules of communication. So, unless we redesign the systems behind our brand voice, our story will drift. First quietly. Then suddenly

This week, I’m going deeper because the real problem isn't the speed just speed. It's scale without trust.

America’s AI Action Plan embraces a frictionless vision: de-regulate, open-source, deploy rapidly, and dominate globally.

It even mandates every federal agency ensure “to the maximum extent practicable” that employees use frontier models.

There’s a lot here. 28 pages to be exact. However, when I read it, I see a lot more missing than present including a plan to ensure these tools don’t distort truth, flatten nuance, or accelerate bias and confusion at scale.

These omissions affect every company, every brand.

Here’s what America's AI Action Plan means for company leadership, today:

Your narrative is no longer yours by default.

• As AI reshapes internal workflows, external campaigns, and public discourse, brands will increasingly sound the same.

• Speed will cannibalize your brand’s soul if you don’t deliberately preserve your voice and your POV.

The cost of inconsistency just exploded.

• Open-weight systems + no shared standards = messaging that shifts subtly across every platform and channel.

• Every hallucination, every off-brand phrase, every insensitive output now bears your logo.

• Moving fast and breaking things will only be an acceptable excuse for the most minor communications and positioning transgressions or mistakes.

To cut through the noise, and not be consumed by AI-driven brand voice, companies must:

1. Architect brand-safe AI pipelines: Treat your AI stack like your CRM or CMS. Every system that generates messaging must be governed, trained, and monitored against clear standards.

2. Train for narrative resilience: Don’t just chase trends. Develop a rock-solid core story and set of values. Train your AI pipeline on it and your teams to defend it, especially when generative tools push for sameness.

3. Position trust as strategy, not sentiment: Trust is not a soft metric. It determines message reach, brand recall, and revenue confidence in every market.

Remember, your voice doesn’t need to be the loudest. Just a clear one that people believe.

The Invisible Risk in AI Policy: What Happens to the Brand?

What happens when the systems that shape language, and generate content, no longer reflect the values of the brand using them?

America’s AI Action Plan reads like a blueprint for dominance: deregulation, infrastructure, and global distribution. It outlines a future where “whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global standards.”

What it doesn’t outline is this:

How do brands maintain trust when the tools they use to communicate are reshaping the meaning of communication itself?

For brand and communications leaders, this is not theoretical. It’s operational. Right now.

AI will soon touch, if not produce, every message, story, and campaign. Most importantly, if the foundational models your company relies on don’t reflect your brand’s values, you’ll lose message fidelity, erode audience trust, and create a growing disconnect between what you say and what customers experience.

For brand, marketing, and comms teams, this means your message is no longer just about what you say. It’s about how the tools you use say it.

That’s a new kind of brand risk.

So ask yourself:

• Who trains the systems you rely on to represent your brand voice?

• Do your AI-powered content workflows reinforce—or erode—your values?

• Are you ready to audit and govern messaging generated beyond human review?

Three things I believe every brand must prioritize right now:

1. Define brand values as AI constraints: Don’t just document your voice—codify what should and should not be generated in your name.

2. Audit every AI-touchpoint: Emails, product copy, chatbots, investor decks—your audience doesn’t care whether a human or a model wrote it. They expect consistency.

3. Establish prompt-to-publish oversight: Marketing operations must evolve. Governance isn’t optional. It’s infrastructure.

Clarity, not speed, is your real differentiator in the age of AI.