The Adaptive Marketer

August 31, 2026August 31, 2026

The Real Way to Escape a Competitive Red Ocean: Own the Category

Blue Ocean strategy tells you where to sail. Category design is what gets customers to follow

Every industry eventually becomes highly competitive. Competitors converge on the same customers, chase the same features, and compete on the same handful of variables until the water turns bloody with discounting and diminishing differentiation.

This is why category creation seems to be a big topic now in marketing circles. Category Creation is the effort to reframe the problems customers face, and therefore define the solution set (language and buying criteria) to dominate the new space.

Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim in 2005 wrote Blue Ocean Strategy, offering the idea that instead of competing in a highly competitive space (a red ocean), companies should find or create a new one, a blue ocean, an uncontested market space where there are no competitors.

Both Blue Ocean and Category Creation are concepts that guide us towards new categories or spaces to avoid competition. Category creation approaches the problem a more from a positioning perspective, while the blue ocean approach has focused more on innovation strategy. However, as I make the case in my book OutPosition, Strategy, competitive differentiation and Positioning only work effectively when they work together as a system, with each of these three elements reinforcing each other.

July 31, 2026July 31, 2026

Richard Mille: How a Marketer Out-Positioned Two Centuries of Watchmaking

In 2024, the most prestigious names in Swiss watchmaking had a hard year. Vacheron Constantin — founded in 1755 — saw sales drop around 14%. Jaeger-LeCoultre fell roughly 18%. The Swatch Group, which owns Omega, Longines, and Tissot, watched its operating profit collapse by 75%. Swiss watch exports declined overall.

In that same down market, a brand that did not exist until 2001 grew. Richard Mille sold roughly 5,700 watches and brought in about $ 1.77 billion in revenue in 2024 — making it the sixth-largest watch brand in the world by revenue while producing fewer watches than almost every competitor above it. Its average price per watch sits around $300,000. To put that in perspective, Rolex — a company most people associate with the top of the market — sells at an average price near $16,000 and produces roughly 200 times more watches every year.

Let that sink in. A brand with no heritage, no nineteenth-century founder, no historic complication to its name, walked into the single most heritage-obsessed category in all of luxury — and now commands the highest price per unit in the entire industry.

Here is the part that should interest every marketer and strategist: Richard Mille, the man, was not a watchmaker. He studied marketing. His competitors descended from master horologists; he came up through marketing and industrial production at Finhor, Matra, and the jeweller Mauboussin. He is best described not as a craftsman but as a luxury-industry executive who understood positioning at a level the entire industry had forgotten was possible.

This is a positioning story. And it is one of the cleanest examples I have ever seen of a principle I come back to constantly: you do not win by being a better version of the incumbent. You win by changing what the category is about.

July 7, 2026July 13, 2026

Think Like a Grandmaster: 7 Strategy Lessons from Garry Kasparov

What a Chess Champion Can Teach You About Strategy (You Don’t Need to Know Chess)

Garry Kasparov was the best chess player in the world for twenty straight years. He became World Champion at twenty-two and held a version of the title until 2000. Then he wrote How Life Imitates Chess, looking back at how he made decisions under pressure, and tried to write it down.

It’s no surprise that people draw parallels between chess and strategy. Both are competitive intellectual exercises built on a sequence of decisions and the responses they provoke. Both demand careful observation, analysis, and creative thinking. And both require understanding the strengths, weaknesses, and potential contribution of each piece at any given moment.

But you don´t need to know chess (or even like it) to appreciate the insights from Kasparov on strategy. The board was just his laboratory. What he is really studying is decision-making under uncertainty, with imperfect information, against an opponent who is also trying to win. Below are the principles that translate most directly from his board to your business — and how to actually use them.

March 30, 2026July 13, 2026

The Trust Equation: The Foundation for Value-Based Selling

The formula for Trus: Value-Based Selling

Every professional in B2B sales knows the power of being a trusted advisor. Many teams want to sell on value. Very few actually know how to do it, despite companies spending over $15 billion a year on sales training.

I have seen it firsthand — as a buyer, as a seller, as a CMO working with sales teams, and as someone who has spent years studying how deals get made in enterprise technology. Most sales conversations are product pitches dressed up in the language of value. The words sometimes are right, but the execution is not.

This is not a failure of intent. Most salespeople genuinely want to help their customers. The problem is that selling on value is harder than it sounds — and most teams have never been given a real framework for how to do it.

Three Fundamental Truths About How People Buy

It is important to understand the perspective of the buyer to frame what it means to sell on value and how to align with the way buyers make decisions. Let´s look at some interesting stats from leading analysts:

February 14, 2026August 6, 2026

The Three Horizons Framework in Action: Lessons from the EV Transition

The global auto industry is facing a difficult reset as consumer demand has grown more slowly than many automakers and suppliers projected during the post-pandemic surge. Companies invested billions in battery plants, dedicated EV platforms, and aggressive capacity expansion based on forecasts of rapid adoption, only to encounter price sensitivity, uneven charging infrastructure, higher financing costs, and consumer hesitation around range and resale value.

When the industry accelerated into electric vehicles, it didn’t fail because it misread the future. It failed because it mismanaged time.

February 6, 2026July 13, 2026

A Practical Guide to HD Audio for Audiophiles

Some people don’t just listen to music – they listen for it. They notice the space between instruments, the texture of a voice, the way a cymbal fades into silence.

Audiophiles are people who perceive music not as background, but as a craft, a performance, and an experience worth obsessing over. Audiophiles actively pursue the most faithful and emotionally engaging reproduction of recorded music. Are you one of them?

The problem? CD quality is not high quality

I remember when CDs first came out: they were supposed to be the epitome of music quality. Reproduction without noise, no magnetic degradation as you had with tapes, no vinyl erosion and playback issues as with LPs.

It’s not.

Then we evolved to MP3 music through Napster and iTunes. More recently, we started streaming our music from services like Spotify – and mostly assumed the quality would be there.

December 12, 2025August 6, 2026

Creating a Category: How Catchpoint Repositioned Itself for Leadership

A little over 3 years ago I joined Catchpoint, a software company who met my criteria for my ideal job: I wanted a medium-sized company (I am not good with big company politics), that had a great product and bad marketing.

My last requirement, which was not negotiable, was that the company had to have a great leader and a good culture. I found Catchpoint to be a company with heart: a passion for customers, for what they do, and for the team that worked together to build a great company.

My Most Important Priority as a CMO

The first job was not to upscale the team, optimize demand programs, or rebuild the website, no. My most important task was to build a strategy that would help the company stand out, build awareness, and earn the business of the biggest companies in the World.

This is how, Catchpoint embarked on one of the most remarkable repositioning journeys in enterprise technology.

December 1, 2025August 6, 2026

The Fundamentals of Effective Positioning

Positioning is one of the most powerful — and most misused — tools in marketing. It’s not a tagline, a clever campaign, or the latest buzzword tossed around in a boardroom. Positioning is the strategic lens through which customers understand who you are, what you stand for, and why you matter.

When done well, it becomes the foundation of every message, product decision, and go-to-market motion. When done poorly, it creates confusion, weak differentiation, and a brand that feels interchangeable. Despite its importance, positioning is often treated as a quick creative exercise rather than a rigorous strategic discipline — which is why so many companies get it wrong.

In this post, I break down the eight rules that define effective positioning — the principles that separate brands that own a place in the customer’s mind from those that simply blend into the noise. Whether you’re refining an established brand or shaping a new one, these rules will give you a practical framework to sharpen your strategy and communicate with clarity and conviction.

October 24, 2025July 13, 2026

Stop the Content Machine – The Seven Deadly Sins of Content Marketing

Every minute, 4.5 million blog posts are published. Yet most go unread.

Content marketing started as a revolutionary idea: educate, don’t just sell. But somewhere along the way, the mission changed — from teaching to churning. The content machine took over.

When done right, inbound marketing builds trust and a steady flow of qualified opportunities especially when you are trying to educate potential customers about a new technology, a new approach, or to establish expertise. But somewhere along the way, the mission changed. What began as a way to build expertise has turned into a production race

“Content Marketing is the only marketing left.”
– Seth Godin

November 13, 2018July 13, 2026

What is Marketing according to Seth Godin

Seth is like the Swami of marketing. Or maybe the shepherd of marketing because for over two decades he has been guiding the marketing profession as it evolves and matures. Seth is the author everyone has to read, no matter what kind of marketing you do.

And it makes sense for him to write a book about what marketing is. This is Marketing is a foundational book. Unlike other books, This is Marketing is not a book focused on one central idea, instead, it covers a wide range of topics from the rationality of buyers to adoption cycles. It’s a book about the core of what marketing is all about.

It also is a book about what marketers are about. It talks about our role in the world, our responsibility to use our talent for the greater good, our ability to change the world, and the importance of doing marketing in an ethical and respectful way.

In a way, this is the book that attempts to encapsulate all of Seth Godin’s wisdom in one tome. It includes the core concepts from permission marketing, written in the 90s, and covers important topics from All Marketers are Liars, which is probably Seth’s most important book.

In this post I will cover a few tidbits of wisdom I particularly liked in Seth’s book:

**What is Marketing, according to What is Marketing?**

“Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. Marketing helps others become who they seek to become”. Continue reading “What is Marketing according to Seth Godin”