Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to find the story you’re probably missing Here’s something I didn’t realize for way too long. Every customer review is a compressed story. Not just feedback. Not just sentiment. A narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Problem is, most of us read reviews like data points. We’re scanning for patterns. Looking for what comes up “a lot.” And in doing that, we miss that story. Let...
3 days ago • 2 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to write copy for your customers instead of at them “Do we really need to do interviews?” A client asked me this last month. We were scoping a messaging project, and when I mentioned customer interviews as part of the research, he paused. “Can’t we just use the data we have? The analytics? The surveys?” I get it. Interviews feel slow. They feel like a nice-to-have. And when you’re...
10 days ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to systematically test your copy before it goes live Message testing has always meant one of two things: expensive user research you couldn’t afford, or shipping and hoping you got it right. You’d write the homepage. Get internal feedback. Maybe show a few friendly customers. Then launch and see what happened. If it worked, great. If it didn’t, you’d rewrite under pressure while...
17 days ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. technology is a glittering lure. Don Draper Great copywriters used to spend hours fine-tuning a single line. Then AI made that seem obsolete. Last week I spent almost an hour editing a single headline, subheadline, and CTA with AI. While prepping for Team GPT’s webinar, I wrote a value proposition for a fictional company called CloudSync (a knowledge preservation platform for CTOs). The...
24 days ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Why your AI outputs sound generic (and how to fix it) There’s a concept from Tor Nørretranders’ book The User Illusion that explains why a lot of marketers get crap results with AI. It’s called exformation. It’s the information you deliberately exclude when communicating, so the other person can actually process what you include. In short, good communication is knowing what to cut....
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to see through space and time You have twenty customer interviews. Three hundred survey responses. Sales calls. Support tickets. Battlecards. Enough raw data to build a category-defining message. Yet, it still takes three weeks to synthesize, and no one onws the process. By the time you've pulled the "insights," two competitors have repositioned and your narrative already needs work...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to scale messaging across multiple products and audiences Your team knows what you sell. You've defined your positioning. And you have a decent handle on your ICP. But when someone opens a blank doc to write homepage copy, sales deck content, or a nurture email, they stare at the cursor of doom. Writing every word feels a negotiation between what you know, what your stakeholders told...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. The two signals that actually convert B2B prospects A potential client recently told me why they reached out after hearing me on a podcast: “You gave the feeling you did what you were talking about and could give us value. And also that you had a clear messaging for your target.” They didn’t hire me for my frameworks or insights. They hired me because I signaled two things: I’ve done the...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. How to scale messaging without losing control It’s a question I get a lot, and a problem I see all the time. Usually the reason is twofold: Marketing, Product, and Sales keep passing the ball on who owns messaging. They struggle to manage it across the entire customer journey. It’s like a highway where alignment depends on everyone knowing their lane. Except no one knows where their...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Last week we talked about turning raw buying triggers into category entry points. But once you have them — how do you know which one will actually move buyers? That’s the question I keep getting on podcasts. “How do you test messaging fast, cheap, and without a full campaign?” It’s a fair ask. Because message validation is the biggest black box in B2B. Teams either A/B test blindly or...
2 months ago • 3 min read