Your city has jobs. Your cost of living is competitive. Your quality of life metrics are strong. And the people you want to attract keep moving somewhere else, often somewhere with worse numbers.

You have detailed personas. You know their demographics, their behaviors, their pain points, and their journey stages. And your marketing still doesn't resonate because you've profiled everything about them except what actually matters.

Your upsell training is solid. Your products are valuable. Your timing is right. And customers still feel annoyed, pushed, and resistant, often damaging relationships for marginal revenue.

Your segments are defined by age, income, and geography. Your targeting is precise. Your media buying is optimized. And somehow, your message reaches the right demographics but fails to move them.

Your agents aren't using the CRM. Your clients ignore the automated emails. Your portal gets traffic, but no conversions. These aren't technology problems. They're trust problems wearing technology costumes.

Your clients don't want robo-advice. They want you, plus the ability to do things that weren't possible before. Understanding the difference will determine whether AI enhances your practice or hollows it out.

Financial services spent more on AI than almost any other industry. Adoption rates are still stuck in the basement. There's a reason for this, and it has nothing to do with legacy systems.

The best firm has the credentials, the case studies, the technical expertise, and the always-popular “we’ve done this before” slide in their deck. All useful and necessary stuff. But ranking as the “best choice” is a logic game. And humans are anything but logical, even if they pretend very hard to be. Logic is only part of the equation.  

Your customer journey is mapped. Your touchpoints are optimized. Your NPS is tracked religiously. And somehow, customers still leave for competitors and rarely advocate for you.

Your AI rollout is stalling, and more training isn't going to fix it.

Here's a tool that will: The Values Resistance Audit. Five questions. Takes about ten minutes. Ask yourself these questions about your team before your next AI initiative, and you'll know exactly where the resistance is coming from and what to do about it. I'll walk you through each one in this post.

Nearly 1,400 Greater Toronto residents who say they're extremely likely to buy a home in the next two years told us what matters to them. Then we did something that makes this research genuinely different: we benchmarked their answers against reality.

If you work anywhere near financial services, you can feel the shift in the air. A massive transfer of wealth is underway, and it’s bringing a massive transfer of expectations with it. The inheritors stepping into financial power are building different lives, different definitions of success, and different relationships with the people who claim to serve them.

Why do two contractors with identical demographics reach for completely different power tool brands? The answer lives in their values. And understanding this changes everything about how we connect with customers.

Destination marketers are being asked to inspire inbound visitors, lift local pride, and brief policymakers who wake up on different sides of the aisle. That is a lot of needles to thread with one piece of thread. The answer, of course, is shared values.

When Cracker Barrel unveiled their new logo and a full interior redesign, people lost it. But they aren’t the first to make a mistake that upset their customers. For reasons other than a rebrand, Target and Bud Light come to mind as other recent examples of corporations not reading the room. What do they have in common and how can you avoid it?

Here’s the truth: most of what we do in business is just different flavors of the same challenge. 

Whether it’s sales, marketing, HR, leadership, customer experience, or any of the other job titles we like to throw around, we’re trying to get people to do something. Buy the thing. Click the link. Apply for the role. Stay with the company. Show up. Get on board. Care. 

Let’s be honest: marketing isn’t getting any easier. If you’re a marketing leader right now, you’re juggling a lot—ROI targets, brand equity, performance campaigns, and maybe a strong urge to scream into a pillow. Meanwhile, your audience is splintered across dozens of platforms and seems allergic to anything that feels like a sales pitch.

So, what actually works? Amazon Advertising and I are on the same page. This post is about that.

If you're a business owner in New Brunswick, this article outlines a method you can use to boost your brand and significantly benefit our planet. This isn't about a new technology or a secret marketing strategy. It's something much more profound and potent—our shared human values.

It can be difficult to make everyone in a diverse and geographically dispersed company feel like they belong. But if you know what people value, across all roles and locations, you can create a powerful set of strategies to bring everyone together. Here’s an example of how this works for the Loblaw Group of Companies.

Leaders of speaker bureaus are constantly looking for ways to attract and retain clients—who are primarily ‘event planners’ of one sort or another. In this blog, I want to share a strategy I recently presented in a keynote on the shared values of event planners. These values can help bureaus engage event…