🥃 The cognac strategy

As a foodie and “The Bear” obsessive, I highly recommend Will Guidara’s book, “Unreasonable Hospitality.” But as a marketer, I recommend it even more. This is a book about customer centricity, only disguised as a book about a restaurant.

One story in particular still stays with me.

At Eleven Madison Park, they’d identified a problem every restaurant faces: the moment diners finish their meal. Being proactive in giving them the check may feel like you’re urging them to leave. But leave it to them to ask for it, every minute trying to get the server’s attention feels like ten.

Every restaurant deals with this moment. Most accept it as “just how it’s done.”

Will’s team questioned the convention. When they brought the bill—proactively unprompted, after the final course—they also brought expensive cognac. They’d pour some for everyone, leave the bottle, and tell guests to take their time.

That awkward transition became a moment of generosity. Guests had the bill in hand but also permission to linger. After all, you can’t feel rushed when you’ve just been supplied with a whole bottle of cognac.

Will’s team found distinction by questioning what everyone else ignored.

We marketers do the exact same thing. Well, not with cognac, but with content.

The “how it’s done” fallacy

We are in love with industry best practices. We research competitors obsessively. We analyze their blog topics, their LinkedIn presence, their video strategies. Then we try to do those things better.

The result? Everyone crowds the same spaces.

We’re all creating pithy LinkedIn posts, hosting 45-minute webinars, writing SEO-optimized blog posts, showing up at conferences with sacks of branded water bottles.

When you benchmark competitors, you optimize for parity in already-saturated spaces. You’re competing to be slightly better at what everyone already does well, while remaining completely blind to the moments in your audience’s content experience that the entire industry ignores.

The overlooked content moments

Think about how your audience actually experiences content. Not your ideal funnel—the real experience.

There are friction points and overlooked states in that journey everyone just accepts as convention.

Are there overlooked content channels?

A client of mine does strategy consulting for Fortune 100 companies. Everyone would say, “C-level executives live on LinkedIn.” True enough. But those same people also scroll TikTok in the evening. So he started creating video content there—and found a much less crowded environment to reach exactly the right people.

Are there overlooked engagement formats?

My current favorite marketing hangout is Louis Grenier’s community, The Roost. Most online communities revolve around persistent Slack or Discord channels that create FOMO if you’re not constantly checking in. Louis went the opposite direction, and his community only exists with live sessions. Completely counterintuitive. Also, exactly what his audience needed—meaningful interaction without the overwhelm.

These aren’t random experiments. They’re deliberate choices to question what everyone else accepts as standard.

Finding your moments

The opportunities are there if you stop benchmarking long enough to observe.

Look at the 95% of your audience who aren’t ready to buy. Most companies ignore it and push them toward a sales conversation they don’t want. What if you built something specifically for that “interested but not ready” state? My friend Justyna calls it creating a Marketing Waiting Room.

Or think about live events. Everyone shows up to event booths with branded swag that often ends up with a kid’s cousin or in the trash of the hotel room. One client of mine created a talk track at their booth instead, offering actual insights. Another skipped swag entirely and created a print magazine worth keeping.

***

Finding these moments is not that difficult.

Start by mapping your audience’s real content journey. Then look for moments where the industry standard is either nothing or something generic that everyone does the same way.

Ask: What’s my equivalent of serving the bill? Where does convention create friction or missed opportunity?

The goal isn’t to be contrarian for its own sake. It’s to find the spaces where everyone else is competing in crowded territory while overlooking moments that actually matter.

Just don’t be so busy watching competitors that you forget to watch your customers.

Attention matters,

🎁 Celebrating the anniversary of my courses

Three years ago, in November, I launched my first solo online course. To celebrate this anniversary, I’m setting up discounted rates on both my courses:

If you’re a marketer working for brands, see the Strategic Content & Messaging →

If you’re building your online presence, see the Personal Branding Blueprint →

Discounts will be valid through December 1.

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

Thought leadership content: Build authority & trust | A massive primer on how to think about thought leadership, how to structure it, and how to measure it. Some good examples in there, too.

You sound like ChatGPT | An interesting piece that describes how AI impacts our real-life communication style and trust towards online content. It’s a curious evolution that marketers need to take into account.

The Editorial Workflow That Doubled My LinkedIn Following in 6 Months | This is a workflow quite similar to my own, so of course I love it. It shows quite well how batching works for time saving and the benefit of having a capture system.

👀 Two for fun

This cool map of movie filming locations | If you’re a cinefile, you can check out if your next vacation destination was the backdrop of a popular movie.

This unexpected bamboo fact | I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Hannah Fry’s science content on Instagram, and this is just another example why.