Why can’t you smell your own home?
Think about it. Whenever you visit someone else’s place, you immediately notice it has a distinct scent. Not bad, just theirs. You might even associate that smell with them after a few visits. “Ah yes, this is Sarah’s apartment.”
But your own home? Nothing. Neutral. Just… regular.
The reason is olfactory adaptation. When you’re constantly exposed to a smell, the neurons responsible for detecting it essentially switch off. Your brain files it under “normal” and stops alerting you. You could technically smell your own nose for the first few seconds after birth. But since you’ve been breathing through it ever since, those receptors went quiet.
The only time you notice your home’s scent is after a reset. Come back from a two-week vacation, and suddenly you’ll catch it—just for a minute, before your nose adapts again.
This is exactly what happens to us as marketers.
We live inside our strategies, messaging, and content day after day. And gradually, we lose the ability to detect what’s working, what’s stale, and what opportunities we’re missing.
We become nose-blind to our own marketing.
The symptoms
This shows up in different ways depending on where you look.
In strategy, it’s doing things the way we’ve always done them—either coasting on “everything’s fine” autopilot or scrambling in “the sky is falling” panic, neither of which leaves room for structured experimentation. It’s also letting your understanding of your target audience grow stale without realizing it.
In messaging, it’s copy that sounds clever to you but confuses prospects. Positioning that feels differentiated internally but lands as abstract and wishy-washy externally. No clear bridge between customer pain and your solution.
In content, it’s talking about topics that no longer resonate, planning from “what do we want to say” instead of “what does our audience want to discuss.”
To borrow a favorite term of a fellow strategist, we get high on our own supply. We get desensitized to the shortcomings, and we lose the ability to sniff out new opportunities.
Why this isn’t a personal failing
I want to make one thing clear: olfactory adaptation isn’t a flaw. It’s an efficient brain function. If you noticed every constant smell, you’d be overwhelmed. Millions of years of evolution have shaped our ability to filter out ambient stimuli, allowing us to focus on what’s changing, which is what matters most.
The same applies to marketing.
Getting close to your work isn’t the problem—closeness builds depth and expertise. The problem is not building in deliberate resets.
Three types of distance to reset your senses
To recover your “sense of marketing smell,” you need to create distance. There are three ways to do it:
Temporal distance means waiting before reviewing. Draft Friday, review Monday. Even a lunch break helps for simple tasks like putting enough distance between your writer brain that did the draft and your editor brain that needs to review it. For complex work like campaign plans, I prefer to give it a few days and run multiple revision rounds.
Spatial distance means bringing in outside perspectives. This can include peers, prospects you trust, subject matter experts—anyone who hasn’t adapted to your particular “scent.” They’ll catch what’s become invisible to you. As a solo exercise, you could also think about “the voice of the market” or “the voice of competitors”. How would people challenge the points you’re making, or how can you connect the messaging to the current forces at play?
Psychological distance means shocking your brain into novelty. Read your copy on a different device from the one you wrote it on. Change your physical environment. Read it aloud. Create an ICP agent in AI to pressure-test your messaging. Explain your strategy to someone outside your industry. Any one of these (and many others) will help you get into a different headspace than the one you first created your work with.
In essence, all three categories achieve similar results. The context shift forces your brain to process familiar material as if it were new.
***
The goal isn’t to never get close to your work. Live it and breathe it, think about it at all odd times of day. That closeness is what layers in meaning and builds real expertise.
The goal is scheduled distance—regular resets built into your process so you can keep detecting what others smell immediately.
Fresh perspectives matter,
📆 Join me for a free event
Let’s talk social search & TikTok strategy
TikTok has become a platform with mass appeal, as well as a search engine. And yet, too many marketers (me, as well) feel intimidated by the specific vibe of the platform, subscribe to the myth this is only a Gen Z space, or believe (erroneously) that you can’t promote “serious” or “boring” brands there.
On January 21, search marketer and social media expert Mathilde Høj will join me to discuss how we can make the most out of TikTok, and why it should be a focus in 2026 in the first place.
👌 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
How to Determine Search Intent and Optimize for It | It may sound technical, but optimizing for search intent all comes down to ‘satisfying the need of the reader’. Adapting your content to intent simply means ensuring you’re serving your audience in the best way possible. Still, this is a good technical how-to you’d want to see.
How To Conduct a Brand Awareness Survey: A Complete Guide | If you’re planning some new research projects in 2026, this is a helpful resource. It explains the different types of awareness metrics and provides a set of questions you can use.
Free Resources for Product Marketers | This is a great set of resources for anyone looking to deepen their product marketing knowledge.
👀 Two for fun
This reminder of the progress of time | Watching the Times Square Ball drop not just for the last minute of the year but for its full length is a good reminder to make every moment count.
This look into the Internet’s past | A nostalgic web-museum for everyone who fondly remember Flash sites (or Gen Alphas who want to connect with their parents, I guess?)
🐈 Weekly cat
Cleaning conga line. I can’t get over the fact that the orange guy is cleaning the air!
🤿 Diving deeper
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