Notes from the wall
Senior perspectives on strategy, pricing, go-to-market and growth - written to be useful, not to fill a content calendar.
WK Dzik: a YouTube brand that lives on the shelf
Revenue grew from PLN 9.9 million to PLN 173 million in five years, and more than 80 percent of turnover comes from retail chains. The advantage is an audience leaders cannot buy, the risk a sugar levy increase planned for 2027.
Category strategyPrivate label took half the units. Not on price.
Private label is 50 percent of units across Europe's six biggest grocery markets and promotes 14 percent of them against the brands' 34. In Poland a branded unit at 20 percent off already sells below the average private label unit.
BrandShort-form video: stop buying views, buy entry points
Every platform counts a view at the start of play, and none of them pays on that unit. Meta charged 23.8 percent more per person reached in a year, and your real cost is the planned cost divided by your six-second rate.
E-commerceD2C ecommerce: what owning the customer costs
Allegro's take rate fell to 12.30 percent of GMV while its advertising revenue grew 31.1 percent. Amazon's ad business grew 26.2 percent against 2.5 percent for its own marketing. The threshold is 22.5 percent.
Marketing financeIncrementality testing: your media grades itself
Chrome kept third-party cookies and Google retired Privacy Sandbox, yet measurement still broke. The number is now produced by the seller of the media - and the holdout that checks it costs 0.69 percent of the budget.
StrategyAI competitive advantage: what is left when everyone has the same tools
The lift lands on novices, not experts, and it reaches every competitor at once. A saving the whole category gets is a price cut waiting to happen: 4.5 points of cost removed, 0.15 points of EBIT kept.
StrategyChallenger go-to-market: beat the leader where copying you costs them
Differentiation invites a copy. Counter-positioning makes the copy expensive. One question sorts which one you actually have - and the arithmetic runs on the incumbent's P&L, not yours.
Category strategyNo- and low-alcohol: a structural substitute, not a fad
Run as a trend, no and low gets priced below its alcoholic parent and forecast as cannibalisation. Both are errors - most of the volume comes from occasions alcohol could never enter.
Marketing financeRetail media: the invoice nobody audits
Eight times reported, one point four times incremental. Retail media harvests demand rather than creating it - and part of the spend is often trade money counted twice.
BrandDistinctive beats different: the two numbers that govern a brand asset
Buyers retrieve, they do not compare. Fame and uniqueness are separate measurements, and an asset that is famous but not uniquely yours is media spend donated to the leader.
StrategyJobs to be Done: what your customer actually hires your brand for
Ask what they stopped doing, not what they like. The thing the customer fired to hire you is the competitor your category map does not contain.
GEOThe ROI of GEO: what one cited answer is worth to a B2B brand
Traffic is the wrong unit of account for AI visibility. Fund GEO on cost per cited answer against contribution per deal - and know the case where the honest answer is “not yet”.
PricingThe discount nobody costed: where margin actually goes
The same transaction carries three margins: 45% on list, 31% on invoice, 16.5% in pocket. Discounts get granted on the first and paid out of the third.
GEOGenerative engine optimization for B2B: build the prompt set, not more content
AI visibility in B2B comes from naming the buying prompts that decide your category and measuring how often the model names you, not from publishing more.
PricingPrice-pack architecture: passing inflation without breaking the brand
When costs rise, the reflex is a single blanket hike - the bluntest tool there is. How a deliberate price-pack ladder passes cost through where willingness-to-pay can absorb it, and protects the profit pool.
StrategyBrand Wargame: plan the move before your competitor makes it
Most plans assume the competition stands still. Play their response - and your counter - before you commit the budget.
GEOGEO: how brands get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity
Search is moving from ten blue links to a single AI answer. How to be the brand the model names - not the one it skips.
PricingPrice wars: when not to cut price
A price cut is the fastest way to teach a market your brand is worth less. When to hold the line, and how to defend margin without a race to the bottom.
GrowthYour brand grows through penetration, not loyalty
Growth comes from reaching more buyers, not deepening loyalty - what double jeopardy and light buyers mean for how you actually grow.
StrategyFrom strategy to execution: why good strategies die on delivery
Most strategies that fail were never wrong on paper - they died between the boardroom and the shelf. The five failure points, and what keeps one alive.