Welcome to another brain dump. Currently tapping away in Dallas, Texas, discovering how to navigate Substack (drop your fave people I should follow in the comments).

The other day I was thinking about something taught to us in Maths, which is rich considering I dropped Maths in Year 9 at the ripe age of 15 (Asian mum’s worst nightmare).

We’ve all heard a teacher say it at some point, you need to show your working.

15 year old me was thinking, I actually can’t show you my working because I’ve copied Ollie who sits to my right & then cross checked it with my bff Frankie to my left.

So how is my year 9 maths class connected to this post? Well I recently made a TikTok about what I believe will be trending in 2027, and one of my biggest predictions was that ‘showing your working’ is about to be trending again.

I mean creators showing us how they arrived at an opinion rather than just presenting the perfectly packaged answer as if it came to them by second nature.

We’ve spent the last few years creating an online culture built around speed. Fast paced intros, insane hooks, typewriter sound effects and editing out every half second where nothing is happening (which I am definitely guilty of).

God forbid I pause to formulate a single thought.

But like most cultural pendulums, when something swings far enough in one direction eventually people start craving the opposite. Kind of giving you want what you don’t have.

We’ve seen it with minimalist trends swinging back towards maximalism in 2026. Perfectly curated Instagram feeds swinging to now the messy girl aesthetic.

When everything starts looking and feeling the same, the thing that feels different suddenly becomes interesting again.

And I think we’re about to see the same thing happen with content, creators leaving the silence in. Instead of cutting out the two seconds where someone is thinking about their answer, we actually watch them think (crazy concept)

The hesitations. The pauses. Changing their mind halfway through a sentence. Taking a second to figure out what they actually want to say.

Tahlia and I always talk about the love of changing our minds as we age. Strong opinions loosely held, we want our thoughts to be challenged. We’ve changed our mind so many times about opinions we had years ago, and that’s ok.

Longer form content: I feel like people have been saying this for years, but YouTube, podcasts, Substack (hi) places where there’s enough room to actually develop an idea instead of condensing everything you know into “3 things I wish I knew before turning 28.”

Podcasting is probably the most obvious example to me. I swear there is a new podcast launched every day.

Yes people still want short form content, obviously, but they also seem willing to give someone 30 minutes, an hour, sometimes three hours if they think there’s actually something worth listening to (cue me with the Lindsay Clancy trial)

More emphasis on value. This is something I’ve preached for a long time: what value am I actually adding to someone’s FYP?

Education? Inspiration? Entertainment? In a dream world, all three.

I think the bar for creators is going to continue getting higher. Lip syncing and being conventionally attractive might get someone to look at you, but increasingly I think audiences need a reason to stay.

IMO we haven’t necessarily become less overstimulated; we’ve just become much better at knowing when we’re overstimulated.

There’s a funny kind of fake self awareness play in knowing a behavior probably isn’t great for you, acknowledging it and then doing absolutely nothing differently. Which I’ve done many times in my life. Being chronically late while announcing that I’m chronically late. Dating someone I know isn’t good for me. Watching 247 text messages pile up knowing full well I need to reply at some point.

At some point, knowing you’re doing the thing isn’t self awareness. It’s just knowing you’re doing the thing. We know we scroll too much. We know our attention spans are cooked. We know spending four hours consuming useless pieces of information probably isn’t doing wonders for our brains long term.

But we’re not piffing our phones into the Hudson anytime soon either.

So if people are going to continue spending this much time online, I think there will be a growing desire to at least feel like they got something from that time, more of a value exchange for the time spent scrolling.

Which is why I think the creators who become increasingly valuable will be the ones who give you a reason to care about how they think, not just what they look like or what answer they give you.

And no, I’m not just saying that because I’m a Substack rookie.

My faves I think you’d also like below:

Toni Bravo

Justine’s Camera Roll

Miranda

Paris

Emily

Autumn

Turns out my maths teacher was right and you should probably start to show your working in your content.

If you’re wondering what I’m listening to when I write, see playlist here.

Welcome back to the weekly marketing recap!!!

Today we’re going to dive into the saying “How you do one thing is how you do everything.” This is something I often remind myself of whenever I don’t feel like making my bed, going to the gym or deciding to let the dishes “soak”

We’re going to talk about habit stacking and compounding effort, some of the things I’ve done over the years that have helped me build what I would now consider my dream life.

I spoke about this briefly in my latest YouTube vlog because I get messages all the time asking how did you get to where you are now? And if I were to answer that honestly it would probably take a minimum of twenty pages, six 10 minute voice notes and a whole lot of digging through my old journals to give you the exact step by step process.

Instead, let’s try to fit some of the important pieces into one newsletter. I promise I’ll do a proper breakdown of my career history at some point, probably when I visit Paris and have plane time to delete my entire camera roll and write. IYKYK.

When I started as an intern in marketing, I used to get the biggest headaches. Not because the work was particularly hard, but because I felt SO stupid. It was like all the learning I was doing at uni suddenly meant nothing. How the fuck do I build a campaign in Meta Ads? What is a UTM link? How do I create an accurate Klaviyo segment?* Why does everyone else seem to know what all these acronyms mean? All of which now feel significantly less catastrophic in my brain.

What that experience, and working in marketing ever since taught me is that you are going to feel like the biggest idiot in the room time and time again. I actually think you should. If you’re always in rooms where you feel like the smartest person there, it’s probably time to find a new room and drop your ego a little bit.

I think this can be an uncomfortable feeling when you’re starting out in your career because for most of our lives, being the smartest person in the room is glorified. School teaches us that knowing the answer is the end goal. Being smart and being successful become pretty closely linked in our brains.

Then you enter the marketing workplace and realize there often isn’t a right answer. Two intelligent people can look at the exact same campaign, the exact same data and come to completely different conclusions about what to do next. Suddenly being smart in marketing isn’t about knowing the answer, it’s about being able to form an opinion, explain why you think it will resonate with the target consumer and accept that sometimes you’re going to get it completely wrong once you’ve spent all your marketing budget on it. Yay!

I think our instinct in those situations can be to hide how little we know because we’ve spent most of our lives being rewarded for knowing the answer. You don’t want to ask the stupid question in the meeting because surely everyone else knows what they’re talking about?

This is something I actually only started doing when I moved to New York. If someone used a word I didn’t know I’d ask them what it meant. Previously I probably would have nodded along, made a mental note and Googled it the second they left the room. The funny thing is half the time it was a man who then couldn’t actually explain what the word meant either when I did ask them. Circling back to that ego point...

I think doing this over and over made me realize how much energy we spend trying to hide the things we don’t know. There is always going to be someone who knows more than you about something and pretending otherwise only really stops you from growing. I’d much rather ask the potentially stupid question and actually understand something than leave the room still confused.

It also took me a while to realize that feeling stupid and actually being stupid are two completely different things. A lot of the time feeling stupid is just the discomfort of learning information you haven’t had access to yet.

The important part is remembering that feeling when eventually you become the person who does know. If you read last week’s newsletter, you’ll remember we spoke about the curse of knowledge if retention isn’t your strong point no worries, this is our inability to fully remember what it was like not to know something once we know it. The acronym that once had you secretly Googling under the table eventually becomes something you throw into a sentence without thinking twice.

And sometimes, without meaning to you can end up making someone else feel exactly as stupid as you once felt. I think that’s something worth being conscious of as you progress in your career. Knowing more shouldn’t make you less patient with people who know less. If anything being good at what you do should make you better at explaining it and if you can’t explain it you don’t know it well enough.

I think the goal changes as you move further along in your life and career. It becomes less about proving you’re the smartest person in the room and more about getting yourself into rooms that make you smarter, at least that’s how Tahlia and I always look at it, whenever we’re in a room with intelligent people we eat it up.

At the time of my internship, my schedule looked something like this: wake up at 4am to clean the local gym because I couldn’t afford the membership, train at the gym with my best friend Charlotte, finish my university work before 8:30am so I could be in the office by 9am, work until 5 or 6pm and then head to my evening shift at the local Italian restaurant so I had money to put into my dress hire side hustle.

I wasn’t doing any of that thinking, oh yeah one day I’ll be writing a newsletter for you to read from my apartment in New York. There was no plan connecting cleaning gym toilets at 4am to the life I have now. All I knew was that the things I was doing felt like they were pushing me closer to the person I wanted to become.

I think that’s an important note because we have a tendency to look at where someone is now and reverse engineer their life into a very streamline story. This internship led to that job, which led to that opportunity freelancing, which led to the moving overseas, which led to whatever they’re doing now. It looks intentional once you know the outcome. When you’re actually living it you’re mostly just making the best decision you can with the information you have at the time. When I was planning to leave my 7 year relationship I thought my life was ending, but now in hindsight I know that was one of the better decisions I made for both of us.

This is where I think compounding effort becomes really important. One day of working hard isn’t going to change your career. Neither is learning one new skill, staying back an extra hour, reading one book or moving cities/ countries. The individual action is almost insignificant IMO. The real value comes from doing versions of those things time and time again.

It’s the same reason investing $10 once isn’t particularly exciting, but consistently investing over a long period of time can become something significant (thanks Tahlia for teaching me about investing, if you’re keen to learn more go to her TikTok). I’ve always felt that effort works in a similar way, you rarely notice the return while you’re putting it in. Then you look back five years later (if you saw my before and after TikTok you know what I’m talking about) and realize how far away you are from where you started, it’s pretty insane.

Something I like to keep in mind is you’re either moving towards your goal or away from it. Maybe not with every tiny decision you make, i.e I don’t think ordering DoorDash on a Tuesday evening has derailed my future. But some decisions have definitely helped move me closer to my goals.

So when you’re making a career decision, looking at your work ethic or having a what is this all actually for moment, ask yourself whether the things you’re repeatedly doing are compounding in the direction you actually want to go. Emphasis on you. Not your parents or your friends.

You don’t necessarily need to know the final destination I certainly didn’t, my god. I never dreamed of living in New York, I’ve never watched Sex and The City, but knowing the general direction you want to move in makes a lot of decisions easier day to day.

Okay I thought this newsletter was going to be short and sweet, but when has that ever been the case? Let’s chat habit stacking because I think this is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in fitness, work and aspirational influencer world.

When I was younger I thought the solution to everything was having a huge clean of my room at 2am, reorganizing the position of my bed and deciding that tomorrow morning I would wake up as a completely different person.

There are very few people who can flick a switch and start doing everything right the next morning because they’ve decided they want to change. I know that if tomorrow I tried to wake up a 5am, work out 6 times per week, hit my step goal every day, read a book a week, drink 3L of water and go to bed at 9:30pm, I’d probably last two weeks max.

This is the case for most people. Kudos to the switch flickers, not a bit of me.

The biggest thing for me was realizing I didn’t need to fix everything at once. Every time I tried to I usually ended up doing none of it particularly well. I started picking one thing and focusing on it until it stopped requiring so much thought and effort. If you’ve ever read Atomic Habits a lot of this will probably feel familiar.

The first habit I put in my stack was not opening TikTok when I woke up. I used to do this out of habit and if there was a negative comment waiting for me it could genuinely throw my mood for the morning. For someone whose job requires being very active on social media, I realized I didn’t want social media to have the ability to dictate how I felt before I’d even got out of bed. I had a friend named Margot once tell me that your bedroom is your safe space and it’s yours. Opening up social media in your bed first thing in the morning allows all the negative people to get in bed with you.

So that was it since then, no TikTok first thing in the morning. Hardly a groundbreaking tip but for someone who posts daily it is tempting to open as soon as you wake up.

The next thing was the gym. My coach Dimey has always said to me don’t create an entirely new routine, add things to the routine you already have. If you’re already going to the gym can you walk there instead of creating a completely separate time in your day where you now also need to go for a walk? You’re already doing one thing, so find a way to attach the next thing to it, you want to think of these habits as links.

This sounds so goddamn obvious when you write it down, but it changed the way I thought about building habits. I used to treat every goal as another thing I needed to find time for. Now I’m more interested in asking myself where it can fit into something I already do, for example I edit, post and reply to TikTok comments when I’m on my daily walks.

At the beginning going to the gym consistently required effort and waking up earlier which you know I hate. Then eventually I stopped negotiating with myself each morning. An important note here is also finding a workout you enjoy for the most part. If you despise every second of whatever you’re forcing yourself to do I think you’re making this unnecessarily hard for yourself.

Once the gym required less thought I focused more on water, then sleep, then walking more, then nutrition. None of these things individually changed my life (although sleep is pretty clutch) and I’m still not perfect at any of them. I have days where I barely drink enough water, stay up far too late or lose hours of my life doomscrolling.

I also notice that when I’m more stressed or generally not feeling like myself the habits that move me away from where I want to be start creeping back in. I’ll open TikTok when I wake up, spend too much time scrolling during my work day, go to bed later and become a slightly worse version of myself oops.

Surprisingly the step count increases during these periods, crazy how far you can walk when you’re going insane lol.

But I think that’s also why having the habits in the first place is helpful. You start to recognize what your own floor or baseline looks like. When I notice three or four of those things slipping at the same time, it’s usually a fairly good indication that something else is going on and I probably need to pay attention to it.

It doesn’t take a scientist to work out that the way you operate outside of work can impact the way you perform within it. I used to think being ambitious meant putting more and more hours into work (cue me working until 1am at my agency job) Obviously there are periods of my life where that has been necessary, but I’ve also learnt that there’s a point where another few hours sitting at your laptop isn’t necessarily the thing that’s going to make you better at your job despite what corporate America will tell you.

For me I notice I’m less stressed, more focused and generally feel less rushed when the rest of my life has some structure to it. I’ve moved my body, I’ve slept properly, I haven’t spent the first 45 minutes of my day absorbing the thoughts of 200 strangers on TikTok and I ensure my morning isn’t filled with negativity (incoming newsletter on being a former pessimist).

And all of this means I can expand my client portfolio, come up with better ideas, write these newsletters, film & edit more content, show up when I said I would and importantly make time for myself to continuously learn.

Which brings us straight back to compounding effort. I think we’re often looking for the big thing that’s going to unlock the next version of our career or our life. When in reality, at least in my experience it has been far less exciting. It’s mostly been doing relatively small things, making them normal and then doing them for a very long time.

So if you’re looking for an easy way to unlock more of your potential at work the answer might not be another hour or two at your desk. It might be looking at what you repeatedly do when you’re away from it.

Ily see you next time

Caitlin xx

​

Said things that made me want to cry below

*UTM link: Essentially a normal URL with little pieces of tracking information added to the end of it so marketers can see where the person clicking it came from. For example, whether you clicked a link from an email, TikTok, Instagram ad or somewhere else.

Meta Ads: The advertising platform used to run paid ads across Facebook (Meta) and IG.

Klaviyo segment: A group of people within your email or SMS database who meet certain criteria (you!). For example, people who have purchased in the last 30 days, or people who haven’t opened one of these damn marketing newsletters in the past 3 weeks. Basically a way to make sure you’re not sending absolutely everything to absolutely everyone.

It’s me again. Thank god she could commit to two newsletters.

Coming to you with a story time that I promise is relevant (for once). Early on in my marketing career I had a manager say I couldn’t market the high end brands because I wasn’t experienced enough with that world. AKA you’re not in that tax bracket babe xoxo

At the time I was offended, I almost believed her. I tell this story to a lot of marketers I’ve mentored and there are two things I hope they take away from it.

1. What is HiPPO?

2. How to avoid the false consensus effect.

Hopefully by the end of this week’s newsletter you understand both and know when you’re accidentally falling victim to them.

Now I know I said I wasn’t going to sell you on things, but I’m going to make an exception for books I find particularly helpful. Think Again should be high on your list if you’re open to challenging your own perceptions.

One of Grant’s points around HiPPO really stuck with me (the acronym was doing its job).

Highest Paid Person’s Opinion; something we’ve likely all experienced at some point in our career, from your first casual job to a corporate boardroom.

The concept is pretty simple. HiPPO is what happens when the opinion of the most senior person in the room starts carrying more weight than the data. Given marketing is largely unregulated i.e every agency nominating themselves the “leading” marketing agency it’s probably one of the easiest places for this to happen because so much of what we do feels subjective.

Everyone has an opinion on an ad, an influencer, a billboard (guilty), a TikTok, a rebrand. However when the person giving that opinion also happens to be the person approving your pay rise, it can be very easy for personal preference to become the main strategy. Now this is not to say that experience is not valuable. Someone who has worked in any industry for 20 years has pattern recognition that someone two years into their career doesn’t have.

Something I learnt from that experience, which has probably been equally important in my career is learning to recognize who in a workplace genuinely wants to teach you and who would prefer you didn’t know what they know. The most impressive marketers I’ve come across have never been particularly precious with their knowledge. They’ll tell you how they got to an idea, show you the data they’re looking at, explain why something didn’t work and importantly let you challenge their ideas. Experience should give your opinion more context, not make it immune to being questioned.

I think that’s because great marketers have a certain confidence that comes from knowing their value isn’t tied to one idea or one piece of information no one else has. It’s kind of like thinking the SKIMS nipple bra was the only idea that the marketing team has ever come up with. Yes some ideas land far harder than others (cheers Grill’d) but great marketers know they’ll have another incredible idea. When I’m on calls I always say, you’re not paying me for one idea, you’re paying for the brain that came up with it. That’s your mental IP. You can teach someone everything you know and they still won’t think exactly like you do.

Average marketers IMO tend to operate from a defensive place. Knowledge becomes something to gatekeep, processes aren’t properly explained, information is selectively shared and to them new talent asking questions can feel less like curiosity and more like a threat to their own position in the workplace. Perhaps I’m biased working as a creative in this industry but after watching incredibly talented, number oriented people operate I’ve realized that great teachers rarely feel threatened by someone else knowing what they know. They understand that their value doesn’t disappear the second someone else learns something from them, pretty poor USP for them if so.

I remember telling my dad about this after work that evening and he told me if you spend all your energy making sure other people don’t catch up, you’re probably not spending enough time moving forward yourself.

I think the longer you work in marketing, the more you realize that knowing things isn’t really the skill anyway. The skill is taking what you know, pairing it with what the consumer and market are telling you, looking at the data & figuring out what actually makes sense for your campaign.

So if you’re early in your career, pay attention to the people who invite you into their way of thinking rather than selectively sharing what they know. Those are always the people worth learning from. Someone I think is an incredible resource is Annabel Hay who runs the company Clutch. You’d know if you follow me on TikTok I have around 4 of those in my purse or bathroom at one time. She also recently started a SubStack which I’ll link here.

While I’m sitting in my Brooklyn apartment writing this I always think should I break this up into two newsletters? Get to the point already girl.

Okay, let’s move on. How to avoid the false consensus effect. Another classic trap is thinking, “well I’m a consumer and I wouldn’t buy that.” Cool, but you are unfortunately a sample size of one lol. You can absolutely be part of the target market without being representative of how that entire market thinks or behaves.

If marketers could only effectively market to people exactly like themselves, we’d all be pretty limited in what we could sell (not great for scaling). Your job as a marketer isn’t to be the consumer, your job is to understand them well enough to know what drives their decision making. You don’t need to own a $5,000 bag to understand why someone wants one. You don’t need to be a 38 year old man to understand the social signaling behind the watch he buys and you definitely don’t need to personally use the product you’re marketing.

What you do need is curiosity, data and enough self awareness to know where your own view/opinion ends and someone else’s begins.

We have a tendency to assume that other people think and behave more like us than they actually do. It’s similar to why a lot of couples have communication issues. We naturally communicate in the way that makes sense to us, forgetting that what feels obvious to us might not be obvious to our partner.

I digress.

There’s actually a cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge, which is essentially our inability to fully remember what it was like not to know something once we know it. Which is probably why after sitting through 47 meetings about a campaign you’re confused that the consumer doesn’t immediately understand it. Babe, they weren’t in the meetings.

I think this becomes interesting when you work in marketing because after a while your perception of what is “normal” gets a bit skewed. When you’re spending $3M across ad campaigns each month and generating tens of millions of dollars for one business owner you start thinking everyone is buying this product, how could people not have heard of this brand you’re working on day in day out at your agency? Reminder sweetie there’s people in the middle of Kearney, Nebraska.

I probably spend significantly more time thinking about brands than a normal person ever would and considering you’re reading this far (I hope) I assume you notice packaging changes, font changes, even when a product gets suspiciously smaller (shoutout Cadbury for fucking us all, we will cover shrinkflation at some point).

Tahlia and I send ads to each other, talk about campaigns and follow similar people. Naturally, the algorithm feeds us more of what we already think is important. After a while, your very curated version of the internet starts to feel like that is the entire internet, probably why TikTok named it a FOR YOU page. If you don’t believe me, pick either Democrat or Republican run TikTok pages, engage with 10 videos and watch your FYP shift over the next 24/48 hours.

Your algorithm is a reflection of your thumbs, not the actual market.

I think one of the things I’ve had to get better at over the years is catching myself when I start using my own behavior as data, because it becomes very easy to think something is much bigger, more obvious or more overdone than it actually is.

I see this all the time consulting with brands that have in house teams. That campaign you’ve been working on for four months and revised 32 times? A consumer has seen it once while scrolling on the toilet. You’re looking at it with four months of context, they’re looking at it with four seconds of attention. Your perception of the exact same ad is completely different.

I feel (and fear) some of you may be thinking, no Caitlin, I am the target consumer for most products.

Okay, but just because you’re the target consumer doesn’t mean the rest of the target market thinks like you do. Stay with me. You might buy the $5,000 bag because you love the design. Someone else buys it because Kylie Jenner wore it. A third buys it because they want everyone to know they can afford it. Same demographic. Same bag. Three completely different motivations.

So with all that rambling, use your intuition, but interrogate it. Have opinions and be willing to back them up with data. Come up with ideas you believe in, but remember that they need to resonate with the consumer, not just you. And be willing to find out that you’re wrong (because I am a lot of the time).

I think that’s ultimately what separates a great marketer from an average one. It’s not being right more often, it’s being more interested in understanding why you were wrong.

And please never use “I wouldn’t buy that” as data.

Ily!!! See you soon

Caitlin xxx

Only feels right to start the first newsletter this way.

Whilst I may not be the most articulate lady on earth when it comes to pen to paper (a reality for someone who has chosen a career that involves quite a lot of yapping and solo brainstorming) a large part of my job is understanding why people think the way they do, perfect for a Scorpio.

My job is to figure out how to elicit some kind of behavior from a consumer. Give me their attention. Think differently. Buy something. Ideally all three at the same time.

My hope is this newsletter does the same. Maybe not the buying part. Unless I eventually have something to sell you, which is likely to be the best fold over leggings you’ve ever put on your body.

Anyway, one of the questions I get asked most aside from “how do I dress for my body type?” is “How do you actually learn? How do you come up with ideas? Who do you learn from when working for yourself?”

I don’t have a particularly exciting answer but the one thing I would say is basics are basic for a reason.

One of the first books I recommend is The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. If you’ve followed me for some time you’ve probably heard me harp on about this book time and time again.

Disclaimer before you read this book it was published in 1993, which means some of the references are old school and a few of the “immutable” laws are in my opinion, mutable.

One of the traps you fall into as you become better at marketing is assuming you’ve graduated from the simple concepts, not sure if that’s ego related (really good read for any philosophy girls is The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud) which would likely give me that answer.

I find the concept of always wanting new information to be relevant for the current times we live in, people swipe and find their soulmate and if it isn’t their soulmate they can jump back on and swipe again, creators are using insane hooks to keep you engaged on TikTok and IG and frankly people are wanting more. The problem could be that you’re looking for more information before you even understand the old information.

New knowledge can feel superior, so we assume it must be more valuable. But most of the marketing problems I come across aren’t complex problems. For example the easier you make it for the consumer to see themselves using your product the more likely they are to purchase it. Not rocket science.

When I’ve mentored marketers and trained employees, I’ve always been super annoying about making sure they understand the fundamentals, sorry Tahls.

Because you can know every emerging platform, growth hack and trend report but if you don’t understand positioning, perception and why someone should choose your product over the 47 others who also commented “hack” on the random dude’s LinkedIn to give you the secret sauce, you’ve essentially just done a lot of reading. In my opinion the real skill is knowing how to turn all that information into something consumers actually want and ideally, something that scales a business.

My three favourite chapters in the book are The Law of Focus, The Law of Leadership and The Law of Perception. Although please read the whole book.

The Law of Focus is based on a simple idea: The most powerful thing a brand can do is own a word in the consumer’s mind.

For example if you think of the word computer it’s likely you think of Apple. Heinz to ketchup & Colgate to cavities.

The interesting part is that you don’t have to be the best at something. You just have to become the brand that’s most strongly associated with it. Although it does help if you have a really great product too.

If you find yourself working with or for a brand, I’d encourage you to figure out what word already exists for that brand in the consumer’s mind. Worst case nothing comes to mind which probably means you have some work to do on your positioning. From there, it’s about figuring out what word you want to own and how you’re going to repeatedly “burn” that association between the word and your product into the consumer’s mind.

Which leads me to one of the claims in the book I’m not entirely sold on, you know the mutable part we were talking about earlier. If you’ve worked with me before you know I love any opportunity to pick apart a theory or statement so this will be a common theme you’ll see in this newsletter (at the end of the day I am my father’s daughter)

The book states “you can’t take someone else’s word” In 1993, maybe. In 2026, I think you can.

Touchland is one of my favorite examples of this. For anyone in Australia, Touchland is a hand sanitizer brand that sold to Church & Dwight in 2025 for $880 million USD. Before Touchland, hand sanitizer already had an owner, Purell. Purell didn’t just dominate the category, it was the entire category. If you asked someone to picture hand sanitizer, chances are they were picturing the image on the right without even realizing it.

​

Touchland did something I find much more interesting than trying to convince existing Purell customers that their sanitiser was better. They made hand sanitiser desirable to people who weren’t really buying it in the first place. Touchland turned it into a beauty accessory for Gen Alpha to Millennials.

You could argue Touchland never actually stole Purell’s word because it wasn’t fighting for the same consumer. But those younger consumers were probably future Purell customers.

Touchland intercepted them before that happened. I had the pleasure of spending time with the Founder Andrea last summer and this year at Ulta Beauty World and could (and probably will) write a deep dive on how impressive their marketing strategy is.

Sometimes the opportunity isn’t to convince an existing market that you’re better. It is undeniably harder to create behavioral change among existing consumers. It’s much easier to target a group of people who have been largely ignored by the stale category and make the category mean something to them.

You’ll find throughout this newsletter I go on tangents that are seemingly unrelated or loosely associated to my first point but anyone who has had a coffee, lunch, dinner or couch chat with me knows that’s exactly how my brain runs and this is something I’m hoping to share with you more.

Appreciate you taking the time to read and speak soon!

Caitlin xx