Issue #159

Reader

Every single week I get the call "We hired [branding guru du jour] who downloaded the latest branding algorithms from the cosmos via Starlink during a juice cleanse."

It's painful to hear. It's why, this morning, I am publishing the field guide to telling the fakes from the real ones.

Why? Because someone just dropped $50K on a branding guru who spent three months "aligning energies" and delivered zero strategy.

While someone else dropped six figures on a firm that produced a deck full of buzzwords and a logo their own mother couldn't pick out of a lineup.

When I get these calls, they're not angry. Not yet. They're embarrassed. They should have known. They had a feeling. But the guru talked a good game. The website shimmered. The testimonials glowed.

And now they're sitting on an invoice that could have funded real growth, real differentiation, real market advantage.

Instead it funded someone's juice cleanse.

I'm done watching this happen.

I just published something I've been holding back for years: A surgical takedown of the fake expert industrial complex. The ones who "midwife brand souls through the birth canal of capitalism." The ones who quote the cosmos instead of the balance sheet.

[Link: Fake Experts vs Real Ones: How to Tell Shallow Brand Gurus from Blue Oceans]

It is the most fun I've ever had writing something I'm furious about.

Read it before you write another check. Read it before your board asks why the branding budget disappeared and nothing changed. Read it so you know exactly what questions to ask the next time someone in designer glasses starts talking about "manifesting parallel universes of possibility."

Because here's what the fake experts are counting on: that you won't know the difference until it's too late.

Don't let that be you.

[Link]

Have an incredible week.
David

P.S. If you're wondering whether your brand has a fake-expert-shaped hole in it, let's find out. I do an UNdiscovery Call — just you and me, nobody else. No junior strategist. No gatekeeper screening you first. It's a Brand Assessment to isolate exactly where you're leaving money on the table. Not a pitch. A diagnosis. [Schedule yours here.]