Meet the Author

This year, we’re lucky enough to be celebrating Nebo’s 10th anniversary. Adam and I are incredibly proud, but we’re not the ones you should be congratulating.

Let me explain.

Nebo was established in 2004 as a reaction against what we saw as the marketing industry’s deepest flaws. We started by taking a human-centered approach to marketing as well as treating clients, employees, and vendors the way we’d want to be treated. Culture would be our competitive advantage. We’d prioritize long-term strategy over short-term wins.

We didn’t know if we could make it. We definitely didn’t know if our approach would resonate. But we thought we were young enough to recover if we didn’t.

Flash forward 10 years and we’ve achieved more than we ever thought we could.

As you can imagine, we do quite a bit of brand work. Frankly, it’s one of our favorite things to do. Working with new product launches or start-ups is particularly exciting. The entire world is at our fingertips. We can craft the perfect story and message to encapsulate the heart and purpose of the organization.

Even when established brands need help taking their brands in a new direction, the work is exhilarating. I don’t think there is anything more challenging or more rewarding than boiling down a company’s tools, technologies, people, and culture into a succinct, powerful story that helps them connect with customers.

Great companies have personality. They have history and stories to tell. They have unique products and services. They aspire to solve problems and serve their various market segments.

However, one thing that often gets overlooked when companies build their brand is trust.

I think we can all agree that buying a new car is one of the most painful experiences you’re likely to have.

But we like new cars. We love new things in general. Driving a new car is fun and exhilarating.

So then why is buying one so unpleasant?

It’s simple. The sales person is probably a commission-only employee and his compensation is based on the profit margin of the sale. Hence, he’s actually incented to sell you the car for the worst deal he can manage. As a result, there’s natural friction between the two of you.

It’s a shame. Automotive manufacturers spend a fortune on branding and marketing to have much of that goodwill and trust thrown away by an over eager sales rep just trying to make a living.

Simply put, the incentive structure is broken.

It’s not easy to quantify a gut feeling. But it certainly seems, these days, that NBA basketball is a shell of its former self, both in terms of the product on the court and its mainstream appeal.

By one measure -- Nielsen ratings for the Finals -- the NBA is holding steady. The Finals consistently out-draw the MLB World Series, for one, but that’s hardly a massive compliment. If you really dig into the numbers, you’ll see that basketball’s popularity is still a far cry from its peak in the late 80s to late 90s, when the sport’s greatest legends dazzled the world with ability like we had never seen before.

The NBA looks to be holding steady, sure, but when you stop and reflect on the glory days -- it’s really just treading water. So what happened?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

We recently reached out to an industry contact because we wanted to use his firm for an upcoming high consideration / high value purchase (I’m being intentionally vague here). We've known him for a few years and he's always been a super nice guy. When we began looking at options together, he was friendly, knowledgeable, and made it clear that he'd take great care of us. Everything was going great.

And then the emails started.

The drip marketing emails. You know the type. They started trickling into our inbox, offering us all kinds of promotions we had no use for and consultations on products we didn’t want. He had added our name to some database, and now we were on the hook for every intrusive email his company wanted to put out.