Brandistry Buzz

When I was learning arithmetic, using a calculator was cheating. By the time I reached calculus, it was required. Same tool, opposite rules - and through all of it, one expectation never moved: show your work. That's the lens I've come to trust for AI, in classrooms and in first jobs alike. In this episode, I dig into what school and entry-level work have to relearn in the age of AI. Why t...

EPISODE: "AI WILLS AND WILL-NOTS" One of three articles on judgment, learning, and ownership in the age of AI. DESCRIPTION The AI conversation has quietly changed. Two years ago the question was whether you could use these tools. A year ago it was whether you had the time to. Now the barrier isn't capability. It's choice. In this episode, I unpack the move from AI haves and have-nots to AI wills a...

Full Description In 2010, I spent the better part of a year hunting for new places for J&J's beauty business to grow - and ended up watching us slowly dismantle the very brand we'd acquired to get there. It's a mistake I've seen play out again and again, at every scale. In this episode, I trace the rise and fall of Dollar Shave Club: the 90-second video that rewrote the razor c...

Levi's name is covered. But the batwing shape - unchanged since 1967 - is so familiar that the FIFA policy has provided more attention to the brand, not less. Levi's didn't fight the mandate. They leveraged an asset they'd spent decades building, and outmaneuvered most of the official sponsors in week one of the World Cup. This week I broke down how patience AND agility - two attri...

There are two kinds of pride. The kind we celebrate in June. And the kind that got in my way twelve years ago when my son came out. I've written about my rainbow family each of the last three years in recognition of Pride Month. This year I wanted to share honestly what made that summer so hard. And why sharing my family's story since then has created a new identity that I'm proud of.

e.l.f. has a rule: no post-mortems. Not because they don't evaluate what went wrong. Because the word implies something died — and at e.l.f., every failure is just the input for the next attempt. They call them After Action Reviews. They run them in real time. And they're a big part of why a beauty brand compressed its Super Bowl production timeline from three weeks to eleven days over three years...

Every CMO  Kory Marchisotto  consulted gave her the same advice: build a persona. Name it. Decide what handbag it carries. She read every customer letter in the company's files instead. What she found wasn't a persona. It was everyone. So she leaned into that reality — and ignored the advice. The results speak for themselves. $1.64B business growing at 28% per year. 26 consecutive quarters of grow...

A good friend just got back from South Korea. Her first text to me wasn't about the temples or the food. It was: "Have any other countries done what Korea has done with a single letter?" And thanks to Ruth Jouanne , I've been turning that question over all week. No other country has built what Korea has built. Not Bollywood. Not the British Invasion. Not Nordic Noir. Each of those is a landmark. "...

Marketers rank among the least trusted professionals in America. Just above lobbyists and members of Congress. Then again, we've all driven past a diner advertising the "World's Best Chicken." Maybe we earned it. But here's what I actually believe: most marketers aren't trying to deceive anyone. They're trying to get people to experience something they genuinely believe in. The problem isn't bad i...

I just returned from my fifth cross-country drive in nine months. My wife Eva and I have now covered 17,000 miles together driving back and forth from New England to SoCal in our Kia Telluride. We've seen the Heinze Museum, the Hoover Dam, and a hand-painted sign in North Dakota that kept us laughing for two straight days. We also survived a moment in a New Mexico truck stop that I can only descri...

The marketing landscape is shifting faster than anyone predicted. The old maps don't work. And the brands that are winning aren't following a better playbook — they're pioneering without one. This is Brandistry Buzz — the podcast version of my weekly newsletter for marketers who want to be READY for whatever comes next. I'm Nate Challen. Brand strategist. Marketing executive. And someone who has s...