"So you're basically a mind-reader?"
We were eating dinner and my son asked the difference between what I do and what the average marketing company does. It's a question I spend a lot of time thinking about.
Once upon a time, I use to answer that question by saying, "I help businesses grow through strategic marketing."
I stopped saying that about 5 years ago. Those words became dead language for me; they tasted like chewing on a paper napkin. Just like every homepage I'd revised in the last six months, every "about us" page I'd rewritten because the client's original was exactly this kind of dead filler. It sounded like a LinkedIn headline from a over-confident founder.
I didn't have the term then but I knew in my stomach that "strategic marketing" was not what I wanted to be known for.
So I pivoted. "I help companies figure out how to talk to the people who might buy their stuff."
Better. But still too clean. Like talking to someone at a dinner party when you don't want follow-up questions. The sentence that communicates competence without revealing anything about me or what the work actually feels like from the inside.
That's the problem with trying to sum up what you do in an elevator pitch: getting it right, having the words land, making someone actually see your value, isn't about talking.
It's about listening.
The verb. Listen. The actual first thing I do every morning in that room. Before the research. Before the Hidden Layer. Before any of it. There's a person at their computer at 11 PM typing something into a search bar, and the whole job starts with treating that person as someone worth hearing.
I tried to name what I do. Really name it. Not strategic marketing. Not growth consulting. Not "helping brands find their voice." Not "bridging the gap between companies and their customers." Not any sentence that could appear on a conference lanyard without anyone stopping to ask what it means.
Every phrase I reached for sounded like a shape instead of a thing. The shape of expertise, value or professionalism. Hollow outlines with nothing inside them.
I listen to people. I read what they write in reviews and forums and complaint threads and testimonials. I watch videos where they talk about their problems. I sit with what they say for a long time, longer than is efficient, longer than anyone paying me would consider reasonable, until I stop hearing the words on the surface and start hearing what's underneath. The fear. The hope. The thing they want but feel embarrassed to want. The sentence they almost didn't say.
Then I take what I heard and help a company talk back to those people in a way that sounds like a person talking, not a company announcing.
That's it. That's the job. It doesn't sound impressive. It doesn't have a trademark symbol after it.
I've been rereading Harold Bloom. Early mornings, working through The Anxiety of Influence between client projects. Bloom was not a nice man. He once told a graduate student her dissertation was "not even wrong." But his central argument burrowed into me and won't leave.
He writes: "My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves."
Strong poets wrestle. They take the language of the poets who came before them and break it. Misread it on purpose. Force it to carry meaning the original poet never intended. Bloom calls this "poetic misprision," creative misreading. The strong poet doesn't reject the tradition. The strong poet remakes it until it can hold something new.
Weak poets just repeat. They borrow the same vocabulary, use it the same way, and call it their own. The sameness is the shelter. Nobody questions you when you sound like everyone else.
I was on page two hundred and something when the parallel hit me sideways. I wasn't thinking about poetry. I was thinking about being a mind reader.
"Strategic marketing." "Drive growth." "Create value." "Partner with ambitious brands." Every "about us" page on the internet sounds like every other "about us" page on the internet. There's no anxiety at all. There's total comfort. The jargon wraps around you like a blanket and nobody questions it. They can't question it. They're wearing the same blanket.
Bloom's weak poets repeat each other. So does every LinkedIn headline in my industry.
And the strong poets, the ones who break the mold, who force language to carry new weight, they're the ones whose copy makes you stop scrolling. Whose homepage makes you feel something you didn't expect to feel. Whose words sound like nobody else's because they came from listening instead of imitating.
I think about this more than I probably should. About what it means that for 10 years I used the same dead language as everyone else to describe my business. To describe me.
Sadly, dead language is in the water. It's in the conferences and the podcasts and the Slack channels and the LinkedIn posts that get 400 likes because they say the same thing everyone else is saying, just arranged slightly differently, and the algorithm rewards the sameness because the algorithm measures engagement, not truth.
I'm still not sure if I've figured out all the dead language I use to talk about what I do. There's an element of sameness that has to exist to communicate properly to other human beings. I run a marketing agency. How else can I say that? And yet...
The strong poet question won't leave me alone. What does it look like to wrestle with the language of my own industry until it breaks? What would it mean to stop repeating and start misreading, to force the vocabulary of marketing to carry something it was never designed to hold?
I don't know yet.
I listen to people. I help them be heard.
I'm still working on it.