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It's that time of year again.  Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Early Black Friday. Extended Black Friday. Friends & Family. VIP Access. One Day Only. And my personal favorite: LAST CHANCE! Except, of course, there's usually another sale tomorrow. As marketers, we know exactly what's happening. We're creating urgency. Giving customers a reason to act now instead of later. And as consumers? We fall for it anyway. The pressure to sell.  Here's the thing about retail marketing. You're not just competing with other retailers. You're competing with your own sales from last year. Last year's numbers become this year's benchmark. Had a fantastic November last year? Congratulations! Now go beat it. And if a big promotion helped deliver those numbers, there's a pretty good chance you'll be running another one this year. Maybe earlier. Maybe longer. Maybe with a better offer. Because there are sales goals to meet, inventory to move, margins to protect, ...

If you’ve worked in Marketing long enough, there’s a good chance you’ve been asked to rewrite a company mission statement. Maybe more than once. New leadership comes in. Priorities change. The company evolves. And suddenly we’re back in a conference room debating words like inspire, empower, innovate, community and purpose. Then Marketing does what Marketing does. We polish the language. We create the presentation. We update the website. We put the new values on the wall. And that work is important. A good mission can give people a shared sense of purpose. It can articulate what a company believes and where it wants to go. But here’s the marketing lesson: You can write the mission. You can’t write the culture. Culture is what happens after the mission statement goes up on the wall. It’s how people treat each other on a random Tuesday. Do people say good morning? Do they listen? Do they share credit? Can someone ask a question without feeling stupid? Can they make a mistake and own it...

The first time someone said this to me, I was offended. I had just started a new job, and my new boss pulled me aside and gave me that little nugget of career advice. Fake it ’til you make it. Excuse me? I remember thinking, Does she think I don't know what I'm doing? Looking back, I'm guessing my body language was telling her that maybe I wasn't quite as confident as I wanted everyone to think I was. In my defense, it wasn't exactly the warmest work environment. I was probably walking around looking slightly terrified most of the time. And, in a plot twist I couldn't have predicted, she was fired a few weeks later. So I'm still not entirely sure what to make of her career advice. But I've been thinking about that phrase lately. I'm in what we're apparently calling a “career transition.” Which is a much nicer way of saying I'm figuring out what the heck comes next. And almost every day seems to require doing something that makes me uncomforta...

I watched Sleepless in Seattle last night.  And somewhere between the map, the letters, the radio show, and the trip to New York, I started thinking about following your heart. First of all, remember life before smartphones?  Annie had a map. She wrote letters. She listened to a man on the radio and somehow felt a connection to someone she'd never met. And Becky, her best friend, basically encouraged all of Annie's shenanigans. So Annie followed her heart. But what I love is that Jonah followed his, too. This kid got on a plane and flew to New York City by himself . Which seems ridiculous even for a movie.  His dad, Sam, was completely panicked and racing across the country trying to find him, while Jonah somehow made his way through New York City to the top of the Empire State Building. Because, you know...rom-com!  Watching it now, there was something else I noticed. The movie was filmed before 9/11. The Twin Towers are still part of the New York skyline. It's one...

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I boarded my regular 8:15 a.m. United flight from LaGuardia to Denver. I made that trip all the time. Don and I were living in Connecticut. I was working for Einstein Bros. Bagels and traveled frequently to our corporate office in Colorado. Don worked in advertising in New York City. We didn't have Elli yet. What we didn't know, was that eight weeks later, on November 5, she would be born in China and would eventually become our daughter. My boarding pass is taped in my purple diary. It became part of our adoption story. That morning, though, it was just another Tuesday. Until it wasn't. Somewhere in the air, our plane changed course. We were told we were being diverted to Chicago, but no one would tell us why. At first, I was annoyed. I had a meeting in Denver. I couldn't get my cell phone to work. I was going to be late. It's strange to think about that now. Eventually, another passenger got through to someone on his ph...

There are some foods you forget five minutes after you eat them. And then apparently there is potato salad you remember for 30 years. We were invited to a Labor Day weekend BBQ today, and when I asked my friend what I could bring, she said, “A side dish.” Easy enough. They’re making burgers and steaks. Someone is bringing mac and cheese. There will be roasted squash, corn salad, dips, chips—all the things you want at an end-of-summer BBQ. And for some reason, my brain immediately went: Potato salad. But not just any potato salad. Thirty-ish years ago, when we lived in Texas, we used to go to a BBQ restaurant called Red Hot & Blue. It wasn’t fancy. It was the kind of place we’d pop into for lunch—casual, a little quirky, with funny pig artwork and sayings all over the walls. And boy, was it good. They had the BEST pulled pork sandwiches. Real Texas BBQ. The kind I still haven’t been able to find here in California. But the thing I remember just as clearly? The potato salad. I can st...