GarthBox

The most profitable spot in a grocery store isn’t a shelf. It’s the endcap, that little display at the mouth of the aisle where a product you weren’t looking for sits at exactly the height of your reaching hand. Brands pay for that spot. Not because what’s on it is better. Because it’s closer. Closeness, it turns out, is for sale.

You already know this if you’ve bought a charger at an airport, a candy bar at the register, or a breakfast sandwich under a heat lamp at a Kwik Trip when you only stopped for gas. You didn’t choose those things. Proximity chose them, and you signed the receipt.

Seth Godin wrote a tiny piece a while back about the next click. Of everything you could do next, is the thing sitting right beside the last thing you did really the best one? He called the answer obvious and the habit common anyway. He was right, and it has gotten worse, because the endcap moved. It used to live in stores.

Now it lives in your screen.

Every open tab is an endcap. Every notification is a product set at eye level. And the new wrinkle, the one that actually changes the arithmetic, is that you can now start work faster than you can choose it. Point a machine at a task and it runs. Point it at ten and all ten run. The bottleneck stopped being how much you can do.

It became which thing deserves doing, and that question never arrives with a badge or a buzz.

That leaves us drifting toward the adjacent. The session you had open last. The fire someone just lit in a thread. The task that’s easiest to begin because it’s already half-loaded in your head. None of it chosen. All of it reached for.

Reaching for the nearest thing carries a cost that compounds when your tools are fast. A slow person who picks the wrong task loses an afternoon. A tireless machine aimed at the wrong task builds you a polished, fully automated version of the wrong thing and hands it to you before lunch.

Speed doesn’t correct bad aim. It enlarges it.

The cruel part is which tasks tend to sit on the endcap. It’s almost always the loud, customer-facing, someone-is-waiting work. The fire. The reply. The thing with a name attached and an emotion behind it. The work that actually carries a company forward is usually quieter and further back. The process that’s grinding your team down a little more each week. The internal tool nobody outside the building is demanding because nobody outside the building can see it. That work never pings you. It has no endcap. It waits on the bottom shelf, at the back of the aisle, behind the thing that’s screaming.

(A real test… adjust your Claude cowork or code settings to organize by “recent” if that’s still not the default. Go ahead and scan the top end of the list and then scroll down to the bottom end of the list. Which set is getting done because of adjacency? Which set actually has potential for the greatest impact? Yea. You probably don’t even need to do this because you know.)

Automate only what’s adjacent and you’ll automate every fire and never the thing that keeps starting them.

The next click was always a small decision. You just used to make a few hundred of them a day, by hand.

Now you make them on behalf of something that never tires, never gets bored, and will never once stop to wonder whether the thing in front of it was the thing that mattered.

That part is still on you. Keep it there.

Stay Positive & Archive All Your Projects And See Which You Actually Search For Again

Years ago at Screen Time Labs, we mailed press kits to journalists. The product helped parents take back their kids’ screen time, which is a thing you can explain in one sentence and feel in your chest for a decade. We could have sent a one pager. We sent Silly Putty.

The note said, more or less: this is what it feels like when the iPad finally goes down. Your hands get something back. The putty was the whole argument. You cannot read a press release with your fingers, but you can squish a cold lump of the stuff and understand, in your body, the exact relief we were selling. We didn’t describe the feeling. We shipped it.

People remembered that. Not the feature list. The putty.

Somewhere along the way, business decided that feeling things was unprofessional. Walk a trade show floor and count the senses in play. Sight, and only the kind of sight that comes off a screen. Booth after booth of pixels explaining themselves. The whole genre is engineered to be felt by nobody. It smells like hotel carpet and burnt coffee, and that is an accident, because no one thought the smell was worth deciding on. (Don’t even get me started on jars of shitty chocolate…)

We sell software that “removes friction” on slides, and then we mail a PDF that opens in a tab next to forty other tabs and dies there. We talk about how our product feels to use, in a medium that has no feeling at all. The buyer is asked to take the most expensive thing on the feeling completely on faith.

Give them something to touch and the faith stops being faith.

This is the part worth getting right, because it is where the move usually goes soft. The sense is not decoration. A scented mailer that smells like lavender tells a buyer nothing true about your API. The putty worked because the putty was the claim. Texture as evidence. Heft as evidence. Temperature as evidence. If you can hand someone the proposition instead of pitching it, you have skipped the part where they decide whether to believe you.

And here is the thing about B2B that the cookie-in-the-open-house people forget… Nobody signs anything.

A room signs.

The buying decision is a committee pretending to be a person, and the sense you choose has to survive being passed across that table to the skeptic at the end of it. Putty gets passed around. A heavy steel object gets passed around. A flavor gets talked about in the hallway after. Build for the hand-off, not the handshake.

Which means the real target was never the buyer.

The person who signs your contract does not live inside your product. Their team does. The ops engineer who stops getting paged at 3 a.m. is the one who will defend the renewal in a meeting you will never sit in. So the bravest version of the putty is not a clever object for the decision-maker.

It is a small, real, physical thing shipped to the people who carry your product every day, built around the exact ache it takes away. Let the buyer feel their team get something back. That is how you invest in a team, and how a team quietly invests back in you.

B2B has gone numb on purpose and started calling it polish. Clean, frictionless, seamless, and totally untouchable. A category that has trained itself to feel nothing is a category where one squeezable pink lump can do the work of a whole deck.

Alright alright. Point made. Here’s the palette of ideas to get your brain rolling now. All B2B. Organized by sense.

Touch / weight / texture

• Cybersecurity: hand a CISO a single machined-steel object (a “key” with real heft) at a conference. Heavy means serious, unpickable, permanent. The weight argues what the deck can’t.
• Industrial / construction software: a sample card where half is rough-cast concrete and half is glass-smooth. “Your job sites feel like this. Our software feels like this.”
• Logistics / freight: onboarding kit ships in packaging that is absurdly, satisfyingly easy to open — one pull, no rage. The unboxing is the demo of “we remove friction.”
• Legal tech: contracts printed on genuinely beautiful paper for the kickoff signing. The gravity of the moment, made tactile.

Sound / silence

• Data/observability tools: an audio signature for “all systems healthy” vs. an alert — let ops teams hear the state of their stack. (Pingdom-style, but designed like a musician would.)
• Payroll / fintech: a genuinely good 8-second sound when payroll clears successfully. The relief, scored.
• Anything selling calm (DevOps, security, compliance): send a buyer 30 seconds of literal silence as the hook — a card that says “this is what your on-call channel sounds like after us.” Absence as a sense.
• Manufacturing: record the actual sound of a production line running smoothly vs. jammed; use it in the pitch. Operators know that sound in their spine.

Smell

• Coffee / food-service B2B (roasters, suppliers): obvious and underused — ship the actual aroma, freshly, timed to arrival.
• Commercial cleaning / facilities: the smell of “clean” is a real product attribute buyers evaluate emotionally. Let them smell the difference, not read the SDS.
• Hospitality tech / hotels: scent is already how hotels brand lobbies; a hospitality SaaS that includes a signature scent in its showroom is speaking the buyer’s native language.

Taste

• Restaurant / food distribution software: the demo lunch is the demo. Don’t show the inventory dashboard on a screen; cook the meal it helped order correctly.
• Brewery / beverage B2B: a sales meeting where the product is poured, not pitched. Flavor is memory; memory is the follow-up call.
• Ag-tech: send the produce grown using the platform. The tomato is the case study.

Temperature / proprioception / the weird ones

• Cold-chain / refrigeration logistics: a package that arrives genuinely cold (safely) proves the whole value prop in one touch.
• HVAC / building systems: let a buyer stand in two rooms — one at the temperature your system holds, one drifting. The body votes before the brain does.
• Ergonomics / workplace SaaS: the sales meeting held standing, or walking, to demonstrate what you sell.
• Heavy equipment / fleet: let them sit in the cab, feel the vibration dampening. Proprioception is a B2B buying sense nobody names. Google that if you need to.

Stay Positive & Next Campaign You Work On…Add Something You Can Squeeze

My kid wrapped the cookies.

Not the whole batch tossed in a container like a normal person. Each one, individually, in its own little jacket of plastic, because somewhere in the research (and there was research) it said they’d stay fresh a few days longer that way. The cookies would have been completely fine in the container. They always are. But there she was, wrapping.

And I felt the sentence rising up in me. “You didn’t have to do all that. They’d have been fine.”

True sentence. Helpful, even. I swallowed it, and I’ve been chewing on why ever since.

Because that sentence wasn’t for her. It was for me. It was me wanting to be the one who knew the thing, the one with the container wisdom, the seasoned hand gently informing the amateur. She hadn’t asked to be corrected. She’d done the work, made her call, felt good about it. My little correction would have cost her all of that for nothing, and the only person who’d have walked away lighter was me.

Here’s the test I can’t stop running now… Before the sentence leaves your mouth, ask who gets to exhale when it lands. You, or them?

The messages that miss are almost always the ones where the speaker is the one exhaling. When a founder tells me their positioning isn’t landing, that the market doesn’t get what they actually do, it’s rarely a clarity problem. It’s an exhale problem. They’ve written the line that makes the company feel understood by itself.

A professional community I know used to describe itself roughly like this: a trusted space for people in the field to learn, share, and grow. Read it and notice who relaxes. The team that wrote it. Boxes checked, mission captured, everyone in the room nodding at their own reflection.

At some point they rewrote the line. The new one: You don’t need another community. You need backup.

Same buyer. Different lungs. That second line doesn’t describe the product at all. It walks straight into the story the customer is already telling themselves at 11pm. I’m tired, I’m doing most of this alone, I don’t want one more tab open, I want someone in my corner. The customer exhales.

And here’s the part that got its hooks in me: the words “you don’t need” sit inside both my kitchen and that tagline.

One sentence uses them to take something away. The other uses them to hand something over. The grammar is identical. The exhale is opposite.

That’s the whole game. Not what you say. Who gets to breathe out once you’ve said it.

Stay Positive & Ask Who Exhales

I watched a studio recital yesterday and found I could pick out the dancers who were all the way in. Not by skill exactly. By their faces. By the way they dragged their toes with style when they walked offstage, because they knew that even the walking was part of the picture. From three rows back I kept saying it out loud. Remarkable. Remarkable. I could not stop remarking.

Then came the strange flip. If I had been the one up there doing the thing I was admiring, I think I would have felt embarrassed. Too much. Trying too hard. The very gesture that moved me from the seats would have felt, from inside the body, like something to apologize for. Kind of crazy, isn’t it?

That gap is the whole story.

I’m reminded of how we are moved by exactly the thing the maker wants to take back.

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. The line cook who plates the staff meal like a critic is coming. The teacher who laminates a worksheet nobody assigned her. The one slide in the deck that is clearly three hours past what the deadline required, and that one slide is the only thing anyone remembers in the meeting. Nobody told these people to do the extra thing. Catch them at it and most will shrug and call it stupid.

The shrug is the tell. The embarrassment is the gauge. It is the needle telling you that you are still in deep enough for the work to cost you something.

Mine was a kickoff. Four of us, a virtual call, a corporate campaign that on paper did not need a costume. I put on lederhosen. Then I buttoned a business suit on over the lederhosen and got on the call looking, from the neck up, like a man about to walk you through Q3. The team was confused. I was uncomfortable. I rehearsed a talk track anyway, and I painted the customer for them: a buyer who shows up all business, jacket and handshake, quietly spending real money to pull the humanity and the fun back out of their own workplace. The suit was the part the world sees. The lederhosen was the part the software was for.

I tried to talk myself out of it twice. Maybe three times. I did it anyway. That is the kickoff the team still brings up, the one that sent the reps out the door lit from the inside.

Here is what businesses tend to do with the toe-drag… They sand it off.

They take the one specific, slightly-too-much detail that signals a human cared, run it past a room, and file it down until it is smooth and safe and forgettable.

They call this polish.

It is closer to anesthesia.

Committed work and committed brands both look a little amateurish from the inside, a little earnest, a little too much. From the outside they look like the only ones who meant it.

And the part that still surprises me about the lederhosen: it was never really for the customer. It was for the four people on that call.

You hand your team something they can feel, something a little ridiculous and a little brave, and they carry it to the customer with their own pulse already in it. That order matters more than anyone admits. Energy does not trickle down from a polished mission statement. It walks out the door inside the people you trusted enough to be weird in front of.

I would like to tell you the feeling goes away. Shit. I wish I could tell myself that feeling would go away.

It does not.

I still get the flush of this-is-stupid every single time I lean all the way into something. What changed is the lag. There used to be a long argument between the flush and the doing. Now they land almost at once, and I have learned to read the flush less like a stop sign and more like a porch light.

Still on. Still home. Still in deep enough to be scared of it.

Stay Positive & Drag Your Toes

This is not a gardening blog. Give me one paragraph and it will feel like one, and then it won’t.

I don’t garden. I have killed a basil plant that came with instructions. But I know the word, because a friend who does garden taught it to me, and it has been rattling around my marketing brain ever since. The word is volunteer. It is what gardeners call a plant nobody planted. A seed that survived the trash, found its own light, and grew without permission. The squash sprawling out of the compost pile, fruit the size of a forearm, fed by nothing but rot and indifference, while the peppers somebody actually labeled and watered sulk in their tidy row.

Businesses grow volunteers too. We just don’t notice them, because we are busy staring at the beds we planned.

I was talking recently about a slice of a business that had no team, no owner, no quota, no goal anyone was accountable for. By every org-chart logic it should have been a rounding error. Instead it was quietly outperforming. Customers in that category kept showing up, kept fitting, kept staying, and nobody had told them to.

The lesson for anyone doing positioning: demand you did not manufacture is the most honest signal you will ever get. A campaign tells you what happens when you push. A volunteer tells you what happens when you don’t. One measures your budget. The other measures your fit.

When a segment converts without a single ad aimed at it, when customers invent a use case you never built a deck for, when a vertical keeps closing with no rep assigned, that is not a curiosity to file away. That is the market voting before you asked the question, and the vote is cleaner than anything your funnel will hand you, because nobody coached it.

The danger comes in two flavors.

The first is neglect. The volunteer has no sponsor, so it gets no water, and one quarter you look up and the thing that was growing on its own has finally given up on you. Plants you ignore long enough learn their lesson.

The second is stranger, and it is the one I watch smart teams walk straight into. We find the volunteer, get excited, and immediately try to civilize it.

We hand it an owner, a target, a roadmap, a set of OKRs, a name with a color. We move it out of the compost and into a raised bed. Sometimes that move is right. Sometimes it kills the exact wildness that let the thing grow. Structure is not free. Attention has a metabolism. Every hour you spend dressing up the volunteer is an hour stolen from somewhere else, and the volunteer was, by definition, the one thing that did not need the hours.

The skill is neither neglect nor conquest. It is noticing.

Stay Positive & Some Of The Best Things You Will Ever Ship Are Already Growing

Pull up a sales call from a year ago. Then pull up one from last week. Same kind of buyer, maybe the literal same person, same job title printed on the same badge. Listen for where they lean in.

It’s a different spot.

A year ago the thing that made them sit up was one set of words. Now it’s another set entirely, and nobody sent a memo about the swap. The buyer didn’t announce they’d changed. They’d swear they hadn’t. And in the way that matters most, they’re right.

What moved was the ground, not the person. A year ago the market wasn’t doing whatever AI is doing to it right now, and that churn quietly rewrote the conditions every buyer is standing in. New fears, new shortcuts, new ways to look smart in front of a boss. So the things they need a product to prove have shuffled. The value props that landed last spring sound a half-step flat today.

But ask them why they bought into your company, the worldview, the bet you’re making about where the world is going, and you’ll get close to the same answer they gave you a year ago. That part held.

Two layers. Two different speeds.

Think of a band. The rhythm section is your company. Bass and kick drum, holding the song’s identity steady, show after show, room after room. That steadiness is what people mean when they say they trust you. The solo is your product. Improvised for the night, bent to the crowd in front of you, different every time the room changes.

And the room has changed.

It’s full of strangers now, every one of them holding tools that didn’t exist to this degree last year.

A good band reads that room and changes the solo. The bass line stays put.

The trouble starts when a company gets spooked by the new room and decides the whole song is wrong. Everyone starts soloing at once. They drag the AI energy all the way down into the company story, repaint the thing that was supposed to stay still, and what comes out isn’t bold. It’s noise.

In a way they sawed through their own bass line chasing a sound they heard in somebody else’s set.

There’s a quieter way to get it wrong, and it’s worse because it feels responsible.

You go re-interview your customers, careful operator that you are. They tell you they still love the company. You exhale. You file the notes. And you miss that the product reasons rotted while you were being reassured. The affirmation was real and the affirmation was a trap. (It kinda, sorta, always is if you give it too much weight…) A customer saying the song still sounds like you is not the same as the solo still working.

So the question I keep circling is how you tell those two apart in the moment. When the ground shifts, is it a tremor in the solo, change the value props and move on, or is it the kind of quake that means the song itself has to change, your category moved and the company story has to follow it down?

I don’t think that question has a clean universal answer. I think it has an owner. Somebody whose actual job is standing at the seam between the slow story and the fast one and making the call, quarter after quarter. Not a document in a shared drive that gets updated when someone remembers it exists. A person. The drummer, not the soloist everybody’s watching. The one who decides when the whole song shifts tempo and when it’s just this one solo running long.

Most places don’t have that person. They have a deck. The deck doesn’t know what room you’re in tonight.

And if you want that call made well, you invest in the one who makes it before you need them to make it. That’s the part companies are realizing they’ve skipped pre-AI wave. They spent a fortune chasing the customer’s new mood after new mood and almost nothing on the one teammate built to hear it coming.

So, if you’re looking for an action step here…pull the two recordings. Sit with the gap. Notice that your buyer is loyal to the song and restless about the solo, both at once, and that the restlessness is the honest part. Then ask who in the building actually owns the difference for your brand.

If the answer is nobody, that isn’t a messaging problem.

Stay Positive & Just In Case It’s Not Obvious… That Person’s Title Often Has “Marketing” In It

My voice was shot.

I had just spent three and a half hours training someone on how to do a thing I have done a thousand times. It is the kind of work where you can feel the moment a person stops nodding politely and actually understands. That moment is what you came for. That moment is why your throat hurts.

A year and a half ago, mostly joking, I said out loud that I wanted to wear a constant recorder to conferences so some future AI could mine my day for the good bits. People winced. “What about privacy.” “What about consent.” Fair enough.

This morning, an ad found me for Pocket. A small device that always listens. Clips to your phone for calls. Joins your meetings. A second set of ears that never asks if you are tired. The future I joked about is now a Tuesday checkout.

Here is where I am supposed to talk about how powerful this is. How I could feed today’s training to a model and spit out a personalized onboarding doc that explains every step again in the trainee’s exact learning style. I could. I might. It would probably even be useful.

The obvious post writes itself. I want the other one…

The thing the always-on microphone makes obvious by its absence is this: the moment had to be worth recording in the first place.

Pocket would have captured every word of the training. It would not have captured the fact that I shipped my own package to the bar instead of my house, and that the package arrived right as the bartender showed up to open the place, and that the two of us stood by the back door talking about how he reroofed his garage last summer. That detour was not on the agenda. It became the agenda. The trainee saw me as a person who makes goofy logistical mistakes and bonds with strangers about manual labor, and that changed how he heard the next two hours.

Pocket would have transcribed my words during the lesson. It would not have read his face when he hit the part he kept getting wrong. There is a specific small flinch a person does when they are pretending to follow you. You only catch it if you are watching. You only know to go off-script if you catch it.

So the real gift of the always-on microphone, for me, is not what it captures. It is what it forces me to ask. If a robot will be the cheap, comprehensive version of the meeting, what am I doing in the meeting that the robot cannot do?

The package at the bar. The flinch in the lesson. The voice that ends up shot because you cared enough to say it a third way.

Differentiation used to be a luxury good. Now it is the whole job. Anything generic about how you serve someone is about to be done better, faster, and cheaper by a model that will not get tired and will not get the address wrong. The only moves that survive are the ones a transcript cannot hold.

Stay Positive & Your Move…