Happy Tuesday, Reader!

There are two ways to approach marketing and growing a business: the one most of us inherited without ever choosing it, and the one where growth is real, not just well-lit. With so much shifting right now (in the market, in AI, in how people even find businesses), this feels like exactly the right moment to make the case for the second one.

Welcome to a new series on sustainable marketing. Let's start with the choice itself:

Approach #1: The Permanent Campaign

This is the path most of us tend to fall into because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” The "Permanent Campaign” is a political science theory I learned in college, coined by pollster Pat Caddell back in the 1970s. It's been warping our politics ever since. It's also the baseline of MLM marketing, popularized in direct sales by Mary Kay Ash, and it got cranked up to Monster-Energy-Drink-level hypermania in the late '90s and early 2000s once "Always On" became the internet's default setting.

And it's bullshit.

It's what turns every one of us into a "Personal Brand," where the feelings we sell our audience matter more than the work we actually put into the world. It's made a lot of businesses (and the people who lead them) better at faking it than making it.

It also happens to be the water most of us have been swimming in. Many of you built your business on a version of digital-first marketing that made tracking, testing, and organically growing an audience simple, if not easy. It was real work, and it was an opening that had never existed before.

But that world doesn't exist anymore. Even people with years of loyal followers and established traffic are watching the old organic sure-things quietly stop working. Tim Ferriss recently shared some startling numbers on how fast that shift is happening. He's got a silver lining in there, too, but the decline is real.

Approach #2: Honoring the Cycles

This is the path that trades the highlight reel for the real thing. If you’ve been here for a while, you’re already familiar with our concept of Sustainable Marketing. And the good news is that this approach is the antithesis of The Permanent Campaign. It doesn’t depend on micro-hacking, perfect SEO, or Instagram fame. Call it the anti-growth-hacking model (i.e., marketing that doesn't make us manic to keep up).

​Read the full breakdown here if you want the whole concept now. We'll be unpacking each piece of it together over the coming weeks.

We're starting with the last of the five (always design with cycles in mind) on purpose. It's the height of summer, and I'm about to sign off for two weeks, exactly as planned (because if I'm going to teach this principle, I should probably practice it, too).

Cycles aren't a marketing tactic. They're the shape of everything.

Morning becomes night becomes morning again. Seasons turn. Things are planted, they grow, they're harvested, and the field rests before the next planting. Even the economy moves in waves, not straight lines. We don't question any of that in the rest of our lives, so why do we build our businesses like the only acceptable direction is up, forever, no exceptions?

Businesses that ignore this don't get punished right away. They get punished slowly, and then all at once. JCPenney ran on a constant-campaign model for years, always another sale, always another push, right up until the slow decline turned into a 2020 bankruptcy filing that surprised exactly no one. Constant campaigning isn't the secret to sustainable growth. For most of us, it isn't even fun.

Our team plans for cycles both functionally and literally. We intentionally treat spring and fall as our high-growth seasons, and we use the heat of summer and the quiet of winter to build, create, and slow down. Your cycle might look different, tied to your production schedule, your industry's natural seasonality, or even the ebb and flow of market conditions. Whatever shape it takes, it doesn't happen by accident. It takes an intentional step back to design it.

Sustainable marketing honors the cycles that are natural to every business. The direction shouldn't always be up.

Anyone who's ridden a bike or run a hilly trail knows that always up is exhausting.

So this August, as we prepare for our first-ever live event to launch The 6% Project and our first $250K Club to the world, we're diving back into the archives to talk about what it actually means to build a sustainable marketing strategy. Why? Because the winter of 2026 is coming, and it looks like a doozy. Let's get ready now.

Until next time,

Renia C.

P.S. - Struggling to figure out your marketing strategy in an AI-enabled, zero-click world? A Sustainable Marketing Workshop might be exactly the reset your team needs before Q4 hits. Book a call with me and let's talk about bringing one to your organization this fall.

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