You're here because some part of you already knew the difference, even when the system around you didn't.
We Help Good People Do Better Marketing.
We Help Good People Do Better Marketing.
90% of marketing budgets die in the gap between attention and commitment because the bridge between what you want and what your audience needs was never built.
Attention feels great. You get likes and impressions. People fill your booth and take all your swag. But then what? You can't eat likes. The number of people who take your swag at a trade show is not a measure of success. And impressions are meaningless unless you can connect them to actions, sales, or hires.
What if we could repurpose that 90% of the waste into mission fuel?
But first, you have to know what's creating the waste, frustration, and disappointment, and the consequences of continuing with the status quo.
Most leaders feel the dysfunction before they can name it.
The booth is busy. The campaign ran. And then nothing. The bridge between attention and commitment was never built.
You continue on the tactics hamster wheel, never connecting attention to actions, sales, or hires.
Left unaddressed, every month the question "Then what?" goes unanswered is another month of attention that converts to nothing.
All those opportunities go to your competitors.
You are losing what could have been.
You're using B2C tactics on people making career, mission, or partnership decisions. Your system answers the wrong questions.
When people feel processed rather than seen, they do not commit. The right people walk away and you don't know why they are running toward your competition.
Left unaddressed, Active Risk compounds budget and environmental waste simultaneously. Every tactic deployed through the wrong system writes a script you never intended.
You are actively driving the right people away.
Leadership approves more budget. Everyone hits their KPIs. The wrong KPIs hide the dysfunction until the damage is done. Read the $150K mug.
Brand damage and involuntary repositioning are real risks and you don't see them coming.
Left unaddressed, Aggressive Risk compounds further, adding revenue loss and brand damage that seldom traces back to its source.
You are compounding damage while believing you are succeeding.
"I saw attention as an invitation, not a destination. I invited people in, made them feel seen, and empowered them as heroes on a shared journey, not targets to convince or manipulate."
Dave Betke,
Founder, Do Better Marketing
It manifests itself as risk and also consumes reputations and planetary resources that don't belong in a landfill or in our air and water.
Attention Feeds On Budgets
Tactics get attention. That's what they are meant to do. Then what?
Most organizations don't have an answer, so they buy more attention and climb aboard the tactics hamster wheel.
But attention is a black hole that depletes time, money and resources. It feels like success right up until you try to connect it to outcomes.
You can't eat likes.
The number of people who take your swag at a trade show is not a measure of success.
And impressions are meaningless unless you can connect them to actions, sales, or hires.
Every Tactic Writes a Script
Your brand is the movie that plays in people's heads every time they are reminded of you. Every tactic, swag, and AI-generated content writes a script playing in their heads.
When you optimize for attention, everyone feels the difference, including the algorithms. Your audience can tell. So can the systems designed to serve them. The script that your tactics write may not be the one you intended.
Read a real story of how a cost-saving swag decision lost a customer for life and repositioned a brand without permission.
Waste That Ends Up in Air & Water
The materials, energy, and resources deployed to generate attention that never becomes commitment don't disappear.
They end up in landfills, strain ecosystems, and reposition your brand in ways you never intended.
It is not just physical materials.
Every digital campaign that generates no commitment consumes server energy. Every AI content piece without a path to commitment burns computing resources. Every trade show that fills a booth and converts nobody produces travel, materials, and staff time, all of it waste.
Once you are inside the black hole of attention, it is hard to see beyond it.
Over 35 years, I can count on one hand the number of organizations that invested in functioning engagement, incentive, and commitment systems instead of endlessly spending on attention traps.
Most organizations are measuring the wrong metrics, and because everyone is hitting their KPIs, there is no incentive to change.
The gap is invisible because every department measures a different part of the dysfunction.
This is not a failure of effort or intelligence. It is what structural dysfunction feels like from the inside, when the system that is failing you is also creating the incentives that defend it. Wrong KPIs. Wrong metrics. Wrong role responsibilities. Wrong relationship between the organization and the people it needs to reach; treating them as targets to convince rather than heroes to invite. The pattern is the same across every sector. Only the context changes.
MARKETING
Measures attention, not commitment
JUNIOR STAFF
Measures speed & accuracy, not purpose
PROCUREMENT
Measures cost savings, not brand risk
LEADERSHIP
Holds a budget they cannot defend
THE BOARD
Asks harder questions no one can answer
Can marketing make a difference? We have proved it can, over and over, across sectors and at scales ranging from protecting a 65,000-acre forest to changing how business leaders think about domestic violence to building partnerships now in their 26th year.
Marketing can amplify the difference you make in people's lives, in your community, and for our planet.
The first step is recognizing that tactics and attention are black holes, and that the people you most need to reach are not targets. Chasing attention and people is a hard habit to break because marketing schools teach it and everyone perpetuates it.
On the other side are systems that outlast campaigns and do not need constant feeding because they often take on lives of their own.
It begins by seeing the person on the other side clearly enough to give them something worth saying yes to.
People are searching for purpose and meaning. Making a difference starts with composting the old habits and growing the conditions for something worth belonging to.
Composting the old habits begins with Marketing Triage™.
Growing the conditions is Purpose-Ecosystem™ Design.
Our founder, Dave Betke, didn't come from marketing school. His diagnostic ability came from a psychology degree, five years of grassroots work, a deep connection with nature, and 35 years of observing how organizations treat the people they most need to move.
While marketers learned to manipulate targets, Dave studied what makes people trust, engage, and walk alongside you.
Instead of optimizing funnels, a psychology background asks a different question: why do organizations keep chasing attention even when they know it isn't converting?
The answer is dopamine. Attention triggers the same neurological reward system as any other addictive behaviour. Likes feel good. A busy booth feels productive. A campaign that drives traffic feels like progress. And the departments measuring those signals are incentivized to keep generating them, not out of bad faith, but out of structure.
Marketing, procurement, junior staff—all hit their KPIs, but leadership is left holding a budget they cannot defend because there is no connective tissue between spending and results.
A psychology background immediately sees that pattern. Marketing training optimizes within it.
Dave disrupts the structural conditions that keep broken systems invisible and appear to be the only option.
Our founder has spent 35 years making the abstract holdable. A flashlight that moved business leaders to fund domestic violence programs. A frisbee that solved a water conservation problem by giving a neighbourhood permission to play. A relocation album that answered every question a family was afraid to ask before they asked it, and hired three senior engineers when the goal was one.
The creative work is not decoration. It is the methodology made tangible. The competition sent a cowboy hat. We saw a family making an irreversible decision across an ocean.
Feel the difference. See the work that made these results possible →
Learn more about Dave's background and approach →
The engineering CEO wanted a quality leather bag. We helped him see that a family making an irreversible decision across an ocean needed something entirely different. Three engineers hired. The goal was one.
The most surprising entry point into our diagnostic is branded merchandise because it is the most honest surface available. Nobody defends their swag. Everyone is candid about how they use it and what they expect it to do.
How an organization deploys a $3 item tells us how it deploys a $50,000 budget. It tells us which of the three system failures is costing you outcomes, often within the first conversation. And the same diagnostic questions apply to any tactic, any touchpoint, any communication system.
This is why many of our longest client partnerships began with what looked like a simple branded merchandise order, and became something neither side anticipated. When you optimize for attention, everyone feels the difference, including the algorithms. The diagnostic question is not what is the next shiny thing. It is who you haven't truly seen.
The same diagnostic questions apply to any tactic, any touchpoint, any communication system. Whether we are examining a trade show deployment, a donor journey, a recruitment campaign, a community engagement program, or a landing page, the questions are the same.
The methodology is rigorous enough to be systematized. As a proof of concept, Dave has trained an AI agent to analyze landing pages and homepages based on the questions people ask before they commit. It scores each page on how many of those questions it answers and how well. It is not a product. It is evidence that the diagnostic framework is transferable to any touchpoint, and that the questions at the center of it are precise enough to be taught to a machine.
The lens changes. The questions don't.
PURPOSE-ECOSYSTEMS™
I see systems as alive, growing and connecting like mycelium, the underground fungal networks that connect entire forests.
Most organizations' engagement and commitment systems are the opposite. Not living networks but collapsed bridges, with no connection between the attention they generate and the commitment they need. No path for others to join them, choose them, or walk alongside them on their mission.
What if people didn't need to be convinced to join you, because the system you'd built made joining feel like the most natural thing in the world?
That's what a Purpose-Ecosystem™ creates. It is neither a funnel nor a campaign, but a living system where people find themselves in your story, see themselves as heroes rather than targets, and choose to walk alongside you, often in ways you never anticipated and couldn't have designed alone.
Purpose-Ecosystems™ are built to facilitate human connection because connection is the cornerstone of commitment.
The t-shirts that funded five years on the road were not designed to generate attention. They were designed to give students an identity worth wearing: forest protectors, not protesters. When the creative work gives people something to become rather than something to respond to, the system does not need a campaign to sustain it. It sustains itself.
Diagnose the dysfunction, redesign the system, deploy strategically. Three services that work as a holistic ecosystem. Each one can be an entry point. All of them connect.
01
You're spending $25K+ annually on tactics, but you can't connect that spend to outcomes. Your team reports activity metrics. Your board asks for business results. The gap widens.
02
Triage reveals what's broken. Purpose-Ecosystem™ Design fixes it by focusing on a singular organizational goal and answering the questions your heroes ask before they commit.
Designed to follow Marketing Triage™ diagnosis.
03
How your organization deploys a $3 item reveals how it deploys a $50,000 budget. Every touchpoint writes a script in people's heads. Most branded merch writes the wrong one, not because the product was wrong, but because nobody asked the right questions before ordering it:
Our approach was born 35 years ago with no marketing budget and a 65,000-acre forest in British Columbia that needed protecting. Since then, diagnosing the gap between attention and commitment — and building systems that invite the right people across the bridge — has driven results across every sector we've worked with.
65,000
Acres Protected Forever
The West Arm Provincial Park, British Columbia. The passion project that served as the origin of the Symbiotic Systems Methodology.
3×
Engineers Hired
Created a Purpose-Ecosytem™ for 12 candidates. Hired three. Goal was 1.
6000%
B2B ROI
Within 6 months of launch. Multiple decade's long partnerships.
25 Yrs
Festival Partnership
Edmonton Folk Music Festival. 300% increase in merch sales first year.
7
National Awards
Across B2B, nonprofit, cause marketing, and association work.
These results did not come from better campaigns. They came from actually seeing people and what they needed, then making something that gave them a role to inhabit rather than a message to respond to.
See the stories behind the numbers.
We Help Good People Do Better Marketing.
We work with leaders in high-stakes B2B, associations, nonprofits, and public sector environments — changemakers who care deeply about the communities they serve.
"As CEO of a consulting engineering company, I had seen us for years give away marketing materials for seemingly little real return. It was frustrating to see resources being literally thrown away. There had to be a better way. I first got involved with David because he was driving our marketing staff crazy. We were just trying to buy stuff and he was asking us why we were buying it and what outcomes we were expecting. Outcomes? What did he mean? We just gave it away because everyone else gave it away. I came to realize that, unwittingly, I had found an answer to my frustration. David taught us that every give away was actually an opportunity to get something back and we had better figure out what we wanted.
He didn't give up and we came to understand the power of real marketing. A powerful example. We were headed to the UK to try to recruit talented staff and sell them on a new life in Canada. However, we were going with our competition, who were also going to try to hire these same folks. David's solution? A focused marketing effort that played to the move that our potential employees would have to make: [A leather photo-album packed with what the candidate needed to know about Canada, and the move].
It was expensive!! But it left the potential employees with a massively great impression about who they were talking to - a company that was serious about moving them across an ocean that cared about quality. Our competition brought hats. We hired three senior staff on that trip: Our goal was one.
I would strongly recommend David to you if you worry about your marketing budget. I guarantee he will change your perspective on those "throw away" costs. I have found the more freedom you give him, the more you will get. Your costs will actually go up. But you will find that each give-away leads to sales leads. Or potential recruits. Or something you had not planned. But it will be good.
Paul Ruffell, CEO
EBA Engineering Consultants Ltd.
Decade-long partnership: 300 → 1,200 employees
These results did not come from better campaigns. They came from actually seeing people and what they needed, then making something that gave them a role to inhabit rather than a message to respond to.
YOU MIGHT KNOW US FROM
A bi-monthly networking event that connects people who are making a difference for others, communities, and our natural world.
GreenMeets isn't a typical networking event. It's a Purpose-Ecosystem™ in practice. With 30–40 regular attendees who are highly engaged and heavily connected. It's where real partnerships form, collaborations launch, and solutions to shared challenges get co-created.
The most common questions about Marketing Triage™, Purpose-Ecosystem Design, Dimensional Advertising, and speaking engagements are answered in full on the FAQ page.
Two entry points. One conversation before anything else.
Let's have a strategic planning conversation before you order anything.
5% of success is product choice. The other 95% is planning.
Prefer to reach out directly?
+1 (780) 474 • 6563
Do Better Marketing
(a division of Avatar Brand Management Inc.)
Do Better Marketing sees the person behind the role. That act of seeing has protected forests, changed how business leaders see domestic violence, and hired senior engineers. Marketing Triage™. Purpose-Ecosystem™ Design. Dimensional Advertising™. Symbiotic Systems Methodology. GreenMeets™. Edmonton, Alberta.
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