Not manipulation.
It starts by diagnosing the gap between attention & commitment, then inviting the right people across the bridge.
Not manipulation.
It starts with diagnosing the gap between attention and commitment, then building the bridge.
Unfortunately, there is a devil that sits on each of our shoulders that keeps telling us how good attention feels. How good those booth visits, people taking our swag with a smile, and all of those social media likes feel. And that devil keeps us firmly rooted on the attention side of the bridge, while the gap between attention and the outcomes you actually need quietly widens.
Then you wake up to reality. You spent all that time, money and effort, and nothing happened.
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.
We get it, attention feels great. You get likes and impressions. People fill your booth and take all your swag... but then what?
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.
You're using B2C tactics on people making career, mission, or partnership decisions. Your system answers the wrong questions.
The right people walk away and you don't know why people run 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.
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.
Marketing Triage™ identifies which system failure is costing you outcomes, and what to fix first.
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, content, AI—writes a script playing in their heads,
When attention is the goal, that script is rarely the one you intended.
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 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.
"I treated people as empowered heroes on a shared journey, not targets to convince or manipulate."
Dave Betke,
Founder, Do Better Marketing
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.
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>
What if we could build better systems that bridge the gap between attention and commitment, increase efficiency, improve outcomes, and cause less harm to the world we all share?
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.
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 →
Seeing the person extends in two directions simultaneously. It means seeing the specific humans the client needs to reach, the ones nobody else in the brief has bothered to look at. And it means seeing the client — past what they want to what they actually need.
The engineering CEO wanted a quality leather bag. He knew his audience was an engineer. He knew the piece needed to feel premium. It was a completely reasonable want. But it was the wrong question. The right question was what a family making an irreversible decision across an ocean needed to feel before they would say yes.
The leather bag impresses an engineer. The album sees a family. Those are different acts entirely. Only one of them earns commitment.
The most surprising entry point into our diagnostic is branded merchandise. Not because it matters most, but 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 to order. It is who you have not yet 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. Not a funnel. Not a campaign. 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.
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:
My approach was born 35 years ago with no marketing budget and a 65,000-acre forest in British Columbia that needed protecting. Since then, seeing the person nobody else was looking at has driven results across every sector I've worked in.
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.
I work with leaders in high-stakes B2B, associations, nonprofits, and public sector environments — changemakers who care deeply about the communities they serve.
"David was driving our staff crazy with 'why' questions. No one else had ever asked them before. The competition brought hats. We hired 3 senior engineers. Our goal was one."
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 seeing who nobody else was looking at, and making something that gave those people a role to inhabit rather than a message to respond to.
See the work that made these results possible →
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 40–60 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 was founded on a single act: seeing the person nobody else in the brief had bothered to look at. That act produced a line of t-shirts that protected a 65,000-acre forest, a flashlight that moved business leaders to fund domestic violence programs, and a relocation album that hired three senior engineers, even though the goal was one. It now expresses itself through Marketing Triage™, Purpose-Ecosystem™ Design, and Dimensional Advertising™ — three services that diagnose why marketing systems stop at attention, redesign them around a single organizational goal, and deploy creative work that gives people something to become rather than something to respond to. Creator of the Symbiotic Systems Methodology. Founder of GreenMeets™, a bi-monthly global gathering of sustainability and regenerative practitioners.
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