ABOUT DAVE
"I replace marketing dysfunction with Purpose-Ecosystem™ design, because when you see the person instead of a target, marketing becomes an act of caring, and attention becomes an invitation, not a destination."
Dave Betke, Founder,
Do Better Marketing
"I don't know if this man uses a different part of his brain than other marketing types, but he and his ideas are entirely new and refreshing. Best of all, they work. His small company has pummeled marketing giants in national awards competitions, and for good reason. David combines genuine goodness and humanity with clever, strategic ideas that deliver results."
Michelle Morra-Carlisle
Writer, Editor, Communications Professional
While marketers chased attention, I studied how people decide, build trust, and commit. Attention is easy (just keep paying); commitment requires clarity, trust, and purpose.
Thirty-five years of cross-sector observation have produced conclusions that conventional marketing training never reaches. Not because the training is wrong. Because it optimizes within broken systems rather than questioning whether the system itself is the problem.
Where a conventional marketer sees targets to be convinced or manipulated, I see partners, heroes, pollinators to empower and give agency to, so they are inspired to walk alongside you and co-create the success of your mission.
I've spent 35 years asking the questions nobody else asks. Not what you want to create. What you want to happen. Not what message you want to send. What the person on the other side needs to hear before they'll say yes.
The answers reveal things that tactics never surface: which incentive structures are working against you, who owns the bridge between attention and commitment, and what your organization has been optimizing for versus what it actually needs.
In 35 years of cross-sector observation across nonprofits, B2B firms, associations, festivals, cause-marketing campaigns, and public-sector organizations, I have seen every variant of every system failure, enough times to classify them, name them, and recognize which one is costing you outcomes within the first few conversations.
The context changes. The structural dysfunction does not. Wrong systems. Wrong KPIs. Wrong metrics. Wrong incentives. Wrong role responsibilities. Wrong relationship between the organization and the people it needs to reach. Different industries. Same failure. Every time.
"Dave asked me questions no one else had. He took time to understand where I was at and where I wanted to go. He built a step by step actionable plan that made more sense than any prior plan I had come up with."
"Dave saved me thousands of dollars and months of frustration before I even paid him a dime. I didn't know if I could afford to work with him — it quickly became obvious I couldn't afford not to."
Maria Latouf,
Owner, EquilibriOm
In 1990, one of the last great stands of Canada's temperate interior rainforest, outside Nelson, BC, was slated for clear-cut logging. It would create a few jobs for a few years, but the community knew the cost was too high.
A large community roadblock ensued. Tempers on both sides flared. It was not my way. So I designed a line of t-shirts, built a petition and letter-writing campaign, and spent five years criss-crossing Canada more than a dozen times, visiting universities and stores, until I had built a network of more than 180 retailers selling my shirts. Tens of thousands of petition signatures poured in. With funding from Aveda to produce a video about the threatened forest, the campaign tipped the scales.
That 65,000-acre forest is now the West Arm Provincial Park, protected forever.
I treated every student, every retailer, every signature as a hero in a shared story, not a target to convince. I gave them agency. I gave them identity. The logging industry and the conservation movement both got what they needed. Nobody had to lose for someone else to win.
Five gruelling years on the road built something I didn't yet have a name for. Either both sides benefit, or the system fails. That principle didn't come from a textbook or a framework. It came from watching what actually works when you treat people as partners rather than targets. I eventually named it the Symbiotic Systems Methodology. The principles have never changed.
Soon after, businesses began asking me to create branded merchandise for them, uniforms, festival t-shirts, and promotional products.
It quickly became obvious that none of them were building the types of systems I had built to engage real people on a common journey with a common goal. I had just saved a forest, and they were asking me for giveaways that would inevitably end up in a landfill.
That gap between what I had just proven was possible and what most organizations were settling for has driven everything I have built since.
I began asking questions that they were not used to being asked. Then, designing Portable Purpose-Ecosystems™ that answered them. The results won national marketing awards, pummelling industry giants. Here I was on the stage with huge teams and agencies, seven times.
Along this journey, I've met countless changemakers with incredible potential, but many struggled because their marketing hadn't caught up to their vision.
That is why Marketing Triage™ exists.
See how the 180 store retail experience serves festival merchandising today →
It came from a psychology degree that taught me how people actually decide, trust, and commit, not how to manipulate them toward a predetermined outcome.
It came from five years of grassroots work, crisscrossing Canada, to enlist a nation of students and retail stores in a shared mission to save the forest.
It came from growing up in a conscious community with a deep connection to nature and living systems. That connection gave me a worldview oriented around symbiosis, both sides benefit, or the system fails, long before I had language for it as a methodology.
And it came from 35 years of observing how organizations treat the people they most need to move, across nonprofits, B2B firms, associations, festivals, cause marketing campaigns, recruitment environments, and public-sector organizations. Living inside organizational dysfunction at ground level before anyone had a chance to manage the narrative. Watching what actually happens between attention and commitment. Watching who owns the bridge and who doesn't. Watching the same failures repeat across sectors, budgets, and teams until the patterns became impossible to miss. Every sector. Every size. Every variant of every dysfunction.
Those 35 years produced something more useful than a framework invented at a desk. They produced a taxonomy of three primary failure types, each with subcategories, each observed enough times across enough different organizations to be classified, named, and recognized within the first diagnostic conversation. I have seen every variant of every failure. Enough times to know which one I am looking at before the organization can fully describe what is wrong.
The most surprising expression of that worldview is the promotional products lens. Not because branded merchandise matters most. Because it is the most honest diagnostic surface available.
Nobody defends their swag. Everyone is candid about how they use it, how they feel about it, and what they expect it to do. No slide deck. No prepared defence. The conversation goes straight to the truth.
And the decisions an organization makes about a $3 item reveal the same incentive structures, measurement failures, and system dysfunctions that exist across every other tactic, including the ones people do defend. How you deploy a $3 item tells me how your organization deploys a $50,000 budget. It tells me whether your systems treat people as heroes or targets. It tells me who owns what happens after the attention. And it tells me which system failure is compounding, usually within the first conversation.
This is why the conversation about materials always starts with a series of diagnostic questions rather than a product catalogue. And it is why many of my longest client partnerships began with what looked like a simple branded merchandise order, that became something neither side anticipated. The diagnostic question is never what to order. It is who you have not yet seen.
That act of seeing operates in two directions simultaneously. It means seeing the specific humans you need to reach, the ones nobody else in the brief has bothered to look at. And it means seeing you, past what you want to what you actually need, and who specifically needs to walk alongside you for the mission to become real.
The engineering CEO wanted a quality leather bag for a senior engineer he was trying to recruit. We helped him see that a family making an irreversible decision across an ocean needed something entirely different. The leather bag impresses an engineer. Our album was a Portable Purpose-Ecosystem™ that saw a family. Those are different acts entirely. Only one of them earns commitment.
Though the promotional products lens is the most powerful entry point. It is not the only one.
The same diagnostic questions apply to any tactic, any touchpoint, any communication system. Trade show deployment, donor journey, recruitment campaign, community engagement program, landing page, the questions are the same. How does this system view, engage with, and incentivize the specific humans you most need to move? What questions are those people silently asking before they commit? How well does this system answer them?
The methodology is rigorous enough to be systematized. As a proof of concept, I have 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 across any touchpoint and that the questions at its center are precise enough to be taught to a machine.
The lens changes. The questions don't.
"When you see audiences as targets, marketing becomes an act of hunting. Attention is your prey.
When you actually see the person, marketing becomes an act of caring. Attention becomes an invitation to join you on a shared journey, not the destination."
-Dave Betke
I empathize with the person behind the sale, the recruitment candidate, the donor, the activist, the target, the audience, and the community.
Where a conventional marketer sees targets to be convinced or manipulated, I see partners, heroes, pollinators to empower and give agency to, so they are inspired to walk alongside you and co-create the success of your mission.
I believe people are not targets. They are heroes on their own journey, and my purpose is to create a fork where your two journeys meet, and you walk together.
I am deeply inspired by symbiosis in nature. The flower does not chase the bee. It offers nectar and trusts the bee's visit will bring life. That is how marketing should feel: not a constant pursuit, but a living relationship built on trust, respect, and shared nourishment. When you optimize for attention, everyone feels the difference — including the algorithms. The flower does not need to chase because it offers something genuine. That is the only brief that has ever produced something worth feeling.
I believe that lasting results only come from systems where both sides genuinely benefit. The organization gets the outcome it needs. The person gets something worth saying yes to. That is not idealism. It is the structural reason some systems outlast the campaigns that created them by decades.
"And" is a bridge.
"Either/or" is a dam.
"Dave has the uncanny ability to take a key message and merge it with a unique visual focus to make a pitch that can be unforgettable."
"One of many pieces they created, for my past work with the Alberta Council of Women's Shelters, used a light beam to highlight little-known facts about interpersonal violence for businessmen at an awareness event. Several years later, a former guest noted that every time he sees that 'darn little flashlight' he is reminded of how those facts changed his thinking."
"Making heartfelt connections, underscoring fresh perspectives, communicating something memorable — that is what David does best and what sets his work apart from simply marketing."
Patti McClocklin
Alberta Council of Women's Shelters
The Symbiotic Systems Methodology. Four principles: Symbiosis, Compassion, Psychology, Marketing. Applied consistently across every engagement.
A methodology that doesn't apply to itself isn't a methodology. GreenMeets, the diagnostic tools, and the Symbiotic AI Agent currently in development are all built inside Symbiotic Systems™ before being offered to clients.
The methodology expresses itself through three services. Each one is an entry point. All of them connect.
"Dave is a master at creativity. Open-minded, innovative, client focused and measurement driven."
"If you choose Dave, you're 90% of the way to being successful — the rest is up to you. If you choose not to utilize his talents, pray your competitor doesn't."
Cliff Quicksell, MAS,
Professional Speaker, Author, Consultant & Coach
I choose to work with individuals and organizations dedicated to improving the lives of people, communities, or our natural world.
When I find the right people, I don't just work with them. I try to connect them: through GreenMeets, through introductions, through the community that has grown around this practice over 35 years. Because I believe we are stronger as a unified voice.
The awards are just pieces of glass. What I care about most are the partnerships that have lasted over 25 years, the forest protected forever, and the Purpose-Ecosystems™ that take on a life of their own long after I'm gone.
I'm on a 35-year mission to reduce the impact of waste generated by broken and misaligned marketing systems on budgets and our planet, and to repurpose those savings as mission fuel for the people doing the work that matters.
What if we could build better systems that increase efficiency, improve outcomes, and cause less harm to the world we all share?
Will you join me?
We reply within 2 business days.
Speaking topics, formats, workshop details, the official bio, and the speaking enquiry form are all on the Speaking page.
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If something on this page created a moment of recognition, that is the signal. The 15-minute conversation is the right next step. There is no obligation, no sales pitch, just an honest conversation about whether there is a fit
We reply within 2 business days.
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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