Why, is a Question We Ask Each Other

Why We Do What We Do

When was the last time your marketing made someone feel genuinely seen rather than targeted?

Most marketing comes from the mind. Who is our target? How do we press their pain points? How many impressions can we drive? How many pats on the back and pieces of glass can we collect from our peers?

Most marketing treats attention as a destination. It measures likes, traffic, and impressions, and continues to consume resources in pursuit of those metrics.

We prefer marketing that comes from the heart and satisfies the gut. That does not mean we set the mind aside. We use it differently: to invite, empower, and honour people as heroes, rather than to chase attention and manipulate targets. We answer the questions people feel in their guts before they say yes, because we care about those questions.

We see the whole ecosystem from a different vantage. Attention is only a door, and behind it is a bridge to commitment: actions, sales, donations, and hires. The bridge is built through connection, by truly seeing people, honouring their agency, and giving them a way to join you on a shared path where both sides benefit, and where the whole serves the broader community and the living world.

So he designed t-shirts and set out across the country to tell that story.

The t-shirts gave students something to become, not something to do. Forest protectors, not protesters. Every shirt sold funded more time on the road. A hundred and eighty retailers carried them. Thousands of students wore them.

The shirts didn't argue for the forest. They made the viewer feel the absurdity of destroying it before they had decided whether to care. Two geese fly into a cloud; two roasted geese fly out. The caption: Acid Rain. A three-hundred-metre deer mows down a city with a lawnmower. The caption: Clearcut.

The shirts weren't aimed at the system that forced a false choice between jobs and nature. Satire doesn't argue. It makes the viewer see something they can't unsee.

The students gained an identity worth inhabiting. The stores gained a demographic they had never served, and kept selling the shirts long after Dave moved on to the next city. The sales funded the travel and lodging that carried the campaign to the next university, the next store, the next community. The whole network sustained itself across Canada, because every participant genuinely benefited from the same work, and the product itself generated what the movement needed to keep growing.

That is the earliest proof of the principle that still governs everything we do: when every side genuinely benefits, the system sustains itself long after your involvement ends.

After the forest campaign, festivals and companies began asking Dave for branded merchandise. The company grew. But something was missing: the transformative impact the forest campaign had produced.

He watched client after client waste money on swag that returned almost nothing. He saw those same objects differently, because of what the forest had taught him: a branded thing can be a vehicle for a story with real impact, sparking a genuine connection every time someone touches it. Slapping a logo on a product and handing it out was the opposite of everything the forest campaign had proved was possible.

That gap between attention and commitment is what led directly to Marketing Triage™.

The race toward AI makes it more urgent. Every organization deploying AI without redesigning the system underneath it is putting a more powerful engine in the same broken vehicle. The dysfunction accelerates. The waste compounds at a scale no earlier tactic could reach.

And the move toward greener giveaways only deepens our resolve. Greener materials inside a broken system are a bandage on the real wound.