Marketing Matters: Four Big Words Worth Slowing Down For

BUSNESS NORTH: February 2026

This article is dedicated to an exceptionally perceptive friend, the late Dan Hansen, who died on December 28, 2025, from pneumonia and complications related to Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Despite significant physical challenges, Dan lived a rich, creative life marked by curiosity, insight, and careful attention to ideas.

 

One evening, while discussing a project we were working on, I used the word discernment. Dan paused and said, “That’s a big word.” He didn’t mean it as a criticism. He meant it as an observation.

 

As we talked about what the word meant—and how it applied not just to our project, but to decision-making more broadly—he suggested that certain words carry more weight than others. These were words worth slowing down for, words that shape how we think and act if we take them seriously.

 

Over the next few weeks, the list began to grow. What follows are the first four: 

 

Discernment, Context, Motivation, and Momentum

Each matters in marketing. More importantly, each matters because they help us make better judgments in a noisy, fast-moving environment—something Dan understood instinctively.

 

Discernment

Marketing today suffers less from a lack of information than from an excess of it. We are awash in metrics, dashboards, trend reports, expert opinions, and algorithmic advice. The temptation is to believe that if we just collect enough data, the right decision will present itself. In practice, the opposite often happens.

 

Discernment is the ability to decide what matters—and just as importantly, what does not. 

Not every new platform deserves your attention. Not every metric deserves equal weight. Not every tactic that worked for another company will work for yours. Discernment requires judgment, not just measurement. It means asking better questions before acting: Who is this for? What problem does it actually solve? Does this align with who we are and where we’re headed?

 

Without discernment, marketing becomes reactive. Businesses chase trends, imitate competitors, and respond to noise instead of signals. Effort increases, clarity decreases, and results flatten out.

 

Good marketing decisions often look boring from the outside. They involve saying no—to distractions, to shiny objects, to unnecessary complexity. Over time, discernment builds focus, coherence, and credibility.

 

In marketing, wisdom isn’t knowing everything. It’s knowing which few things deserve your attention.

 

Context

Once discernment helps clarify what deserves attention, context determines whether that attention lands well or falls flat.

 

Marketing messages do not exist in isolation. They are received at a particular moment, by a particular audience, under particular conditions. The same message can feel timely and relevant in one context—and tone-deaf or irrelevant in another.

 

Context includes more than demographics. It includes timing, culture, local conditions, economic mood, and recent events that shape how people interpret what they see and hear. A message that works nationally may miss the mark locally. A campaign that made sense last year may feel out of step today.

 

When marketers ignore context, they tend to overestimate the power of their message and underestimate the situation it enters. That’s when marketing starts to feel intrusive rather than helpful.

 

Effective marketing doesn’t just speak clearly. It speaks appropriately. That depends less on clever wording than on situational awareness.

 

Motivation

Discernment helps us decide what deserves attention. Context helps us understand where that attention will land. Motivation answers a more basic question: why anyone would care at all.

 

Good marketing does not create motivation out of thin air. People are already motivated by something—solving a problem, reducing risk, saving time, improving status, or avoiding frustration. Marketing works when it recognizes those existing motivations and aligns with them, not when it tries to manufacture desire through pressure or hype.

 

When motivation is misunderstood, marketing becomes noisy. Messages get louder, offers more aggressive, and tactics more intrusive. The assumption is that people need to be pushed. In reality, they usually need to be understood.

 

Motivation also matters internally. Organizations that lose sight of why they market often drift into activity without purpose. Without a clear motivation, effort increases while impact diminishes.

 

Marketing succeeds not by overpowering motivation, but by respecting it.

 

Momentum

With the Super Bowl approaching, it’s worth borrowing a lesson from sports.

 

In baseball, a string of base hits can be more damaging than a single home run. The rally builds pressure, unsettles the opposition, and energizes everyone involved. In football, the same principle applies. Methodical, sustained drives down the field are often more demoralizing than a single long touchdown pass. Those drives communicate control. They wear opponents down.

 

Marketing momentum works the same way.

 

Many businesses look for the equivalent of the long pass—one campaign, one viral post, one silver bullet, one promotion that suddenly changes everything. Occasionally that happens. More often, lasting advantage is built through steady progress: consistent messaging, repeated exposure, and incremental trust earned over time.

 

Momentum isn’t about speed or spectacle. It’s about direction and endurance. Familiarity takes time. Trust takes repetition. Recognition builds quietly before it becomes obvious.

In marketing, as in sports, the teams that control the field over time tend to win—not because of one dramatic moment, but because the pressure never lets up.

 

Closing

These are big words. Not because they sound impressive, but because they ask more of us. They require judgment, patience, and restraint—qualities that are easy to overlook in an environment that rewards speed and volume.

 

Discernment, context, motivation, and momentum won’t make marketing easier. But they do make it better. They remind us to slow down, think clearly, and act with intention. In a world full of noise, those may be the biggest advantages of all. 

Momentum

One of the basic principles of marketing success is momentum. I think here, for example, of a giant concrete wheel with a tiny handle. To get the wheel turning takes a great effort. At first, it takes all your strength to simply get it to budge. But then, once you get it started, it takes less effort with each revolution until it seems to have a life of its own. To keep it spinning at a high velocity then requires a minimal effort on your part. You can't neglect it, of course, because it will eventually slow to a stop and you are back to where you started.

Well, companies have momentum, too. As do careers. It seems to take an inordinate amount of energy to get a brand established. The power and value that accrues can become startling to the one who initially invested so much to get that wheel turning.

Football players understand the psychological power of momentum. Last night when Alabama routed Notre Dame to take the national championship in college football, the Notre Dame head coach had one task at halftime, and that was to turn the tide, to reverse the momentum somehow. They failed and the outcome became a given. Likewise in football, the ability to assemble long drives can be more devastating than a chance long ball touchdown pass. Those drives show dominance, and instill respect. In baseball, a series of base hits can do more to damage the competition than a home run. The thrill of the rally ripples through the whole stadium. An error, or a fumble or a stupid penalty can upset the momentum and make the team wonder, "Uh, oh, what next?" The psychological edge it blunted.

Cities can have momentum, too. While watching leaders in our Twin Ports towns of Duluth and Superior these past few years, I have observed that there are a lot of people working hard behind the scenes to bring about change for the good in these communities. All cities have their tidal ebb and flow, but some towns have a more challenging time dealing with change. When a major employer leaves many small towns end up as ghost towns.

In 2005 a group of community leaders here in Duluth began a process of re-defining its vision for the future. One piece of that vision, based on the Richard Florida model, included the leadership role that the arts would play.

When I was a young artist in college I had a very political friend who wished me to become more politically aware and would tell me that "the artist is the vanguard of the revolution." In our cities here we're not seeking revolution, but we are seeking to strengthen our future, and the artists here have been on the vanguard of that change.

For a brief summary of activities in the arts in 2012 read my recent Reader column The Twin Ports Arts Scene: 2012. Let's work together to keep the momentum going in 2013.