Marketing Against the Grain
Intelligence extracted from Marketing Against the Grain newsletters.
30
Issues Tracked
21
Insights Extracted
8
Topics Covered
Topics
Key Insights from Marketing Against the Grain
**Marketing Against the Grain** released a free AI field guide with 25 tactics including turning one blog post into 10+ cross-channel assets.
Marketers can use the guide to build **AI agent workflows** for research, writing, and strategy execution.
The guide covers **personalized newsletter generation**, ad campaign creation in minutes, and building a virtual board of advisors with AI.
**HubSpot's** rebrand, led by senior creative director **Daniel Koch**, drove a 31% increase in demo conversion rate and a 15% boost in email CTR by shifting from a youthful aesthetic to a more sophisticated upmarket identity.
**Gap's** 2010 logo redesign was reversed within one week due to massive public backlash, illustrating how deeply consumers connect with established brand identities.
Koch's core branding advice is to balance retaining familiarity for existing customers while evolving the brand's visual language to attract a new, more senior buyer audience.
**BERO Brewing** VP Jackie Widmann says consumer testing revealed NA beer drinkers are frustrated with taste and carbonation, so the brand focuses on elevating product quality rather than persuading beer drinkers to switch.
**BERO** positions its non-alcoholic beer as an additive to drinking culture rather than a substitute, distinguishing itself from competitors who frame NA beer as a lesser alternative.
**Tom Holland's** organic posts outperform co-branded **BERO** collaboration content, proving that authentic celebrity involvement beats polished celebrity marketing.
**57% of B2B marketers** plan to increase **AEO** investment in the next 12 months, but only **8%** have incorporated AEO metrics into their reporting.
Latest issue: July 15, 2026
30 mins, 4 AI wins 🏆
Paid marketing’s missing step ⚽
🗑️ You’re wasting AI on captions
Let's get personal 💅
Group chat ➡️ career empire
⌚ The 19-minute fix your content strategy is missing
Your ads aren’t failing (but your benchmarks might be)
The World Cup’s missed branding opportunity
💋 The kiss of death for your social
A playbook that raised $20m 💕
The podcast stat that will reframe your strategy 🎙️
What B2B marketers should (and shouldn’t) learn from B2C 💼
🥳 The hottest marketing strategy right now is... a party invite?
Can answer engines see video? 👀
Inside the $15.8B TikTok Shop opportunity
Stop seeding the wrong people
🌀 Don't treat a crisis like a campaign
📸 Your camera doesn’t matter
What to do if you fall out a plane? ✈️
LLMs love.... LinkedIn? Really??? 🤨
22 rapid-fire ideas to steal [NEW VIDEO]
You’re building your brand backward
AI hacks to try at work 🧑💻
Marketing Against the Grain released an AI use case field guide featuring 25 time-saving tactics for marketers, covering content repurposing, personalization, AI agents, and ad campaign generation. The guide is positioned as a free resource for marketers looking to leverage AI tools in their daily workflows.
🌩️ Feeling bold?
This edition of Marketing Against the Grain explores what makes a memorable brand, using HubSpot's recent rebrand as a case study. Senior Creative Director Daniel Koch explains how HubSpot evolved its brand from a hyper-energetic, youth-skewing identity to a more sophisticated look to appeal to upmarket buyers, resulting in a 31% increase in demo conversion rate and 15% rise in email CTR. The newsletter also references Gap's infamous 2010 logo failure as a framing device for why brand identity matters deeply to consumers.
🕸️ Not even Spider-Man can shortcut good marketing
Jackie Widmann, VP of Marketing at BERO Brewing, shares three core marketing lessons from building Tom Holland's non-alcoholic beer brand. Key insights include the importance of narrow audience targeting, positioning a product as additive rather than a substitute, and the fact that celebrity backing doesn't replace rigorous marketing strategy. The newsletter also promotes a State of AEO Report covering how brands should adapt to AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
AEO without ownership is just expensive guessing
A survey of 250 B2B marketing decision-makers reveals that 57% plan to increase AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) investment in the next 12 months, yet only 8% have incorporated AEO metrics into their reporting. Additionally, 41% of organizations lack clear AEO ownership — either no one is responsible (26%) or responsibility is distributed across teams with no single lead (15%). The newsletter recommends building reporting infrastructure and ownership frameworks before scaling AEO spend.
Forget "cutting-edge technology"
This newsletter features behavioral psychology lessons from Phill Agnew, host of the Nudge podcast, applied to marketing campaigns. Key insights include why algorithmic reach underperforms borrowed audiences, why concrete language is 8x more memorable than abstract phrases, and why showing social proof visually beats merely claiming it.
LinkedIn > YouTube
Wistia's 2026 State of Video report reveals LinkedIn has surpassed YouTube as the top platform for B2B video sharing. Key findings include longer webinars (30-40 minutes) seeing 70% higher engagement, 48% of teams increasing distribution budgets, and overall video budget growth slowing with only 49% planning increases (down from 57% in 2024). The newsletter also links to content on YouTube subscriber count becoming a vanity metric and audience distribution strategies from MrBeast's content strategist.
What could you do with 800 more hours? 😩
HubSpot's Product Marketing lead program manager Jamie Hill shares how his team built a process map that saved 800 hours of labor while managing Spotlight, a twice-annual event launching 200+ product updates with 750+ marketing assets and 500+ stakeholders. The newsletter outlines how chronic pain points like late decisions, frequent changes, and coordination overhead drove the team to overhaul their marketing workflow framework. Hill's approach involves a structured process map and decision matrix to eliminate manual fire-fighting and scale to any business size.