Your marketing playbook is outdated (here's what's replacing it)

An invite to our September 15th talk on what winning companies have figured out

Sep 04, 2025

The best product used to win. Now the best stories do.

(Yet most companies haven't gotten the memo.)

I was talking to a founder last week who spent two years building what is genuinely a better project management tool. Better features, cleaner interface, faster performance. But they're getting crushed by a competitor with a clunkier product and a more compelling story.

This keeps happening.

When anyone can spin up a SaaS in a weekend and 10,000 new products launch every day, "better features" don't cut through the noise anymore. Your customers are choosing which story they want to be part of.

We're entering a new normal where everything has changed about how people discover, evaluate, and buy from companies. Talent included.

The tactics that worked even five years ago feel ancient now. Growth playbooks from 2019 read like marketing archaeology. Most companies are still playing by the old rules while their competitors figure out the new game.

Making sense of the new normal

I was talking with my friend Adam about what I've been noticing, and he mentioned that he’s running into similar patterns. We run different consultancies yet we keep bumping into the same thing. The companies that are crushing it right now have figured out something the rest haven't.

They know exactly who they are and why they exist. And that clarity shows up everywhere—in how they hire, how they talk to customers, how they build products, how they show up online.

The companies still struggling with growth? They're optimizing landing pages while their competitors are building movements.

We gave a version of this talk to a room full of VCs last fall. Halfway through, you could see the lightbulb moments happening. Partners were quietly texting their portfolio companies. The managing partner pulled us aside after to say it was one of the best talks of the offsite.

So we decided to update the talk and share it with the people who actually have to execute this stuff every day.

Sound familiar?

Maybe you're the founder who's also the head of marketing, head of sales, and head of everything else. You built something genuinely useful, but you're drowning in a sea of "me too" competitors who somehow get more attention.

Or you're the CMO at a Series B company watching your tried-and-true tactics suddenly slow down. Your CAC keeps climbing while your conversion rates drop, and you can't figure out why.

Maybe you're the designer who got handed the "brand strategy" along with your UI work, or the product person who realized that features don't actually sell themselves.

If you've ever wondered why your objectively better product is struggling to keep up with competitors who have worse functionality but better stories, this is for you.

Here's what you'll actually learn

We're going to walk through several fundamental shifts that define how marketing is changing. Not theory, not best practices from 2019, but the actual playbook that winning companies are using right now.

You'll see exactly how to identify which of your current tactics are dead weight and which ones just need to evolve. We'll show you the what actually works in this new environment, with real examples from companies making this transition successfully.

We'll show you how to adapt what you're already doing without starting from scratch.

Want to join us?

We're doing this as a live ~~webinar~~ virtual talk because the best conversations happen when you can ask questions and dig deeper on the stuff that's most relevant to your situation.

If this sounds up your alley, grab a spot here.

It's going to be a good one.

—Elan

Elan is the founder of Off-Menu, where he helps founders figure out how to win on the new internet.