Strategy. Brand. Deliver.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve been able to try Coca-Cola in over 10 countries, each with its own distinct flavor that reflected the local culture. 🌍

Most people grab a soda out of habitual buying behavior, including myself, as I’m not much of a variety-seeker. So when I recently sat down for a History Channel documentary on the Cola Wars and ran a blind taste test, I was all in. 🦊

Lo and behold, I picked out my favorite right away. If you’ve never really had a cola, Coke and Pepsi taste nearly the same. But for those of us who are fans, the difference is very real.

The documentary covers the decades-long war between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. It was crazy to learn about the Pepsi Challenge and how Coke launched New Coke as a brand-new product in 1985. It flopped hard, and customers were furious! I know if I were alive then, I would be as well... 🙃

It tied right into what I’d been reading on consumer buyer behavior. New Coke failed because the choice was never about taste; it was about perception and emotion. People didn’t just want a drink; they wanted the version of Coke that fit their lifestyle and identity.

So how do people choose when products are this similar? Honestly, the product stops being the point. 🧠 People buy the brand they feel connected to, which is why someone will proudly call themselves a “Coke person.”

In a crowded market, you’re not selling a product; you’re selling a feeling people want to be part of. ✨

As a small business owner, it’s been really interesting trying to identify my target audience. Who do I actually want to help solve their brand positioning challenges?

I’ve had clients that are 7-figure businesses and others who are just getting started. Surprisingly, the process of helping them is quite similar. But finding them? That’s where the similarities disappear. 🔍

Recently I dove deep into market research, and it tied directly into what I’ve been wrestling with at work. Positioning matters, but it means nothing if the right people can’t find you. It’s like a doctor with a cure for an illness, but no one knows he’s a doctor. 🩲

At Blue Luna, we’re currently narrowing down our target customer using a mix of primary data we collect ourselves and secondary data from outside sources, including AI search engines that are giving us a whole new layer of customer insights we didn’t have access to a year ago. 📊

Big data and marketing analytics are making this kind of research more accessible and affordable than ever for small businesses like ours. 🤖

Big takeaway: even the best positioning is useless without research to back it up. Without that, you’re just a great doctor in an empty waiting room. ✨

As an entrepreneur, I dream of one day owning a portfolio of businesses to run, scale, exit, and repeat. 💼 It’s one of the major reasons I’m studying finance. The principles are timeless and carry over into every industry.

However, I recently came across a perspective that honestly changed how I think about organizing a business portfolio.

We studied Johnson & Johnson, a company most people know for BAND-AID, Tylenol, and Johnson’s baby shampoo. But those iconic consumer brands only make up about 15% of J&J’s $94 billion in annual revenue. The real bulk comes from their pharmaceutical and medical device businesses. That kind of diversification made their business portfolio so complex that J&J recently made a major strategic planning move: splitting into two separate companies. 📊

Their portfolio analysis used the BCG growth-share matrix, which sorts every business unit into stars, cash cows, question marks, or dogs based on market growth and market share. 🐕

Here’s what really opened my eyes: identifying which products to keep or drop isn’t just a finance call. Finance can run the numbers all day, but without marketing’s view of the customer and the market, you might end up keeping a “dog” or killing a future “star.” 💡

Big takeaway: even if I want to build, scale, and exit businesses one day, I’ll never be able to do it well with just a spreadsheet. We need the perspectives of every department, including marketing, to make the most informed decisions. 🚀

The Japanese really know how to make amazing food... But it wasn’t the taste that pulled us through the door. It was something way simpler. 🤳🏻🍣

We just went to Japan in April, and it was an amazing trip, country, and culture. 🇯🇵 We were so impressed by the hospitality and kindness from the Japanese people, and we already look forward to going back!

One thing became really clear about halfway through the trip. Every time we were hungry, looking for a restaurant to eat at, which in Tokyo and Kyoto means thousands of options, we were only going to eat at places where the food looked delicious in their menu photos, Google storefront pictures, or window advertisements. 📸

If the photos didn’t look appealing, we kept walking and searching for somewhere else.

Looking at it through a marketing lens, our need for food was real (we were starving most days from all the walking), but our wants were a lot more specific. We wanted ramen that looked rich, sushi that looked fresh, and gyoza with crispy bottoms. Since we had money in our pockets ready to spend, those wants basically turned into demands.

The places with dismal marketing lost us as customers. I’m sure some of them had amazing food, but we just weren’t drawn to their offering. That’s marketing myopia in action: focusing so much on the food itself that the restaurant forgets how customers actually choose where to eat. No appealing photos meant no exchange ever happened, because we never even walked through the door. 🚪

The places that nailed their visuals got more than our money. They got our customer satisfaction and our recommendations to other travelers we ran into during the trip. 🍜

Honestly, especially in a foreign country where we couldn’t read the menu, the photos made the decision for us. Marketing matters way more than I realized, even before anyone takes a bite. ✨

I cancelled my Notion subscription this week. And what I replaced it with kind of blew my mind.

It started with a YouTube video by Dr. Thomas Roedl. He walked through how you can use Claude Code to build your own system for storing and organizing all of your notes, files, and business information right on your computer instead of paying for tools like Notion.

But the deeper I got into his content, the more I realized this guy isn’t just teaching productivity tips. He’s running his entire business with two humans and 28 AI assistants, each one with a specific job like video editing, YouTube strategy, copywriting, and even a “fox” named Larry who manages the whole team.

Two people. Twenty-eight AI roles. That’s it.

That concept alone rewired how I’m thinking about my own business.

But back to the practical side. I’ve used Notion for a long time and it worked fine. But I’m tired of paying for a dozen different subscriptions when I don’t have to. Using just my Claude Code subscription, I built my own system that stores everything I need, organized the way my brain actually works. I can update it whenever I want, ask Claude to find things in my files, and it just works. And the more I use it, the smarter it gets because it learns from everything I feed it.

What really ties it all together is Tom’s ICOR framework, which stands for Input, Control, Output, Refine. The idea is simple. Tools will always change, but your system underneath shouldn’t have to be rebuilt every time you switch apps.

That hit home for me because I’ve been that person who jumps from tool to tool and starts over every single time.

I’ve shared this setup with a few friends and it’s already changing how they work too. I’ll drop the video link in the comments for anyone who wants to check it out.