The weaker campaign is the one that changed behavior permanently.
Two Texas cities went after grocery bags. Austin banned them and held the ban five years. Dallas ran a bag fee for five months. Both produced the same side effect nobody campaigned for: shoppers who had been lining their kitchen cans with free grocery bags started buying real trash bags. Trash bag sales ran 68% above baseline in Austin and 71% above baseline in Dallas.
Dallas moved more behavior. Hold that thought.
Both policies were repealed, and that’s where the two cities stop looking alike. Dallas drifted back to baseline. It took 13 months, but shoppers went back to doing what they’d done before. Austin never went back. Sales stayed up, and the researchers behind “Are We Worse Off After Policy Repeals?” in the Journal of Marketing Research read the gap the obvious way: five years builds a habit, five months rents one. (They also found both policies still net out positive for the environment, which is a separate argument from this one.)
Now hold your own campaign calendar next to that.
Every promotional mechanism you run has two effects. The lift you measure while it’s live goes in the deck. The habit it installs shows up three years later, in a meeting where someone asks why the renewal team can’t hold list price anymore.
The 20% discount you introduced “just for Q4” is how many quarters old now? Long enough that your customers stopped experiencing it as a discount and started experiencing it as the price. The free tier you shipped as an experiment isn’t an experiment anymore. It’s the product for a real slice of your base, and you’ll find out how big that slice is on the day you meter it.
Think of it as the road-crew problem. Close a street for six weeks and traffic comes right back when the barrels leave. Close it for three years and the side street quietly becomes the route. Nobody re-optimizes their commute the day a detour ends, they keep driving what they know.
So run the audit, and it takes an hour. List every “temporary” mechanism currently live: the discount, the grandfathered plan, the free seat you threw in, the white-glove onboarding you promised one big logo. Put a start date beside each one. Anything older than a year isn’t temporary. Price it, staff it, and forecast it as permanent, because that’s what your customers already decided it is.
Worth Your Time
- Four AI models agreed on a source 1.7% of the time (Orbit Media): Bill Widmer tracked 13,184 citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, and all four picked the same domain for the same question in 30 of 1,792 chances. Perplexity averaged 19.2 sources per answer against Claude’s 3.6. “Our AEO strategy” is really four strategies, so pick the engine your buyers use and go deep.
- Most AI capability changes don’t mean your positioning is wrong (April Dunford): Her test is three questions, and the third one carries the weight: did any of this shift your value themes? Usually not, and the new capability is just better evidence for the position you already hold.
- Agencies are building audit tools because their own AI agents keep overspending (Digiday): Gartner surveyed 1,300 senior marketers in April and expects 60% of organizations using AI to hit cost overruns from thin usage tracking. One agency found a single employee burning 1.5 million tokens a day. Put a cap and a log on any agent workflow before you scale it, not after the invoice.
- The market is repricing per-seat software (SaaStr): Figma grew 48% and is down 35% year to date, while CrowdStrike grew ARR 25% and is up 83%. Growth rate isn’t what separated them. Consumption pricing versus seat pricing did, and your CFO will start that conversation without you if you let them.
- OpenAI is building out the ChatGPT ad stack (Search Engine Land): Global expansion plus audience targeting, conversion measurement, and reporting is the full checklist for a real ad platform. Put a test line in 2027 planning now. The wait-and-see window closes the week your competitor publishes a case study.
- Community pulse: r/ProductMarketing spent the week on a question with no clean owner: who’s responsible for what AI tells a buyer about your product? The old reputation stack was reviews, PR, and social mentions, and nobody’s job description covers the new layer. Over in r/GrowthHacking, a marketer watched AI Overviews visibility climb while rankings and clicks stayed flat, and now keeps two dashboards open that refuse to agree.
What’s the oldest “temporary” thing still running at your company? Reply with how many quarters it’s been. I’m collecting them.
Wondering where your growth engine is leaking? The Growth Gap Diagnostic is where I’d start. Or just hit reply and tell me what you’re stuck on.