Building a brand is hard enough; but when you’re a marketer, the challenge intensifies. You feel the pressure to be perfect, and every misstep feels like you “should’ve known better.”

Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson and Founder of the Marketing Club Chanel Clark co-host this episode.

In this episode, Chanel shares how leaning into authenticity and vulnerability, rather than perfection, built her credibility, grew the Marketing Club to 10,000 members, and turned simple diary-style LinkedIn posts into a fully booked consultancy and speaking opportunities with Google and SXSW.

The episode covers:

• How Jack accidentally picked a fight on LinkedIn and went viral
  
  
• How Chanel and Jack’s discomfort around talking about personal achievements makes self-promotion feel unnatural
  
  
• How Chanel has noticed marketing professionals struggle to transition from promoting others to promoting themselves
  
  
• The pressure Chanel believes marketers feel to present a perfect, polished image online
  
  
• How Chanel launched the Marketing Club from a simple Slack community and grew it to 10,000 members in two and a half years
  
  
• How Chanel’s public disclosure of losing $80,000 in her first year of business became a powerful LinkedIn post
  
  
• Chanel’s experience running a successful consulting business for 18 months without a website
  
  
• How Chanel built a personal brand by documenting her marketing journey through “diary entries” on LinkedIn
  
  
• How Chanel overcame her initial discomfort with self-promotion by being authentically vulnerable online
  
  
• How Chanel became fully booked within a month of launching her consultancy
  
  
• How Chanel grew her profile to secure speaking slots at SXSW and Google

Find links to Jack's and Chanel's online profiles below:

Find Jack on LinkedIn here: Jack Ferguson | LinkedIn

Find Chanel on LinkedIn here: Chanel Clark | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thepush

Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok

Follow The Push on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/bethepush

Visit The Push website here: For Senior Marketers...By Senior Marketers | The Push

Visit Jack’s personal website here: https://jackferguson.co/

Visit Chanel’s website here: Chanel Clark - Marketing Consultant

Visit The Marketing Club’s website here: The Marketing Club

Follow The Marketing Club on Instagram: Instagram

Follow The Marketing Club on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-marketing-club-au-nz

Every marketer knows the value of objectives, they help you prioritise, decide what to push, and what to park.

But here’s the paradox: the very objectives that keep you focused can come back to bite when stakeholders grip too tightly to the promises baked into them.

This episode is hosted by Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson.

In this solo episode, Jack unpacks a story of working with a professional services client where well-intentioned objectives turned into “but you said we’d have sales by now.”

From that experience came a shift in how he sets, frames, and manages objectives.

He’ll cover:

• Why outcome-based objectives set you up for blame when factors outside your control stall sales
  
  
  
• The danger of stakeholders remembering promises, not caveats
  
  
  
• How to balance short-term tactics with long-term brand building without losing credibility
  
  
  
• What input-based objectives look like in practice (and why they’re safer)
  
  
  
• How ongoing retainers and project-based arrangements affect expectation drift

If you’ve ever felt trapped between setting clear objectives and being held to outcomes you can’t control, this episode will give you a framework for balancing ambition with defensibility.

Helpful Links:

Find Jack on LinkedIn here: Jack Ferguson | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thepush

Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok

Follow The Push on Instagram here: Instagram

Visit The Push website here: https://bethepush.com/

Visit Jack’s personal website here: Brand Strategist: Marketing Consultancy — Jack Ferguson

Every marketer has faced it, clients convinced marketing should be a quick fix or a single big idea. In this episode, we discuss challenges with non-marketer persuasion, and why alignment and expectation management matter more.

This episode was co-hosted by Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson and E-commerce specialist Ben Reeves.

They discuss:

• How Ben’s client claimed his one “big marketing idea” worked, and whether his claim stands up to scrutiny

• How Ben missed out on hiring a top UX designer after a client insisted on an unnecessary last-minute “vibe check”

• How Ben’s retail client demanded that digital ads drove only online sales (not offline) and how he responded

• How Jack was asked to hire a PPC freelancer, then held accountable for results on a campaign he wasn’t managing

• How Ben rebuilt a company’s digital operations from scratch after realising they were running campaigns through WhatsApp chats and iMessage threads

• How Ben navigated his marketing role when one founder exited, roles shifted, and he had to play goalkeeper, midfielder, and striker all at once

• How Ben fought constant scope creep when “North Stars” kept changing

• How Jack and Ben discovered that much of a marketer’s work is invisible: fixing fundamentals, plugging holes, and preventing breakdowns that clients never see

Helpful Links:

Find Jack on LinkedIn here: Jack Ferguson | LinkedIn

Find Ben on LinkedIn here: Ben Reeves | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thepush

Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok

Follow The Push on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/bethepush

Visit The Push website here: https://bethepush.com/

Visit Jack’s personal website here: Brand Strategist: Marketing Consultancy — Jack Ferguson

Visit Ben’s website here: https://benreeves.co/

For small and medium sized brands, referrals feel like the holy grail of growth; no acquisition cost, easier conversions, and a compounding return on past work.

But what if you’ve done everything right and they still aren’t coming in?

In this solo episode, Jack shares how a referral drought in his own consultancy forced him to look beyond promotion and into service portfolios.

This episode discusses:

• How to calculate the odds of referrals based on your customer base size and buying cycles
  
  
• How “intrapurchase periods” can quietly kill referral flow
  
  
• Why the fix often isn’t more promotion or incentives, it’s reshaping the product or service portfolio itself
  
  
• How to help others refer work to you.

If you’re in B2B or selling higher-priced B2C and you’re relying on referrals, this episode discusses the math to make it work.

This episode was hosted by:

Jack Ferguson - Host of The Push and Brand Strategist

Find Jack on LinkedIn here: Jack Ferguson | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thepush

Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok

Follow The Push on Instagram here: Instagram

Visit The Push website here: For Senior Marketers...By Senior Marketers | The Push

Visit Jack’s personal website here: Jack Ferguson — Brand Strategist

When you’re paying your agency big money, how much of that is productive? And how much is pastries, drinks trolleys, and middle-management ticket clipping?

In this episode, Gerard Doyle joins Jack to share the hidden economics of Marketing Agencies.

We explore:

• Why glass-walled meeting rooms, front-desk greeters, and “free” pastries aren’t really free
• How bloated hierarchy and made-up titles inflate your bill without improving outcomes
• The silo problem: when the SEO and Google Ads specialists only talk in front of you
• How agency profit models push burnout down the org chart
• The career cost of locking juniors into narrow specialisations
• The importance of being a “triangle-shaped marketer”
• What a healthy, integrated team structure looks like

If you’ve ever wondered where your budget really goes, this episode will fill you in.

This episode was co-hosted by:

Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson

And

Fractal Agency Owner Gerard Doyle

Find Jack on LinkedIn here: Jack Ferguson | LinkedIn

Find Gerard on LinkedIn here: Gerard Doyle | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: The Push: Overview | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok

Follow The Push on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/bethepush

Visit The Push website here: For Senior Marketers...By Senior Marketers | The Push

Visit Jack’s personal website here: Jack Ferguson — Brand Strategist

Visit Gerard’s website here: The Startup Marketing Agency for Founders and Entrepreneurs – Helping Entrepreneurs find customers for their amazing services and inspiring solutions

Differentiation vs. Distinctiveness.
It’s a debate that’s been looping in marketing circles for years; so what’s our take?

In this episode Jack discusses the effectiveness of both concepts and shares how he talks about it with non-marketers.

In this episode Jack covers:

• The "Laptop Bag Story" that simply explains category entry points, distinctiveness, and differentiation
  
  
• How Uber could have theoretically used differentiation in the beginning of their growth, before utilising distinctiveness for further growth beyond a certain size
  
  
• How Kit Kat’s “Have a Break” is a distinctiveness play 65 years in the making
  
  
• Kantar’s data on when differentiation matters most in a brand’s lifecycle
  
  
• The category entry points Snickers are (probably) chasing right now
  
  And
  
  
• A simple framework for explaining these concepts to stakeholders, jargon-free

If you’ve ever struggled to simplify these distinctiveness and differentiation for non-marketers, or you want to solidify your own philosophy around these concepts, this episode will give you the stories, analogies, and data points you need.

This episode was hosted by:

Jack Ferguson - Host of The Push and Brand Strategist

Find Jack on LinkedIn here: Jack Ferguson | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: The Push: Overview | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok

Follow The Push on Instagram here: Instagram

Visit The Push website here: For Senior Marketers...By Senior Marketers | The Push

Visit Jack’s personal website here: Jack Ferguson — Brand Strategist

Resources Mentioned:

Defending Differentiation Video: Mark Ritson on defending differentiation - IGNITE 2023

Category Entry Points Explanations and Case Studies: Category Entry Point Examples | CEP Case Studies And Inspiration

Brand Salience Definition: How to measure Brand Salience | Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science

In this episode, Jack and Chanel discuss burnout, how marketers are susceptible to it, and how tying your identity in a high-growth brand can be addictive, but unsustainable.

We cover:

• How running 2 sold-out events in 1 day was a burnout breaking point
• What it’s like to go from high-functioning to non-functioning overnight
• Jack’s experience with burnout after launching 14 restaurants for a brand in a year
• How being “the face” of a breakout FMCG brand can blur every boundary
• What happens when ambitious marketers have to stop
• The emotional fallout of stepping away from a brand that has become your identity
• How posting about burnout on LinkedIn turned Chanel into an accidental poster child
• What burnout recovery really looks like

This episode was co-hosted by:

Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson

And

Founder of The Marketing Club and Independent Consultant Chanel Clark

Find Jack on LinkedIn here: Jack Ferguson | LinkedIn

Find Chanel on LinkedIn here: Chanel Clark | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on LinkedIn here: The Push: Overview | LinkedIn

Follow The Push on TikTok here: thepushmedialab (@thepushmedialab) | TikTok

Follow The Push on Instagram here: Instagram

Visit The Push website here: Marketing scenarios. Relatable problems. Practical solutions. | The Push Podcast

Visit Jack’s personal website here: Jack Ferguson — Brand Strategist

Visit Chanel’s website here: Chanel Clark - Marketing Consultant

Visit The Marketing Club’s website here: The Marketing Club

Follow The Marketing Club on Instagram: Instagram

Follow The Marketing Club on Linkedin: The Marketing Club AU/NZ: Posts | LinkedIn

Every marketer knows positioning is crucial, but explaining that to stakeholders is often met with blank stares or polite nods.

In this episode, we’ll share an effective analogy that helps stakeholders get it.

We’ll cover:

• Why most brands confuse company, brand, and product positioning, and how to untangle them
  
  
• The ‘Queensland Analogy’ that makes positioning land with non-marketers
  
  
• How to explain positioning as a driver of choice, not just communication
  
  
• How to make stakeholders see positioning as a commercial decision, not as a creative one

Whether you’re trying to reposition your company or simply tired of fighting for strategic clarity, this episode gives you a straightforward way to make the value of positioning obvious.

This episode was hosted by:

Jack Ferguson - Host of The Push and Brand Strategist

Find Jack on LinkedIn here

Subscribe to The Push on YouTube here

Follow The Push on LinkedIn here

Follow The Push on TikTok here

Follow The Push on Instagram here

Visit The Push website here

Visit Jack’s personal website here