How I Think About Marketing
Marketing isn't a pyramid. It's a flywheel.
You've seen the food pyramid. Grains at the bottom, fats and sugars up top, handed down for decades as settled nutritional science. That diagram turned out to owe rather more to the lobbyists who quietly shaped it than to anyone's health. A pyramid is a great shape for making an argument look finished. It's a lousy shape for describing how marketing actually works.
Marketing isn't a hierarchy you climb once and plant a flag on top of. It's a loop you keep spinning: build the foundations you own, use paid advertising to accelerate through them, then reinvest the return into authority that makes the next spin cheaper and faster. Here's the whole thing, and how I think you should think about each part of it.