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Lochhead on Marketing

Lochhead on Marketing

Written by: Christopher Lochhead
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 Lochhead on Marketing™ is the award winning, chart topping podcast for entrepreneurs, marketers, and category designers with a different mind. Most people do not like it.Copyright ©2021 Economics Marketing Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • Why Marketing Is the Leadership Department

    Why Marketing Is the Leadership Department
    Nov 12 2026

    When times get strange, real leaders stand up. In 2020, the coronavirus has created a heavy human and economic toll, and a downturn looked likely. Pipelines shrank budgets tightened, public companies missed guidance, and private ones found loans and venture money harder to come by. Christopher Lochhead argued that this is exactly the moment when marketing proves its worth. Done well, marketing could set the tone for the whole company, and its impact in tough times is hard to overstate.

    We are looking back into one of our earliest episode and reiterate our game plan back then on how to position ourselves in the best possible way despite the ongoing crisis. Let’s see how many of you were successful in following our list, or have developed their own ways to come out on top through Marketing.

    Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind.

    Lead Together and Lead With Honesty

    If you’re a CEO, think about leading your company and your category through marketing. If you’re a CMO, think of yourself as your CEO’s personal press secretary. In a crisis the two of them should be stapled together, because marketing unifies communications and sets the voice every spokesperson uses.

    Radical transparency matters just as much. Skip the legal and HR babble, and skip lines like “we project a slight take down in revenue growth.” Lochhead points to a struggling company whose CEO and board have been strikingly candid with everyone. That honesty builds trust, and people want to help a team that talks straight.

    Do Good and Cut Smart

    This is a good time to help people. If your company can donate technology, money, or resources, do it, and ask whether you’re doing right by your own employees and their families. Hospitals, charities, and nonprofits fighting the virus could use the support too.

    On the budget side, use the moment to drop anything that doesn’t move the needle. Lochhead says most marketing plans carry about 20% of stupid, baked in like government entitlements. Cut once and cut deeper than feels comfortable, so you don’t have to revisit it in two months.

    Get Thoughtfully Aggressive

    Research from McKinsey, Bain, and HBR suggests that between 9 and 14% of companies beat competitors by at least 10% in sales and profit growth during a downturn. They act fast, make the required cuts, then push hard ahead of the recovery. Aim to be in that group.

    Evangelize your category so people see it as a must have, not a nice to have. Your competitors will likely slash big-picture marketing and over-focus on demand generation, which leaves room for you to own the point of view. Still, keep the cash register ringing. Put five sharp marketers and five sharp salespeople in a room for a day, pick the simplest ideas, and go sell more into existing customers.

    Want to check the whole list? Download and listen to this episode.

    We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on Marketing™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and subscribe on Apple Podcast / Spotify!
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    12 mins
  • PSJ Special Segment: The First AI-Assisted Election | The Pirate Street Journal

    PSJ Special Segment: The First AI-Assisted Election | The Pirate Street Journal
    Nov 6 2026
    The midterm elections wrapped up yesterday, and plenty of people are still sorting through the results. But the hosts of the Pirate Street Journal came away with a different kind of takeaway. This may have been the first AI-assisted election at any real scale, and each of them used the technology in a very different way. One built a voting framework with Claude, one cross-checked three chatbots on California propositions, and one skipped AI entirely and tested what campaign marketing does to a voter’s head. What they found was useful, a little uncomfortable, and in one case very funny. Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind. Building a Voting Plan With a Chatbot Eddie went into this cycle with a problem most of us share. Beyond the two or three names at the top of the ballot, he had no idea who half the candidates were. So he gave Claude his address, asked it to pull up his ballot, and had it interview him about what he cares about. The result was a personal framework: a sensible economy, a reflective stance on AI, leaders who look forward, and measurable outcomes over speeches. He voted ahead of time, so the booth held no pressure. The tool had gaps. It missed a few races, and judges and forest preserve candidates were beyond its reach because no information existed. Eddie filled the holes with a loose belief in checks and balances, voting against incumbents in a heavily Democratic Illinois and tossing a few random votes to Republicans for the sake of competition. When he had nothing at all, he confessed he voted for Asian candidates, a bit of what he called positive racism borrowed from a Ronny Chang comedy routine. Cross-Checking Props and Local Races Christopher faced a different headache in California. Many ballot propositions are worded so confusingly that even when you know what you want, you can’t tell whether to vote yes or no. He ran the props through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok, and argued with each of them, since he figures a single chatbot is too eager to please. Gemini, he said, shut down any political conversation almost immediately. About two thirds of his props turned out to involve raising taxes or making it easier to raise them. He was also surprised by how much the models knew about hyper-local races. ChatGPT had details on a city council contest in Capitola, a town of roughly 10,000 people, and even tracked the vote count drops. That raises an opening for entrepreneurs: a nonpartisan voting agent that gives someone in rural Alaska the same depth of information as someone in a California beach town. Bias, Marketing Noise, and a Peaceful Handoff Christopher raised the touchy question of who builds these models. He pointed to a stat that roughly 80% of engineers at the major labs lean left, and argued that bias deserves a public conversation, ideally solved by builders and not by new regulation. He also noted that models are designed to agree with you, so you have to tell them to give you facts and not flattery. Bri ran the opposite experiment. She skipped AI, judged the election by the flyers, texts, and TV ads she saw, then discovered the “vote no on number two” slogans had little to do with what was printed on her ballot. Christopher closed on a note that stuck. He recalled George H.W. Bush saying that watching power change hands without a drop of blood shed is the real marvel. Whatever side you’re on this morning, the peaceful transfer is worth appreciating. To hear more about the topics in this week’s The Pirate Street Journal, download and listen to this episode. You can also read more Pirate Street Journal entries in the Category Pirates newsletter. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on Marketing™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and subscribe on Apple Podcast / Spotify!
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    24 mins
  • Anthropic S1: Their biggest customers spend 0.1% of revenue on AI | The Pirate Street Journal

    Anthropic S1: Their biggest customers spend 0.1% of revenue on AI | The Pirate Street Journal
    Nov 6 2026
    Most people assume Anthropic is bleeding cash. After reading the S-1, the hosts of the Pirate Street Journal came away with a different picture. The company pulled in about $23 billion over the first nine months of the year, compared with roughly $2.5 billion in the same stretch last year. Investors have put in around $140 billion, and about $132 billion is still sitting in the bank. The headline loss of $104 billion looks scary until you see that roughly $94 billion of it is a paper charge on convertible notes that gained value as the company did. Here is what the hosts found when they dug in. This episode of The Pirate Street Journal breaks down three major business topics through that lens. Christopher, Eddie, and Bri take a hard look at the week’s most important business news and share what the Wall Street Journal and the rest of the mainstream press consistently miss. The result is a faster, sharper, and more honest read on how business actually works. Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind. The Fastest Revenue Ramp Ever Recorded Compare fifth-year revenue. Nvidia did $29.1 million. Google did $439.5 million. Anthropic did $4.59 billion. Nothing in tech history looks like that. Strip out the accounting noise and the business is cash flow positive, with about $6.6 billion in operating cash flow over nine months. The company spent only $9 or $10 billion in net cash to stand up a $65 billion revenue business. Market share tells a similar story. Menlo Ventures reported Anthropic’s share climbing from roughly 40% last year to 55% this year. Even the biggest customers spend only about 0.1% of their revenue on tokens, against technology budgets closer to 4 or 5%, so the room to grow looks enormous. Anthropic: Power, Politics, and the Problem of Messaging Anthropic has a weak spot: it does not control its own infrastructure. Its S-1 names access to data centers, compute, and power as its biggest fear. Elon Musk has said power is now the limit, Microsoft has struck a long deal to revive Three Mile Island, and data center moratoriums are gaining ground in politics. If the U.S. turns hostile to data centers, Musk, with his plans for orbital compute, could end up holding the strongest hand. The hosts also think the company markets itself badly. Its letter leads with abstract benefits and heavy risk language, including a warning that the technology could harm humanity. Simple promises would land better: a doctor or nurse available around the clock, a personal CFO that saves you money, and a software engineer on call. Bree’s own story fits that pitch. AI helped her sort out her acne, then her thyroid problem, and then a skin condition, and her family benefited too. A Knife’s Edge Business With Near Infinite Demand The CFO’s job looks brutal. Slow the spending and revenue cools, which drags down the valuation. Push the spending and you need power that may not exist yet, plus compute bought on the spot market, which can flip the P&L upside down fast. The hosts expect wild swings in year one for anyone buying the stock, and say only an iron stomach will do. Still, the long view is bullish. The category is not really artificial intelligence, it is intelligence, and the collective intelligence of everyone beats the intelligence of a few. Demand for that may have no ceiling. The hosts expect Anthropic to produce a legendary outcome, though they expect the volatility to be just as legendary. To hear more about the topics in this week’s The Pirate Street Journal, download and listen to this episode. You can also read more Pirate Street Journal entries in the Category Pirates newsletter. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on Marketing™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and subscribe on Apple Podcast / Spotify!
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    39 mins
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