Essay: Swimming Downstream…at three different speeds.
The shortest version.
Swimming Downstream is about understanding how markets naturally move, and making brands easier to buy within those currents, rather than fighting against them.
The slightly longer version.
Swimming Downstream is a different way of thinking about markets, growth, and decision-making.
It argues that organizations often focus too heavily on what customers think, feel, or prefer— or say they think, feel or prefer — while paying too little attention to when buying situations arise, how brands become mentally available within them, and which market conditions make growth easier or harder over time.
It’s not that positioning, persuasion, differentiation, or creativity don’t matter. It’s that they work differently depending on whether they align with the way brands and buyers actually behave and interact in the marketplace.
Swimming Downstream shifts attention away from isolated tactics and toward the broader currents shaping behavior before individual decisions are ever made — with the goal of making brands easier to notice, easier to retrieve, and ultimately easier to buy.
The version with enough room to think properly.
Swimming Downstream begins from a simple observation: markets move before marketers do.
Most organizations focus their attention on the most visible parts of marketing — messaging, positioning, differentiation, campaigns, persuasion, optimization. These things matter. But they are often interpreted in isolation, without enough attention to the broader conditions shaping how buying actually happens.
In practice, people rarely approach markets as detached evaluators carefully comparing brands from first principles. Buying behavior is shaped by timing, habit, familiarity, recognition, mental availability, category situations, convenience, and the accumulated effects of repeated exposure over time. Much of what determines a brand’s competitiveness is already in motion before any individual campaign or decision enters the picture.
This changes how marketing effort should be understood. Organizations frequently mistake visible movement for meaningful progress — but the easiest signals to measure are not always the most important ones to base decisions on. Short-term response, engagement, loyalty, precision, and even successful-looking campaigns can create the appearance of momentum while leaving the brand no easier to buy in practice.
Swimming Downstream argues that growth depends less on forcing behavior against the current than on understanding the current itself: where demand already exists, how buying situations emerge, which conditions shape choice, and whether marketing activity is reinforcing those patterns or working against them.
The metaphor matters because it changes the role of marketing. The goal is not to abandon creativity, persuasion, strategy, or intervention, but to place them in context—to understand whether they’re helping the brand move with the way the market already behaves or creating unnecessary resistance by working against the way buying actually happens.
Organizations often manufacture friction by solving for the wrong constraints, then conclude “our marketing isn’t working hard enough” or “markets themselves are difficult to move”, rather than “we’re pushing in the wrong direction.” Swimming Downstream argues for a different approach: understanding when buying happens as well as what people think, interpreting signals more carefully, and making brands easier to notice, easier to retrieve, and easier to buy over time.