Cover Brand

What if the person who knows your work best got to ask the questions? That's this episode.

Aicila Lewis has been producing Cover Brand since before Ethan knew it was live. She's heard every episode, watched the frameworks land in real time, and spent years telling Ethan he needed to bottle up those coffee conversations where someone walks away going, wait, that's all I had to know? For episode 69, she finally gets to ask some of...

How do you turn people who stumbled into the Farmer's Market on a nice Saturday into more engaged partcipants?

Mackenzie Sehlke is the executive director of the Boulder County Farmers Markets, a 40-year-old nonprofit running seasonal markets in Boulder and Longmont, plus a food hub that's been quietly building for six years. She came in wanting to know how to convert casual visitors into lifelong fans. What she got was permissio...

An engineer-artist who builds soft skills training like a video game — and the brand problem that comes with it: how do you look trustworthy to the suits who sign the checks while staying genuinely weird for the Gen Z workforce who actually uses the thing?

Sayre Blake is a systems engineer, concept artist, and founder of SkillSage (that's S-K-I-L-L-S-A-I-G-E — the AI is in the name) — a soft skills training pla...

John Tayer has run the Boulder Chamber for thirteen years. He knows the joke — the Chamber is your father's Oldsmobile — and he's not here to argue with it. This episode works through what you actually do when your brand has been aging with its customer instead of recruiting new ones, and the honest answer is more interesting than a rebrand.

Ethan and John pull the Oldsmobile metaphor apart live: product vs. packagin...

A pillow that took six years to build, a third of your life to use, and one conversation to reframe — what happens when you've got a genuinely great product but the pricing, positioning, and place are all pulling in different directions?

Siri Schubert-Nicolella is a wellness expert, bodywork practitioner, and the creator of a contoured natural latex pillow she designed from scratch — hand-carved with her husband in t...

Every few years, someone slaps a new name on the same old thing — and suddenly there's a conference, a certification, and software to go with it. Is account-based marketing actually a discipline, or is it just marketing with a better LinkedIn bio? And if you can't describe what you do without a subgenre, is the subgenre helping you — or just hiding the ball?

Laura Dodds is a digital marketing and demand generation le...

This week Ethan chats with John Pabon. John is a sustainability strategist, former McKinsey and UN consultant, and author of three books including The Great Greenwashing and the just-released Strategic Sustainability: A Pragmatic Blueprint for Responsible Business. This episode digs into one of the most stubborn gaps in brand communication: the chasm between what companies say about their values and what consumers actually do at th...

Two brands, one expert, and a mission that makes being the expert feel like a contradiction — how do you build something institutional out of something that personal?

Carmell Clark is an executive coach with 25+ years of experience, creator of the Core Self-Discovery curriculum, and founder of the Center for Transformational Influence (CTI) — an organization built to help individuals and companies break free from unh...

What if the reason your marketing isn't landing isn't your message — it's that you're still treating people like targets instead of humans?

In this episode of Cover Brand, Ethan Decker welcomes back Chelsea Burns, brand ethicist and relational psychologist at The Marketing Psychologist. Chelsea's work sits at the intersection of consumer neuroscience, relational psychology, and ethical influence — and she's got a bon...

What does it mean to be out — fully, authentically, unapologetically yourself — especially when the culture around you keeps trying to make you invisible?

In this episode of Cover Brand, Ethan Decker welcomes Jamie Rich, a community builder with 23 years of experience producing live cultural events, including founding the Kansas City LGBT Film Festival. Jamie is now launching Out Here Together, an online wisdom and resou...

Are you spending weeks trying to find a brand name that explains exactly what you do? Stop it. Your buyers are mental misers. They aren't parsing the literal meaning of your name; they just need a reliable shortcut.

In this episode of Cover Brand, Ethan Decker welcomes Dror Yaron, a life coach working to humanize business. Dror is struggling with a literal name ("Ethics Coach") that feels heavy and attracts the wrong crowd. Ethan an...

Nic Hinwood returns to Cover Brand for a Shop Talk episode about the messy middle of brand building—the place where client expectations, practical marketing work, and brand science collide.

Nic runs Keo, a brand and marketing agency in Tamworth, Australia, working primarily with small and medium-sized businesses. After sixteen years in business, he has watched his agency evolve from producing tactical assets—logos, w...

How do you choose the right marketing tools when there are thousands of options claiming to do the same thing?

In this episode of Cover Brand, Ethan Decker sits down with Jay Friedman, co-founder of Cartograph AI, to explore the increasingly complex world of marketing technology.

As AI lowers the barrier to launching new products, the number of martech vendors continues to grow rapidly. While this innovation creates opportunities...

How do you build awareness for a movement around an issue people often avoid discussing?

In this episode of Cover Brand, Ethan Decker talks with filmmaker and founder Karen Moore about her mission to address colorism through film, workshops, and community conversations.

Karen’s company, The Color of Beautiful Media & Entertainment Group, works to redefine beauty standards for dark-skinned Black women and create spac...

How do you focus a brand when your expertise could help almost anyone?

In this episode of Cover Brand, Ethan Decker talks with Chelsea Burns, founder of The Marketing Psychologist, about the early-stage challenge of narrowing a brand’s target audience and defining its core offering.

Chelsea’s business blends psychology with ethical branding and marketing, helping organizations build trust-based relationships with ...

How do you compete with big-city agencies when you’re based in a town of 50,000 people?

In this episode of Cover Brand, Ethan Decker talks with Nic Hinwood, founder of Keo, a branding and marketing agency based in Tamworth, Australia. Together they unpack the perception challenge facing regional agencies—and why buyers often rely on subtle cues when judging expertise and credibility.

Ethan introduces several practical...

Ready to stand out in an industry that wasn’t built for you? This episode is a sharp, honest conversation about identity, confidence, and what brand science actually says about change. Victoria Carrington Chávez—TEDx speaker, narrative strategist, and founder of Lilac & Aspen—joins Ethan to explore how young, multi-identity marketers can cement their presence without sanding off what makes them different.

T...

How does a small marketing agency grow when buyers struggle to tell agencies apart?

In this episode, Ethan Decker and Megan Bortner explore the mechanics of differentiation in B2B services. They discuss why most agencies are comparable in the eyes of buyers, how growth comes from acquiring more customers rather than creating extreme loyalty, and why focus is often more powerful than breadth.

You’ll hear how narrowing into a...

How do you know if your personal frustration is a real market opportunity?

In this episode, Ethan Decker and Tatyana Huseynova unpack the early thinking behind a niche consumer product idea in the outdoor sports space. The problem is specific. The category is crowded. The need is under-addressed.

The discussion covers how to evaluate demand, where to find early signals of interest, how to think about market size without perfe...