Fresh off the Omar Roubi interview, Marc and Vassilis sit down for the PostPod to work through what stuck.

The uncomfortable one: when the business is broken, whose job is it to stop advertising? Target Canada ran full advertising cycles, back to school, holiday, the works, while shelves sat empty and the experience fell apart. So the spend did not just fail to help. It amplified a promise the business could not keep. "Expect more, pay less" landed as "expecting more, paying more."

They get into the reflex every marketer knows: use it or lose it, and the maturity it takes to hand budget back and say the problem is upstream. Plus leading versus lagging indicators, why revenue tells you far too late, and how supply chain efficiency and customer sentiment map onto physical and mental availability.

They also sit with the thing that keeps pulling them back: it was not one P, it was the clock. A lease deal and government hiring timelines built a manufactured pressure that eroded the quality of every decision after it. Nordstrom entered around the same time with a slower playbook and lasted longer.

No clean verdict. A much better set of questions.

Enjoy the show!

Chapters

00:00 Doomed from day one

00:38 PostPod: debriefing Target Canada

00:52 A case study that keeps giving

02:40 Going all in, and Nordstrom's different path

04:05 Canada's geography vs three warehouses

05:41 Whose job was it to say "stop advertising"?

07:49 Use it or lose it: should marketing give budget back?

08:14 Shared accountability and deferred blame

10:56 Leading vs lagging indicators

12:08 The promise to the customer

13:49 Mapping mental and physical availability

14:13 The price problem: priced premium, wasn't

16:08 You can't isolate one P: the clock

17:00 Making quality decisions under pressure

19:28 Why extremes are the best teachers