Conviction is found in the field. You have to talk to people and get your hands dirty. I spend my time with customers, subject matter experts, online communities, and the people inside the building, then build brand and creative functions on what turns up.
Why the conviction has to come before the message
Most brand messaging skips straight to solutions and features. It describes what the product does, lists who it's for, and moves on. The result is accurate, competent, and completely interchangeable. Any competitor could sign it without changing a word.
A conviction is the thing your buyers already suspect but nobody has said out loud.
Convictions are what make an audience say exactly. They turn a silent frustration into a shared belief, and a shared belief is what earns the right to present a solution.
Believing is belonging.Patrick Hanlon, Primal Branding
Hanlon argues that durable brands operate like belief systems, and that part of declaring what you stand for is naming the people you are not for. He calls them the pagans. Most companies won't do it, because excluding anyone feels like leaving money on the table. It's the same instinct that produces messaging a competitor could sign.
Brands built the other way attract people who already agree. That reduces churn, shortens sales cycles, and makes word of mouth do work that paid media otherwise has to buy.
Go into the field: customers, experts, communities, the people inside the building, and what the answers already say. The truest version of a story is usually already out there.
A laddered messaging system from corporate strategy down to feature-level language, so every team downstream inherits it instead of relitigating it.
Briefs, voice standards, testing systems, and AI workflows that let a lean team ship on a deliberate cadence without the message drifting.
Five places I go before I write anything. Each one knows something the others don't.
Interviews, sales calls, and the stories people tell once the pitch is over.
The words buyers use for the problem, and the objections nobody wrote down.
Engineers, product teams, practitioners, analysts.
The claims you can actually defend, and the proof underneath them.
Reddit, LinkedIn, forums, and the comment sections.
What people say about the problem when no vendor is in the room.
Founders, executives, sales, and customer success.
What leadership believes and hasn't written down yet.
Search results and AI answer engines.
What the market already says about you, and the questions where you're missing from the answer.
Features on this sheet. See the full portfolio
Conceived and built the plan for the company's first national brand sponsorship: strategic brief, messaging architecture, creative direction, channel strategy, and activation roadmap. An ambitious swing for a fleet software company, and one that could have gone either way.
Built the company's first laddered corporate narrative and sequenced its rollout against three category moments: a first-ever user conference, an annual state-of-the-industry report, and the first analyst quadrant published for the category. Presented to the executive leadership team and the board.
Grew organic traffic 40% year over year and organic MQLs 30%. The top-of-funnel engine came to influence roughly 45% of inbound leads. Built the multi-format system behind it, taking long-form customer interviews across editorial, social, video, email, and events, plus a library of 15+ customer stories still in active use across the sales cycle.
Hired the content and social team, grew it through four stages of company scale, and expanded scope to an eight-person group across content, social, design, video, and PR/comms, plus agency management. Held final creative sign-off, built the intake and prioritization systems that replaced ad hoc requests, and directed a full trade show booth redesign end to end.
Built the argument and messaging plan for the category's first analyst quadrant, creative directed the visual system, and led the claims framework through the analyst firm's compliance review and legal. Sequenced it as one of the three moments in the corporate narrative rollout, and reorganized awards and speaking around accolades that reinforce the story.
Rebuilt design and content workflows so projects arrive roughly 80% complete before human touch, so the team refines what matters instead of producing variants. Paired with a pipeline that flags decaying content, drafts the update, and routes it to an editor to publish, and a skills library encoding voice, research standards, and thought leadership direction.
Working documents, not case studies. Each one came out of a real problem, got rewritten after contact with reality, and is portable to any company. Examples use a manufactured brand so nothing proprietary travels with them. They run in order, and each one hands the next something.
00 Where convictions come from
Five places to listen before anyone writes a message: customers, experts, communities, the people inside the building, and what search and AI already say. What to pull from each, and how to tell when you've heard enough.
Read the framework
01 The system underneath the work
A laddered framework from corporate strategy down to feature sets, built so convictions come before solutions. The one most teams skip, and the reason their messaging sounds like everyone else's.
Read the framework
02 How to actually build voice guidelines
Stop asking which adjectives describe the brand. Show people the same fact written five ways and ask which one sounds like you. Voice guidelines built from choices, not vibes.
Read the framework
03 The editorial bar
Every piece either earns a save or earns a send. Content that does neither doesn't publish. One question that replaces volume targets with a quality gate, and gives a lean team a defensible reason to say no.
Read the framework
04 Sessions people keep using
Build every session backward from the thing the attendee is holding at minute sixty. A gate for what earns a webinar, a run of show weighted toward the build, and a playbook that keeps working after the call.
Read the framework
05 How work gets made and proven
Front-load the work that makes iteration cheap, ship the smallest version that can teach you something, and let evidence decide what earns polish. Includes the module system and the testing order.
Read the framework
Getting named in the answer
Buyers build the shortlist inside AI answers and never click. Where to look, how to baseline what the engines say about you, what to change, how to ask others to change it, and what success looks like.
Read the frameworkWhat a marketing team stops doing once AI can write.
I build the workflows that answer that question, and the gates that stay human: what we work on, what the quality bar is, and what ships. Those are judgment calls, and an accelerating pipeline can't make them for you. That call is the work.
For an afternoon, for a season, or for good. Most of my favorite conversations start with a question.
“Can you check this out?” “Is this legit?” “Where should I put my focus?”
Send it over. I'll tell you what I'd keep, what I'd cut, and what I'd go find out first.
Between marketing leaders, ahead of a launch, before an analyst cycle.
Or when the company has outgrown its story. I go into the field, build the system, and hand it to whoever runs it next.
A permanent seat.
Building a brand and content function and leading the team inside it. This is where I've spent most of my career.
Fleet management, construction, transportation, utilities, automotive, accessibility compliance.
Industries where the buyer is a practitioner, the budget is scrutinized, and anything that sounds too polished gets discounted on arrival. That shapes how I work: clarity over cleverness, proof over promise, practical over impressive.
I've been the person who builds the function rather than the one who inherits it. Hiring the first content person, standing up brand campaigns from scratch, stepping into creative leadership when the org needed it. The through-line is infrastructure: playbooks, briefs, frameworks, and operating systems that outlast whoever built them.
| 2026–now | Level Access | Senior Director, Corporate Marketing |
| 2021–2026 | Fleetio | Director, Brand Campaigns · Content Marketing |
| 2020–2021 | AutoTec | Manager, Marketing & Communications |
| 2016–2020 | Cayenne Creative | Senior Digital Community Manager |
| 2014–2016 | Books-A-Million | Brand Content Coordinator |
Purple marks the current role, the same way it marks live work above.
Send me what you're working on: a page that isn't landing, a vendor pitch that sounds too good, a launch that needs a story, or a role building the team that tells it.
zach@zdsearcy.com