1 Blog

Teardowns, field notes, and real numbers from the core team and the community. The toolkits and processes nobody publishes - written long-form.

Darya Nikolaeva in Playbook24d ago

Automation You Don't Own Is Not a Saving. It's an Unpriced Risk.

Here is a question that stops most teams cold: if one of your automations quietly stopped working today, how exactly would you find out? Not "sales would notice". A mechanism. The question is uncomfortable because borrowed automation almost never fails loudly. It keeps firing on schedule, keeps showing a green status, keeps reporting success — and does nothing. A step returns "no data", and "no data" is indistinguishable from "there was nothing…

How-to Guide✦ Save

1 DOOR TEAM in Opinion28d ago

How to Build a Dream Team: Five Cases, Markers, and a Checklist

I learned leadership mainly at Mars and LEGO, from managers who considered leadership a craft with rules, not just a lucky character trait you either have or don't. I learned leadership mainly at Mars and LEGO, from managers who considered it a craft with rules, not a lucky character trait you either have or don't. And almost every manager I've met since has underestimated how much conscious work goes into a good team. Usually the bet is on the…

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Darya Nikolaeva in Playbook23 Aug

I broke our supply chain with one DM and two units

Two units of product. Zero pounds. Fourteen days out of stock. That is not a humblebrag, it is an indictment — of my own planning, and of an industry that has convinced brands the hard part is paying for reach. Brief an agency. Request media kits. Compare CPMs on a spreadsheet where every creator looks like a media buy. Negotiate a four-figure fee, a two-week approval cycle and usage rights I would never exercise. I skipped all of it. Instagram…

Template / ToolkitIntermediate✦ Save

Darya Nikolaeva in Ask the Community23 Aug

Your campaign worked five times too well. Whose failure is that?

Last week we published the story of how we took our own product out of stock with a single DM. Two units sent to a UK creator, no fee, fourteen days unavailable to buy. Everybody who read it agreed it was a good story. Nobody agreed on whose fault it was. So we are asking. "Marketing's. Obviously." You created demand you could not service. Forecasting the size of your own campaign is part of the brief, not a favour you do for the warehouse. If y…

Opinion / ColumnIntermediate✦ Save

AKAlla Kazanceva in Member Story20 Aug

We Were Looking for More Leads. We Found a Better Reason to Buy

Sometimes the best way to improve lead generation is to stop touching lead generation. In this Member Story, we look at an international logistics case where growth did not start with a new ad account, but with one simple question: what is the customer actually buying here? The initial brief sounded extremely familiar: a company handling international logistics from China to CIS markets needed more leads. The obvious next steps would have been e…

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AKAlla Kazanceva in Playbook20 Aug

The Leaky Bucket: Why Good Retention Is Not a Growth Plan

Imagine a business with excellent retention. Customers are happy, they come back, buy again, and churn is under control. Does that mean the company has a sustainable growth plan? The short answer is no. This is one of the questions in 1 GAME that seems almost obvious until you start looking at the mechanics behind it. Retention is critically important: it affects LTV, acquisition payback, marketing economics and revenue predictability. But good…

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AKAlla Kazanceva in News Reaction20 Aug

Three Quarters of Marketing in the UK Is Irrelevant. Marketers in the Same Survey Explained Why

75% of UK consumers regularly receive marketing they consider irrelevant. At first glance, it looks like yet another statistic about poor personalisation. But Optimizely surveyed not only consumers, but marketers themselves. That is where things get much more interesting. Marketing has been living with a strange contradiction for the past few years. We have never had this much customer data, nor this many tools for analytics, automation, persona…

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1 DOOR TEAM in Member Story18 Aug

My Odyssey Across Australian Online Experience

I built my first online store in Moscow in 2019. UX wasn't optional there. It was oxygen. Ship a clumsy checkout and your users were on Mvideo, or Ozon, or any of the other twelve tabs already open. The bar was absurd and everybody just accepted it: the checkout guessed your name, your city, your street, your apartment number before you finished typing. Card, cash on delivery, credit, split into four payments. Miss any of that and you didn't los…

Personal Story✦ Save

AKAlla Kazanceva in Expert Opinions15 Aug

Why counting touchpoints is no longer enough in 2026. Businesses need to build a relationship journey

For a long time, it was convenient for businesses to think of the customer as someone moving through a clear funnel: saw an ad, became interested, clicked, submitted a request, bought, returned. It looks neat on paper. It looks neat in reports too. In real life, however, customers tend to behave much less predictably. Someone might first hear about a brand on TikTok, then see a review on Google, then ask ChatGPT, then visit the website, leave, s…

Opinion / Column✦ Save

AKAlla Kazanceva in Cases15 Aug

Why strong specialists do not always add up to a strong result

There is a very appealing idea: if you bring enough strong people into a project, the result will automatically be strong. So, a great marketer, a strong e-commerce specialist, an experienced strategist, a good performance lead, a smart analyst, a bold creative, and a manager who knows how to build processes all come together. The plan is simple: everyone steps in, does their part, brings their expertise, packages the solution — and surely, the…

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AKAlla Kazanceva in Expert Opinions15 Aug

A good external partner should leave a business stronger, not more helpless

Outsourcing has long stopped being something rare or suspicious. Today, it is a normal part of the modern business model: companies outsource IT, customer support, marketing, design, development, analytics, e-commerce, logistics, HR, accounting, operational processes, and dozens of other functions. And it makes sense. It is not always beneficial for a business to keep everything in-house. Sometimes an external team is faster, more experienced, m…

Opinion / Column✦ Save

AKAlla Kazanceva in Playbook15 Aug

How to choose the right model for the task instead of getting stuck between “we’ll do it ourselves” and “let’s outsource everything"

When a business faces a new challenge, it often chooses between two familiar options: either train the existing team and try to handle everything internally, or hand the task over to an external contractor and hope that “they’ll figure it out.” Both options can be right. And both can fail. Because the real question is not which is better: an in-house team or outsourcing. The question is which model fits the specific task, timeline, level of risk…

How-to Guide✦ Save

AKAlla Kazanceva in Expert Opinions15 Aug

Marketing in 2026 Is No Longer a Funnel

For a long time, marketing was easy to imagine as a simple system: run ads, generate traffic, convert that traffic into sales. The more people you put at the top of the funnel, the more customers should eventually come out at the bottom. The problem is that customers stopped behaving this way a long time ago. Today, someone might discover a brand on Instagram, do nothing, see it again through a creator a week later, read some reviews, ask a frie…

Opinion / Column✦ Save

AKAlla Kazanceva in News Reaction4 Aug

Open ai: The Right Strategy Matters More Than Any Creative Idea

Marketing is often evaluated by the strength of its creative idea. How visually appealing a campaign is. How willingly people share its content. How quickly videos and posts spread. But in reality, the success or failure of most major campaigns is determined by something else. It is determined by strategy. OpenAI’s recent controversy is a good example of why these two levels should never be separated. For the first time, the company organized a…

Opinion / Column✦ Save

Darya Nikolaeva in News Reaction4 Aug

AI or Real Life: what actually sells!?

By Darya Nikolaeva — marketing lead, ecommerce and social across the US, Canada and UK Every second brand meeting I sit in this year opens with the same question: "Should we go AI or keep it human?" It's the wrong question. And it's costing people money. I've spent the last two years running paid social, TikTok Shop, Amazon and DTC for pet and CPG brands across three English-speaking markets. I've shipped AI creative that outperformed a $12K stu…

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1 DOOR TEAM in Cases28 Jul

How We Built Our eCommerce Training, and Why Few Trainers Do It

Here is the test I run in the room. I open each module by asking the team what they already know about the topic, and the answers come back thin, including from teams that finished an expensive program from a global provider six months earlier. The material was fine. It just never attached to anything. So we built our own eCommerce team training around a rule that sounds obvious and almost nobody operationalises: the session runs on the client's…

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1 DOOR TEAM in Cases27 Jul

L'Oréal Luxe Australia: a €15.6B strategy, and "REFIILLS" typo

My name is Michael, and I'm a Head of Digital sharing a bit of marketing magic, plenty of knowledge, and a lot of dedication. We went to buy YSL Black Opium the way a real Australian shopper does. We searched for it. The first sponsored result was Amazon AU at $129.99. YSL's recommended retail price is $215. Before we ever reached the brand, it had already lost 40% of its price and every word of its story. No complaints on our side, though. The…

Teardown / Audit✦ Save

AKAlla Kazanceva in Expert Opinions22 Jul

Advertising won’t save the product, the Price, the Team, or the Process

Very often, a company has the feeling that something is not working as it should: sales are growing more slowly than expected; advertising has stopped delivering a clear result; social media is being managed, but it is unclear what it actually brings to the business; a new product has been launched, but the market has not picked it up; the team is taking a lot of action, yet there is still no sense of moving forward. At moments like these, it is…

Opinion / Column✦ Save

1 DOOR TEAM in Cases21 Jul

We tried to buy a Dyson, but copy got the sale.

OPINION My name is Michael, and I'm a Head of Digital sharing a bit of marketing magic, plenty of knowledge, and a lot of dedication. Setting out to buy a Dyson the way any customer would, with a credit card and hours spent to track every intention, thought, move. We purchased it to see the whole picture, including the delivery experience. Somewhere between the search bar and the checkout of this eCommerce customer journey audit, a cheap copy of…

Teardown / Audit✦ Save

AKAlla Kazanceva in Cases18 Jul

BUSINESS PROBLEM FIRST. SOLUTION FORMAT SECOND.

My name is Alena. I am a Head of SMM working across branding, brand growth strategy, social communications, and PR management. That is why it is easiest for me to explain this topic through the language of SMM. It is one of the most common requests businesses make when they feel that something is going wrong: “We need to manage our social media,” “We need an SMM specialist,” “We need a videographer,” “We need an agency,” or simply, “We need more…

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Darya Nikolaeva in News Reaction17 Jul

TikTok Shop vs. Amazon: the smartest sellers stopped choosing.

For years it was a fork in the road. In 2025–26 the best operators just run both, as one machine. Through 2024–25, seller surveys (Jungle Scout, Marketplace Pulse) show a fast-growing share of Amazon sellers adding a TikTok Shop. Diversifying stopped being optional. Here's the part most people get wrong. 5 ways they're MORE ALIKE than you think: 1. Both are closed loops. Discovery, checkout, fulfillment happen inside the platform. Whoever owns t…

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Michael Bogatyrev in Cases14 Oct

Digital Presence Audit: Kincrome's digital toolbox needs a tune-up

My name is Michael and I'm a Head of Digital sharing a bit of marketing magic, plenty of knowledge and a lot of dedication. Kincrome has the tools, but does its digital strategy measure up? My research reveals gaps in SEO, customer journey, site speed, and strategy. The good news? With initiatives like Kincrome Academy, adjustment of audiences for the viral-ready content for TikTok & YouTube, and ideas like Fix It Forward and Garage Makeover fo…

Digital Audit✦ Save

Michael Bogatyrev in Cases17 Sept

CX Audit: 10 mistakes Honda makes online

My name is Michael and I'm a Head of Digital sharing a bit of marketing magic, plenty of knowledge and a lot of dedication.  One of my first cars was a '91 Honda Accord. It was bloody old and literally immortal. Back then, Honda was a legend, and no one could have imagined that in 2025 the brand would be facing years of declining car sales, with its market share shrinking more than five times since 2007. These 10 tips can help Honda Australia f…

Digital Audit✦ Save

Michael Bogatyrev in Cases18 Aug

TPG -50% Sign-Up: how a strong offer dies in a weak funnel

This wasn't my first hassle with TPG, so this time I tracked the whole UX journey to share it. Goal My goal was to move my two mobile plans from Telstra to TPG, since it looked like I could cut my costs by more than three times. Result I found 8 blockers killing conversion and rocketing support costs. - Existing customers are forced to create new accounts. - There is no clear choice between eSIM and SIM. - No Back button. Progress is not sav…

Digital Audit✦ Save