Skip-Bo and the Wrong Deck of Cards
Why your marketing can feel off even when you’ve done everything “right”
A Story, Told From a Dentist’s Office
I’m sitting in a dentist’s office right now.
Not exactly the place writers dream of creating… but here I am.
A few days ago, I had one of those rare, good hard laughs.
The kind where it’s so funny you can’t get air. Where your abs suddenly decide to work harder than you asked them to.
The kind where no sound comes out and tears blur your vision.
Those laughs don’t come too often.
But they’re so good.
It happened at a Starbucks with my mom, my aunt, and my two kids. We met to exchange Christmas gifts and spend some time together. We started with a game of cards and thought Skip-Bo would be fun to play.
My mom pulled out the deck and began shuffling.
The instructions, though, were far too complicated.
We didn’t care to work that hard that day, so instead we used the deck to play a game of Crazy Eights… much like Uno.
What we didn’t know was that a Skip-Bo deck of cards is nothing like a normal deck of cards.
The game quickly turned into confusion. Bouts of laughter rolled in, building up momentum as we began to understand what was happening with this deck. People in Starbucks were staring at us, smiling, as they witnessed the squeals burst out of our silent laughing heaves.
Turns out, a game of Crazy Eights can’t really be played with a deck of Skip-Bo cards.
You Can’t Play the Game With the Wrong Deck
I came home and told my husband the story. He said, “That sounds like what your clients do. You should blog about that.”
Using the story for my blog hadn’t even crossed my mind, but he was right.
People try to do marketing with the wrong deck of cards.
The flow and voice of their copy is off. Their strategy tries to fit a mold, but it’s not working. They’ve done the email funnels. They’ve done the lead magnets. They’ve done the website.
But clients don’t come in. Offers aren’t grabbed. Silence is nice… but not when it comes to business.
This is usually the moment people assume they need more.
More strategies, more templates, more systems.
But most of the time, the issue isn’t effort…
It’s vision.
When Marketing Feels Off, It Usually Is
I talk a lot about creativity and storytelling, not because formulas are useless, but because formulas are only a starting point.
I’m an observer. I watch and analyze. And much of my assessment in the brand world reveals row after row of cookie-cutter houses. Everyone sounds the same, looks the same. No one stands out.
You might know the rules of the marketing game, but if something’s not working, maybe it’s just a matter of grabbing the right deck.
Businesses don’t grow because they followed a perfect template.
They grow because they built something people wanted to step into.
A voice.
A flow.
A world that makes sense the moment someone enters it.
What Actually Works
You need to understand storytelling.
Marketing.
A good flow of writing.
You need a mind and creativity that casts a greater vision than just a series of emails.
You need a world that draws people in.
So put down the Skip-Bo deck.
Stop signing up for all the programs, filling in premade templates, and letting AI piece it all together for you.
Play the game with better cards.
A story that supports your product or offer.
Emails that match your identity.
A website that gets the flow of sales right and gets it done subtly.
A system that fits your rhythms and your schedule.
An audience that is real and connected.
An audience that doesn’t just consume what you create,
but is changed because they entered the world you built.
If you’ve been playing hide and seek with your creativity…
If your smashed out on time…
If you want to be the gorgeous storybook cottage that doesn’t look like the row of Stepford Wives matching houses…
