A glass filling itself
The map on the wall is beautiful. A thick knot of pins right around the city where it all started.
"That's our stronghold," the founder says. "Let's press the advantage."
So the fall budget goes there. Another billboard on the interstate and a bigger mailer. Two more ZIPs worth of ads, all hugging the knot.
Sales in the knot go up four percent. About what they went up last year and the year before.
Nobody is looking at the small town two hundred miles north. It has eleven pins today. Last spring it had four.
No billboard out there or mailer. Nobody on the team could find it on a map without help. The orders just keep coming, a few more every month, from people telling people.
The knot is a full glass. Keep pouring and it doesn't get any fuller. The small town is a glass filling itself.
Here is what most maps get wrong. They show you where you are. They don't show you where you're going.
That's the map we build. Not where your pins are thickest. Where the orders are climbing on their own, faster than the town's population and your ad spend explain, in your own numbers.
We won't tell you why that town is waking up. We tell you it is and where. What you point at it is your call.