About
Mike Millett teaches how trust forms and why customers move.
Marketing strategist, speaker, and author. Mike developed the Marketing Helix and Adaptive Brand Management, and founded Digilu in 1999. MarketingOB1 is where he teaches the ideas in public.
@marketingob1
Why MarketingOB1 exists
A place to teach the ideas in plain language.
MarketingOB1 is the public teaching platform for ideas developed through years of practical marketing, brand, reputation, and growth work. The frameworks came out of client problems that had to be solved, not out of a desire to publish a framework.
The formal version of the behavioral model lives on MarketingHelix.com. The commercial application lives at Digilu. This site is where the ideas get explained without the framework language: what actually happens when a customer moves, and what a business is supposed to do about it.
The central belief
Trust comes before sustained growth.
Attention can be bought. Trust has to be earned, and it decides whether the attention was worth anything. A business that is trusted gets considered faster, forgiven more, recommended more often, and questioned less. A business that is not trusted has to pay for every one of those things separately, forever.
That is not a moral position. It is an operating one. Trust changes the cost of everything else a business does.
Trust First. Hello is only the beginning.
The current work
What Mike is building now.
- Building Digilu as an Adaptive Brand Management company, taking ongoing responsibility for a business's trust, visibility, and relevance as the world changes.
- Developing the Marketing Helix, the behavioral model for customers in motion.
- Operating AIOInsights, the diagnostic platform that shows what customers, search systems, and AI systems can currently find and trust about a business.
- Writing and speaking about trust, adaptation, and customer movement, including Elevate or Vanish and the essays in the Ideas section.
Selected experience
Thirty years of operating work.
Product brands and franchises, law firms, local service businesses, personal brands, ministries, and nonprofits. A few examples that shaped the thinking.
StratusClean, VP of Marketing
Stratus Building Solutions was a successful commercial cleaning franchise with a name that told the market almost nothing. Perception weakened positioning before trust could form. The repositioning to StratusClean corrected the category signal and helped create a clearer platform for growth: a Google rating that moved from 3.4 to 4.7, and four consecutive years recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine as a fastest growing franchise in North America.
Robertson & Associates
Long-term authority work around complex wildfire litigation. Sustained, credible, correctly sourced evidence built trust in a category where claims are cheap and scrutiny is high. It is the clearest example in the portfolio that trust accumulates through consistency, not through campaigns.
Digilu, founded 1999
The company where the ideas are applied commercially. Digilu now operates as an Adaptive Brand Management company and is where businesses go when they want someone to take ongoing responsibility for the work rather than run a project.
Teaching and writing
Marketing instructor at Pepperdine University. Contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine and Authority Magazine. Author of Elevate or Vanish and of the Adaptive Brand Management foundations paper published by Marketing Helix.
Entrepreneur Magazine
Contributor and featured expert. StratusClean recognized as a fastest growing franchise in North America four consecutive years.
Pepperdine University
Marketing instructor. Taught brand strategy and marketing principles to graduate and professional students. M.Div. and B.A. in Speech Communications.
Authority Magazine
Featured contributor on trust-based marketing, brand authority, and AI visibility.
Boston Scientific
Official Patient Ambassador for spinal cord stimulation. Advocate for people living with chronic pain.