About
Mike Millett writes about how trust forms and why customers move.
Founder of Digilu, developer of the Marketing Helix, and author of Elevate or Vanish. MarketingOB1 is his online media channel: essays and video on trust, marketing and customer behavior. His biography, speaking and media live at mikemillett.com.
MarketingOB1
Why MarketingOB1 exists
A place to explain the ideas in plain language.
MarketingOB1 is Mike's online publishing and video channel, 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, Digilu's 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.
Stratus, former 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. During his time as VP of Marketing, the franchise-system Google rating moved from 3.4 to 4.7, and Stratus Building Solutions ranked #1 on Entrepreneur's Fastest-Growing Franchise list four consecutive years, 2023 to 2026.
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
Has taught marketing at Pepperdine University. Interviewed in Authority Magazine's CMO Perspectives series. Author of Elevate or Vanish and of the Adaptive Brand Management foundations paper published by Marketing Helix.
Entrepreneur
Stratus Building Solutions ranked #1 on Entrepreneur's Fastest-Growing Franchise list four consecutive years, 2023 to 2026, during his time as VP of Marketing.
Pepperdine University
Taught marketing: SEO and AI optimization, e-commerce optimization, and how infrastructure costs a business its speed and results.
Authority Magazine
Interviewed in the CMO Perspectives series (2024) on where to assign a marketing budget, and why.
Where to go next