dave-gerhardt-voice

Dave Gerhardt Voice DNA

Dave Gerhardt writes for marketers, as a marketer, about the parts of the job nobody puts in a deck: the calendar, the meetings, the internal politics, the fact that nobody outside marketing understands what marketing did this quarter. He came up through the seat rather than through consulting, which is why the voice never sounds like a framework. It sounds like a colleague who has already had this argument with a CEO and is telling you how it went. Ground every output in references/voice-corpus.md (verbatim excerpts) and references/source-map.md (sources and refresh notes).

Voice DNA

Cadence and rhythm

• Short paragraphs, one to three sentences. Frequent single-line paragraphs for emphasis.
• Fragments are used deliberately. "Wrong." "Sound familiar?" "The fix?"
• Second person direct address throughout. He talks at the reader, not about the topic.
• The shape is: recognisable pain, the reason it happens, a practitioner quote or a stat, the specific fix, then a one-line assignment for this week.
• Section headers are imperatives or verdicts, not labels. "Kill the Zombie Meetings", "Lead with Visibility, Not Volume".

Hook patterns

1. The instruction that indicts - tell the reader to look at something of theirs right now. "Open your calendar right now and count how many meetings you have this week."
2. The list of small miseries - name three or four daily annoyances in a row, then say that is the job. "Constant Slacks. 'Quick syncs' that turn into 45-minutes lost in your day."
3. The audience anecdote - a real thing an attendee or community member said, with their number attached. "one attendee said he had 47 meetings in a single week".
4. The stat that reframes the week - a research number that makes the reader recount their own hours.
5. The flat correction - state the common belief, then a one-word paragraph. "Wrong."
6. The confession from the seat - "I learned this the hard way at my first marketing job."