How to Not Make 2026 Your 2025 | Over the Bull®
Welcome to 2026. A new year always brings the same quiet temptation: to assume that a calendar change automatically creates a business change. But most business owners know the truth. If nothing is confronted, nothing changes. And when nothing changes,…
Welcome to 2026.
A new year always brings the same quiet temptation: to assume that a calendar change automatically creates a business change. But most business owners know the truth. If nothing is confronted, nothing changes. And when nothing changes, the next twelve months become a repeat of the last twelve months—same offers, same marketing noise, same vendor cycle, same confusion, same vague hope that this will be the year something finally “clicks.”
That’s why 2026 is a great time to talk about the Kraken.
Not the literal Kraken, of course. The mythological beast from sailor folklore. The monster that lived below the surface and could destroy ships with one angry movement. The Kraken is a metaphor—because modern business has its own myths, and one of the biggest myths of the last twenty years has been the internet itself.
Not the internet as technology. The internet as mythology. The internet as promise. The internet as a magical ocean where riches and opportunity are floating just below the surface—if only the right person can summon them.
The myth says this: success is waiting inside the internet, and the only thing missing is the right magician to harness it.
And that myth is quietly strangling businesses.
The Internet Myth: How Business Owners Got Trained to Believe in Magic
The myth didn’t form overnight. It was cultivated, repeated, marketed, and sold until it became “common sense.”
It shows up everywhere:
- “We can get you on the first page of Google.”
- “Just redesign your website and your business will take off.”
- “This AI tool will automate your growth.”
- “We can get you more leads, more traffic, more visibility.”
- “Just post daily content and the algorithm will reward you.”
- “If you don’t do this, your competitors will.”
That’s not marketing education. That’s a spellbook.
And like all spells, it works best when the listener doesn’t fully understand what’s being promised or what would actually need to be true for it to happen.
The internet myth thrives because it offers something extremely seductive: the idea that growth can be outsourced, automated, or bought without having to deeply understand the business itself.
That’s why “digital marketing” gets treated like a slot machine. Pull the lever enough times, and eventually something good will happen. Hire the next agency. Try the next tool. Switch the next vendor. Launch the next campaign. Redo the website again. Start fresh again. Keep feeding the system.
And when it doesn’t work, the myth protects itself. It convinces the business owner that the problem is the magician, not the mythology. So the cycle continues.
The Endless Vendor Loop: Hiring Magicians and Hoping for a Miracle
The loop usually looks like this:
- Business is struggling or stuck.
- A marketing person shows up with confidence and buzzwords.
- The pitch sounds believable because it matches what everyone else says.
- Money gets spent.
- Reports show “activity” and “growth” and “engagement.”
- The business doesn’t feel the results where it matters—revenue, margin, pipeline, customer quality.
- Doubt creeps in.
- The business owner fires the magician.
- A new magician appears with a new pitch.
- Repeat.
This cycle creates a strange reality: the business owner becomes both desperate and skeptical at the same time. Hopeful enough to keep buying new solutions, cynical enough to assume none of them will work.
The tragedy is that the business owner isn’t failing because they’re lazy, unintelligent, or unwilling to invest. They’re failing because they’re being trained to invest in tactics before understanding the real problem.
It’s entirely possible to spend tens of thousands of dollars over the years and still know almost nothing more about what actually drives growth.
That’s not growth. That’s motion.
Why 2026 Might Look Like 2025 Unless Something Breaks
Most businesses don’t collapse quickly. They fade slowly.
The owner works harder. The marketing budget creeps upward. The ads run. The website looks “cleaner.” The social media posts get more polished. The dashboard numbers rise.
But the business isn’t getting healthier. It’s getting tired.
And the reason is simple: tactics can create temporary spikes, but tactics can’t fix a broken understanding of the business.
If the underlying assumptions are wrong—about the market, the buyer, the offer, the differentiation, the operational capacity—then marketing becomes a costly amplifier of confusion. It makes the wrong message louder. It drives traffic to weak infrastructure. It attracts the wrong kind of leads. It creates pressure on teams that can’t fulfill what’s promised.
Worse, when marketing fails, business owners often conclude that marketing itself is a scam. They become defensive. They become cynical. They retreat into survival mode.
That’s the quiet failure.
2026 doesn’t need to be another loop. But escaping the loop requires something rare: a willingness to stop chasing magic and start pursuing clarity.
Marketing Isn’t a Spell. It’s a Diagnostic Tool.
Good marketing doesn’t start with tactics. It starts with questions.
In fact, good marketing is less like advertising and more like medicine. It’s diagnosis before prescription. It’s identifying the real problem before choosing the remedy.
A lot of marketing work is useless—not because the work is poorly executed, but because the business is doing the wrong work efficiently.
There’s a reason the quote still stings: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
A business can run excellent ads, publish excellent content, and build a beautiful website… and still fail. Because excellence in execution cannot compensate for a misunderstanding of what actually drives purchase decisions.
The difference between marketing and magic is that marketing should be able to explain itself.
Magic demands belief.
Marketing demands evidence.
Five Questions That Separate Real Marketing from Myth
If a business wants 2026 to be the year of actual progress—not just “new activity”—these five categories need to be addressed before touching tactics.
These aren’t theoretical. These are practical. And they create a framework that stops the endless cycle of redesigns, new campaigns, and “latest tool” hype.
1. Clarity: What Problem Is Actually Being Solved?
The most dangerous phrase in business is: “We need more leads.”
Sometimes that’s true. But often it’s a symptom, not a diagnosis.
More leads won’t fix a business that has:
- Poor positioning
- Weak pricing
- Confusing messaging
- A misaligned offer
- A broken sales process
- Bad follow-up
- Operational capacity issues
- Low trust in the market
Clarity means answering the hard question: what is broken first?
Before traffic, before branding, before social media, before SEO—what is the actual constraint?
And just as important: what is the value proposition, and is it real?
Many business owners believe people buy for a certain reason. But belief is not proof. It’s possible to be completely wrong about why customers choose the business. That’s not insulting—it’s normal. Owners get close to their own story. They assume what matters is what should matter. But buyers don’t operate on “should.” They operate on perception, need, risk, habit, and trust.
Clarity is the work of discovering what truly makes the business compelling—and whether that can be communicated with precision.
If a marketing agency builds a website or runs ads without deeply understanding what is being tested, they are guessing. And guessing is expensive.
2. Landscape: What Environment Is the Business Competing In?
Most businesses think competition is a list of other companies nearby.
That’s not competition. That’s a small slice of it.
Real competition includes:
- Alternatives (other ways the customer can solve the problem)
- Substitutes (cheaper or more convenient options)
- Inaction (the customer doing nothing)
- Familiar vendors (people default to what they already trust)
- Platforms (Amazon, Airbnb, big marketplaces)
- Buyer fatigue (too many choices and too much noise)
- Cultural shifts (how people search, how they buy, what they trust)
Landscape is understanding what options exist in the buyer’s mind before they ever see your marketing.
This matters because many markets are saturated—not just with competitors, but with attention demands. People are numb. They’re overwhelmed. They are trained to dismiss promises.
So the question becomes: how educated is the buyer? How crowded is the space? What is changing? What is making the buyer hesitate?
If a business can’t accurately describe the landscape, marketing becomes generic. And generic marketing is invisible.
3. Evidence: What Changed Because of the Marketing?
A dashboard can be a weapon of distraction.
Impressions, engagement, followers, video views, clicks—these numbers can rise while revenue stagnates. These are often vanity metrics. They’re not meaningless, but they’re not proof.
Evidence isn’t “look how many people saw the ad.” Evidence is “what changed in behavior?”
- Did qualified leads increase?
- Did conversion rate improve?
- Did the quality of inquiries improve?
- Did the sales cycle shorten?
- Did margin improve?
- Did repeat business increase?
- Did the business become easier to sell?
Evidence measures cause and effect.
The danger is that humans overtrust visible data and ignore what’s missing. The missing phone calls. The confusing experience. The friction that kills conversions. The missed intent. The leads that never convert. The traffic that bounces.
Real marketing work should generate learning. If the business can’t answer “what did this teach?” then money was spent without progress.
And without progress, 2026 will become 2025 with new graphics.
4. Alignment: Can the Business Sustain the Marketing Ambition?
Marketing often fails because it assumes a business can support what it’s trying to do.
A complex funnel doesn’t help a team that can’t follow up fast. A content strategy doesn’t help a business that can’t maintain it. Ad traffic doesn’t help if the website experience is weak, the offer is unclear, or the operational system is broken.
Alignment means matching the marketing plan to operational reality.
It’s not “what could work in theory.” It’s “what can the business actually maintain, deliver, and optimize?”
This is where many do-it-yourself marketing tools collapse. Templates can’t diagnose operational truth. Automation can’t fix misalignment. AI can generate content, but it can’t guarantee coherence across the entire customer journey—from first click to phone call to booking to fulfillment.
Alignment requires intention.
Every piece must fit: message, offer, tracking, follow-up, sales process, operations. Otherwise marketing is just a loud invitation into a disappointing experience.
5. Reality: Are the Assumptions True?
This is where most businesses either grow or repeat history.
Reality means testing assumptions.
It’s possible that the business is right—people truly buy for the reasons the owner believes. If so, great. The job becomes amplifying and clarifying.
But it’s also possible the business is wrong—or partially wrong. The market might value something different than the business emphasizes. The buyer might care about speed, trust, warranty, or simplicity more than the business realizes. The real differentiator might not be the one the owner proudly describes.
Reality requires humility and experimentation.
That’s why progress should look like Edison, not like roulette. Failure isn’t the enemy. Unexamined failure is.
There’s a massive difference between failing randomly and failing deliberately. Random failure teaches nothing. Deliberate failure teaches everything.
Businesses that learn become businesses that grow.
The Hard Truth: Good Marketing Often Feels Boring
The internet myth makes business owners crave excitement.
A new tool. A new campaign. A new hack. A new “secret.” A new platform.
But real marketing is often mundane.
It’s refining messaging.
It’s improving conversion flow.
It’s mapping the customer journey.
It’s tightening the offer.
It’s testing assumptions.
It’s tracking what matters.
It’s fixing friction.
It’s aligning operations with expectations.
It’s repeating what works and discarding what doesn’t.
This doesn’t feel like magic.
It feels like work.
It feels like walking through mud sometimes—slow progress, constant learning, small adjustments.
But that’s where growth becomes real. Because growth isn’t a spike. Growth is a system that steadily improves.
How to Inoculate Against the Magician Pitch in 2026
If 2026 is going to be different, a business owner needs a different filter.
Before hiring anyone, before buying any service, before investing in any tool, the following questions should be asked:
- What problem is being solved?
- What assumptions are being tested?
- What will success look like in measurable business outcomes?
- What evidence will prove this is working?
- What will be learned if it doesn’t work?
- How does this align with operational capacity?
- How does this differentiate in the current landscape?
- What happens after the lead is generated?
If someone can’t answer these questions clearly, they’re selling fantasy.
And fantasy is expensive.
The goal is not to become cynical. The goal is to become immune to myth. Because the internet is not a Kraken. It doesn’t need a magician. It needs strategy, alignment, and honest testing.
The Promise of 2026: A Year of Real Progress
There’s something sobering about realizing that a year can pass without meaningful change.
But there’s also something empowering about realizing that it doesn’t have to.
The difference between repeating years and building momentum is not the size of the marketing budget. It’s not the newest tool. It’s not the fanciest branding.
The difference is whether the business is learning.
If a business becomes disciplined about clarity, landscape, evidence, alignment, and reality, marketing stops being a gamble and becomes a system.
And systems build freedom.
That’s what makes 2026 worth taking seriously.
If Integris Design can help a business work through these questions, uncover what’s truly holding it back, and build a marketing approach based on evidence instead of myth, then the year ahead doesn’t have to be a repeat of the last one.
The Kraken isn’t real.
But the consequences of believing in it are.
The best year in business isn’t created by magic. It’s built by clarity and truth—tested, aligned, and proven over time.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” – Thomas Edison
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE NOW:
How to Not Make 2026 Your 2025 | Over the Bull®
Welcome to 2026. A new year always brings the same quiet temptation: to assume that a calendar change automatically creates a business change. But most business owners know the truth. If nothing is confronted, nothing changes. And when nothing changes, the next twelve months become a repeat of the last twelve months—same offers, same marketing…
Welcome to 2026.
A new year always brings the same quiet temptation: to assume that a calendar change automatically creates a business change. But most business owners know the truth. If nothing is confronted, nothing changes. And when nothing changes, the next twelve months become a repeat of the last twelve months—same offers, same marketing noise, same vendor cycle, same confusion, same vague hope that this will be the year something finally “clicks.”
That’s why 2026 is a great time to talk about the Kraken.
Not the literal Kraken, of course. The mythological beast from sailor folklore. The monster that lived below the surface and could destroy ships with one angry movement. The Kraken is a metaphor—because modern business has its own myths, and one of the biggest myths of the last twenty years has been the internet itself.
Not the internet as technology. The internet as mythology. The internet as promise. The internet as a magical ocean where riches and opportunity are floating just below the surface—if only the right person can summon them.
The myth says this: success is waiting inside the internet, and the only thing missing is the right magician to harness it.
And that myth is quietly strangling businesses.
The Internet Myth: How Business Owners Got Trained to Believe in Magic
The myth didn’t form overnight. It was cultivated, repeated, marketed, and sold until it became “common sense.”
It shows up everywhere:
- “We can get you on the first page of Google.”
- “Just redesign your website and your business will take off.”
- “This AI tool will automate your growth.”
- “We can get you more leads, more traffic, more visibility.”
- “Just post daily content and the algorithm will reward you.”
- “If you don’t do this, your competitors will.”
That’s not marketing education. That’s a spellbook.
And like all spells, it works best when the listener doesn’t fully understand what’s being promised or what would actually need to be true for it to happen.
The internet myth thrives because it offers something extremely seductive: the idea that growth can be outsourced, automated, or bought without having to deeply understand the business itself.
That’s why “digital marketing” gets treated like a slot machine. Pull the lever enough times, and eventually something good will happen. Hire the next agency. Try the next tool. Switch the next vendor. Launch the next campaign. Redo the website again. Start fresh again. Keep feeding the system.
And when it doesn’t work, the myth protects itself. It convinces the business owner that the problem is the magician, not the mythology. So the cycle continues.
The Endless Vendor Loop: Hiring Magicians and Hoping for a Miracle
The loop usually looks like this:
- Business is struggling or stuck.
- A marketing person shows up with confidence and buzzwords.
- The pitch sounds believable because it matches what everyone else says.
- Money gets spent.
- Reports show “activity” and “growth” and “engagement.”
- The business doesn’t feel the results where it matters—revenue, margin, pipeline, customer quality.
- Doubt creeps in.
- The business owner fires the magician.
- A new magician appears with a new pitch.
- Repeat.
This cycle creates a strange reality: the business owner becomes both desperate and skeptical at the same time. Hopeful enough to keep buying new solutions, cynical enough to assume none of them will work.
The tragedy is that the business owner isn’t failing because they’re lazy, unintelligent, or unwilling to invest. They’re failing because they’re being trained to invest in tactics before understanding the real problem.
It’s entirely possible to spend tens of thousands of dollars over the years and still know almost nothing more about what actually drives growth.
That’s not growth. That’s motion.
Why 2026 Might Look Like 2025 Unless Something Breaks
Most businesses don’t collapse quickly. They fade slowly.
The owner works harder. The marketing budget creeps upward. The ads run. The website looks “cleaner.” The social media posts get more polished. The dashboard numbers rise.
But the business isn’t getting healthier. It’s getting tired.
And the reason is simple: tactics can create temporary spikes, but tactics can’t fix a broken understanding of the business.
If the underlying assumptions are wrong—about the market, the buyer, the offer, the differentiation, the operational capacity—then marketing becomes a costly amplifier of confusion. It makes the wrong message louder. It drives traffic to weak infrastructure. It attracts the wrong kind of leads. It creates pressure on teams that can’t fulfill what’s promised.
Worse, when marketing fails, business owners often conclude that marketing itself is a scam. They become defensive. They become cynical. They retreat into survival mode.
That’s the quiet failure.
2026 doesn’t need to be another loop. But escaping the loop requires something rare: a willingness to stop chasing magic and start pursuing clarity.
Marketing Isn’t a Spell. It’s a Diagnostic Tool.
Good marketing doesn’t start with tactics. It starts with questions.
In fact, good marketing is less like advertising and more like medicine. It’s diagnosis before prescription. It’s identifying the real problem before choosing the remedy.
A lot of marketing work is useless—not because the work is poorly executed, but because the business is doing the wrong work efficiently.
There’s a reason the quote still stings: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
A business can run excellent ads, publish excellent content, and build a beautiful website… and still fail. Because excellence in execution cannot compensate for a misunderstanding of what actually drives purchase decisions.
The difference between marketing and magic is that marketing should be able to explain itself.
Magic demands belief.
Marketing demands evidence.
Five Questions That Separate Real Marketing from Myth
If a business wants 2026 to be the year of actual progress—not just “new activity”—these five categories need to be addressed before touching tactics.
These aren’t theoretical. These are practical. And they create a framework that stops the endless cycle of redesigns, new campaigns, and “latest tool” hype.
1. Clarity: What Problem Is Actually Being Solved?
The most dangerous phrase in business is: “We need more leads.”
Sometimes that’s true. But often it’s a symptom, not a diagnosis.
More leads won’t fix a business that has:
- Poor positioning
- Weak pricing
- Confusing messaging
- A misaligned offer
- A broken sales process
- Bad follow-up
- Operational capacity issues
- Low trust in the market
Clarity means answering the hard question: what is broken first?
Before traffic, before branding, before social media, before SEO—what is the actual constraint?
And just as important: what is the value proposition, and is it real?
Many business owners believe people buy for a certain reason. But belief is not proof. It’s possible to be completely wrong about why customers choose the business. That’s not insulting—it’s normal. Owners get close to their own story. They assume what matters is what should matter. But buyers don’t operate on “should.” They operate on perception, need, risk, habit, and trust.
Clarity is the work of discovering what truly makes the business compelling—and whether that can be communicated with precision.
If a marketing agency builds a website or runs ads without deeply understanding what is being tested, they are guessing. And guessing is expensive.
2. Landscape: What Environment Is the Business Competing In?
Most businesses think competition is a list of other companies nearby.
That’s not competition. That’s a small slice of it.
Real competition includes:
- Alternatives (other ways the customer can solve the problem)
- Substitutes (cheaper or more convenient options)
- Inaction (the customer doing nothing)
- Familiar vendors (people default to what they already trust)
- Platforms (Amazon, Airbnb, big marketplaces)
- Buyer fatigue (too many choices and too much noise)
- Cultural shifts (how people search, how they buy, what they trust)
Landscape is understanding what options exist in the buyer’s mind before they ever see your marketing.
This matters because many markets are saturated—not just with competitors, but with attention demands. People are numb. They’re overwhelmed. They are trained to dismiss promises.
So the question becomes: how educated is the buyer? How crowded is the space? What is changing? What is making the buyer hesitate?
If a business can’t accurately describe the landscape, marketing becomes generic. And generic marketing is invisible.
3. Evidence: What Changed Because of the Marketing?
A dashboard can be a weapon of distraction.
Impressions, engagement, followers, video views, clicks—these numbers can rise while revenue stagnates. These are often vanity metrics. They’re not meaningless, but they’re not proof.
Evidence isn’t “look how many people saw the ad.” Evidence is “what changed in behavior?”
- Did qualified leads increase?
- Did conversion rate improve?
- Did the quality of inquiries improve?
- Did the sales cycle shorten?
- Did margin improve?
- Did repeat business increase?
- Did the business become easier to sell?
Evidence measures cause and effect.
The danger is that humans overtrust visible data and ignore what’s missing. The missing phone calls. The confusing experience. The friction that kills conversions. The missed intent. The leads that never convert. The traffic that bounces.
Real marketing work should generate learning. If the business can’t answer “what did this teach?” then money was spent without progress.
And without progress, 2026 will become 2025 with new graphics.
4. Alignment: Can the Business Sustain the Marketing Ambition?
Marketing often fails because it assumes a business can support what it’s trying to do.
A complex funnel doesn’t help a team that can’t follow up fast. A content strategy doesn’t help a business that can’t maintain it. Ad traffic doesn’t help if the website experience is weak, the offer is unclear, or the operational system is broken.
Alignment means matching the marketing plan to operational reality.
It’s not “what could work in theory.” It’s “what can the business actually maintain, deliver, and optimize?”
This is where many do-it-yourself marketing tools collapse. Templates can’t diagnose operational truth. Automation can’t fix misalignment. AI can generate content, but it can’t guarantee coherence across the entire customer journey—from first click to phone call to booking to fulfillment.
Alignment requires intention.
Every piece must fit: message, offer, tracking, follow-up, sales process, operations. Otherwise marketing is just a loud invitation into a disappointing experience.
5. Reality: Are the Assumptions True?
This is where most businesses either grow or repeat history.
Reality means testing assumptions.
It’s possible that the business is right—people truly buy for the reasons the owner believes. If so, great. The job becomes amplifying and clarifying.
But it’s also possible the business is wrong—or partially wrong. The market might value something different than the business emphasizes. The buyer might care about speed, trust, warranty, or simplicity more than the business realizes. The real differentiator might not be the one the owner proudly describes.
Reality requires humility and experimentation.
That’s why progress should look like Edison, not like roulette. Failure isn’t the enemy. Unexamined failure is.
There’s a massive difference between failing randomly and failing deliberately. Random failure teaches nothing. Deliberate failure teaches everything.
Businesses that learn become businesses that grow.
The Hard Truth: Good Marketing Often Feels Boring
The internet myth makes business owners crave excitement.
A new tool. A new campaign. A new hack. A new “secret.” A new platform.
But real marketing is often mundane.
It’s refining messaging.
It’s improving conversion flow.
It’s mapping the customer journey.
It’s tightening the offer.
It’s testing assumptions.
It’s tracking what matters.
It’s fixing friction.
It’s aligning operations with expectations.
It’s repeating what works and discarding what doesn’t.
This doesn’t feel like magic.
It feels like work.
It feels like walking through mud sometimes—slow progress, constant learning, small adjustments.
But that’s where growth becomes real. Because growth isn’t a spike. Growth is a system that steadily improves.
How to Inoculate Against the Magician Pitch in 2026
If 2026 is going to be different, a business owner needs a different filter.
Before hiring anyone, before buying any service, before investing in any tool, the following questions should be asked:
- What problem is being solved?
- What assumptions are being tested?
- What will success look like in measurable business outcomes?
- What evidence will prove this is working?
- What will be learned if it doesn’t work?
- How does this align with operational capacity?
- How does this differentiate in the current landscape?
- What happens after the lead is generated?
If someone can’t answer these questions clearly, they’re selling fantasy.
And fantasy is expensive.
The goal is not to become cynical. The goal is to become immune to myth. Because the internet is not a Kraken. It doesn’t need a magician. It needs strategy, alignment, and honest testing.
The Promise of 2026: A Year of Real Progress
There’s something sobering about realizing that a year can pass without meaningful change.
But there’s also something empowering about realizing that it doesn’t have to.
The difference between repeating years and building momentum is not the size of the marketing budget. It’s not the newest tool. It’s not the fanciest branding.
The difference is whether the business is learning.
If a business becomes disciplined about clarity, landscape, evidence, alignment, and reality, marketing stops being a gamble and becomes a system.
And systems build freedom.
That’s what makes 2026 worth taking seriously.
If Integris Design can help a business work through these questions, uncover what’s truly holding it back, and build a marketing approach based on evidence instead of myth, then the year ahead doesn’t have to be a repeat of the last one.
The Kraken isn’t real.
But the consequences of believing in it are.
The best year in business isn’t created by magic. It’s built by clarity and truth—tested, aligned, and proven over time.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” – Thomas Edison
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE NOW: