At the turning of my third septennial, I found myself among soulless stores, for the path of integrity had long since vanished behind signage and promotional noise.

No forest, no beasts—only floor-stands and displays.  A thousand SKU eyes stared back at me, and none of them blinked.

I was not lost. I was complicit.  And thus began my descent—not into madness, but into Retail Marketing.

Welcome to the Inferno of PoP. 

Where strategy becomes seduction.  Where attention is currency. Where cardboard is king, and the consumer’s will—just a myth we whisper to justify the brief.

I built these structures. I helped shape this labyrinth. And now I offer you what I never had: a guide with dirty hands and open eyes.

• That slight nausea when the "customer journey" is just a euphemism for controlled disorientation.

• The spreadsheet joy of seeing uplift after installing displays you’d never show your children.

• The internal whisper: “If everyone’s manipulating, does it still count as manipulation?”

• The hours spent aligning cardboard engineering with budget cuts, praying the client doesn’t ask “why it doesn’t sell.”

• The phantom limb of lost campaigns—aborted by procurement, buried under KPIs.

• That annual event where you pretend this year’s design is “innovative” (it isn’t).

• Knowing that what you’re doing works—and wishing it didn’t.

I Know These Pains. I’ve Lived Them.

I didn’t read these confessions in a white paper.

I lived them—slide by slide, shelf by shelf, deadline by deadline.

I’ve buried three generations of brand assistants, and their managers with them.

Each one came bright-eyed from business school,

armed with ambition and a Google Drive full of frameworks.

Each one burned fast under the cold fluorescent light of reality.

I’ve seen it all:

The tight timing that wasn't really possible.

The “strategic” brief with four layers of contradiction.

The campaign born in Paris, broken in procurement, and buried in-store behind a seasonal offer.

The decks rewritten for region, for trade, for legal, for someone’s cousin in logistics.

They come. They dream. They die a little.

And the shelf keeps selling, uncaring and eternal.

So no—I don’t offer you theory.

I offer you strategy born in fire and shaped by decades of compromise, chaos, and cardboard.

I don’t judge your sins.

I recognize them.

Because I made them too.

And I made them work.

You’ve already drawn the lines. You know what must be sold, to whom, by when, and with which delusions of “added value.”

You’ve fought for your precious big idea across endless internal meetings, shaved off ambition to please procurement, and convinced yourself this will work—even if it breaks on shelf.

But here, in the Inferno, the first relief comes with confession.

Tell me your dark plan.

Not the polished deck.

Not the fake timelines.

Not the budget wish list crafted for headquarters.

The real thing.

What you fear won’t work.

What you know no supplier will dare to execute.

What you’d do if only the retail gods bowed to your deadlines.

Confess that—

and I will help you turn it into a campaign that bleeds beautifully from PowerPoint to pallet. Concept to cutter-plot. Strategy to shelf.

Without detours through five agencies, three revisions, and a nervous breakdown.

I’m not here to judge.

I’m here to translate your ambition into execution.

To protect your time.

To make you faster than your competitor’s indecision.

To deliver in-store desire—the kind that stares back from the display and says “Take me. Now.”

But first:

Confess.