You Can’t Take Hope to The Bank

Hope starts the story. Proof gets you on the shelf.

Hope is the headline, but proof is the currency.

The first buyer meeting I ever went to was at Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. I was in the middle of my last Food Marketing co-op rotation with Johnson & Johnson, sitting in a room I had absolutely no business being in.

Our marketing lead was walking the buyer through something, couldn’t tell you what, and it’s not important, they wrapped it up with, “We hope this program drives xyz.”

The buyer didn’t even look up.
He just said, “You can’t take hope to the bank.”

That was it. End of discussion.

And this one sentence has stuck with me my entire career, because in CPG and in careers, that line is gospel. Retailers don’t buy hope. They buy proof.

Ironically, when I scroll LinkedIn every day, the entire industry kind of runs on a certain kind of hope, hopeful launches, hopeful campaigns, hopeful founders, hopeful investors. It’s not a bad thing. Hope is what gets people to start, to build, to grow, to create, to win. But the reality you have to be able to turn that hope into something measurable, something a buyer can believe in.

Because you might not be able to take hope to the bank but you can turn it into something that gets you a seat at the table and earns you the right to stay there.

Proof isn’t just numbers. It’s how you connect the dots between what’s happening in your world and what matters in theirs.

It took me years to realize that most brands actually have the data they need, they just don’t know how to tell the story that makes it mean something.