Ideas
The frameworks and bodies of work associated with Mike Millett: MarketingOB1, the Marketing Helix, Adaptive Brand Management, Trust-First Marketing and Elevate or Vanish.
Four bodies of work, developed over three decades, and they are not four separate arguments. They are one argument at four altitudes, which is the thing no individual property can say about itself and the reason this page exists.
Each has a canonical home elsewhere. The pages here establish authorship and the relationships between them. They deliberately do not restate the source material, because two copies of a definition do not stay equal.
How they fit together
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01
The Marketing Helix asks what customers actually do
They do not descend a funnel. They circle, arriving at the same questions at a different altitude, moved by trust, relevance and timing the brand did not arrange and cannot see. Alignment happens when all three are present at once, and it is temporary. That is a description, not a prescription: it is the observation everything else has to answer to.
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02
Adaptive Brand Management asks whose job that is
If conditions move continuously, somebody inside the organisation has to be responsible for noticing. Usually nobody is, because brand management was scoped for a world that changed slowly. The framework names the responsibility and gives it a cycle: observe, interpret, decide, adapt, verify, learn.
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03
Trust-First Marketing asks what you build first
The practical answer to the first two. Build the conditions in which a customer can believe you before you scale the spend, not after. Reach applied to a brand nobody has a reason to trust buys attention and converts none of it. It is a claim about sequence, and sequence is the part most marketing gets backwards.
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04
Elevate or Vanish is what happens if you do not
The stakes, and the only one of the four that is a warning rather than a method. Markets do not announce the moment a business becomes outdated. Perception shifts first, expectations move, competitors get easier to understand, and the technology for finding things changes again. A business adapts deliberately, or waits until the market decides for it.
Where each one is published
None of these live here, and that is deliberate. An idea with two canonical homes has none.
MarketingOB1
Where Mike writes and teaches in public, under his own byline. Trust First. Hello is only the beginning.
The relationshipThe Marketing Helix
Holds the intellectual authority for the behavioural model and for the Adaptive Brand Management foundations paper.
The relationshipAdaptive Brand Management
Explained by Marketing Helix, applied commercially by Digilu. Two authorities, kept apart on purpose.
The relationshipTrust-First Marketing
MarketingOB1's territory. Distinct from Trust-Based Marketing, which is Glen Urban's and is not claimed here.
The relationshipElevate or Vanish
The thesis and the free book, drawn from the StratusClean transformation.
The relationshipWhere the ideas came from
Not from a whiteboard. Mike has personally worked through every platform shift from desktop publishing to AI search, and watched the same pattern each time: the tool gets cheap, the skill stops being the moat, and the businesses that survive are the ones people still understand and trust.
He also watched what it costs when somebody does not cross a shift. That is in the biography, and it is the reason Elevate or Vanish reads as a warning rather than a slogan.