The PostPod - Lessons from Omar Roubi, The Rise and Fall of a Promise
EP 241 · Oct 1, 2026 · 20 min · Marc & V
0:00 / 20:29
The short version
Fresh off the Omar Roubi interview, Marc and Vassilis sit down for the PostPod to work through what stuck.
The uncomfortable one: when the business is broken, whose job is it to stop advertising? Target Canada ran full advertising cycles, back to school, holiday, the works, while shelves sat empty and the experience fell apart. So the spend did not just fail to help. It amplified a promise the business could not keep. "Expect more, pay less" landed as "expecting more, paying more."
They get into the reflex every marketer knows: use it or lose it, and the maturity it takes to hand budget back and say the problem is upstream. Plus leading versus lagging indicators, why revenue tells you far too late, and how supply chain efficiency and customer sentiment map onto physical and mental availability.
They also sit with the thing that keeps pulling them back: it was not one P, it was the clock. A lease deal and government hiring timelines built a manufactured pressure that eroded the quality of every decision after it. Nordstrom entered around the same time with a slower playbook and lasted longer.
No clean verdict. A much better set of questions.
Enjoy the show!
Chapters
00:00 Doomed from day one
00:38 PostPod: debriefing Target Canada
00:52 A case study that keeps giving
02:40 Going all in, and Nordstrom's different path
04:05 Canada's geography vs three warehouses
05:41 Whose job was it to say "stop advertising"?
07:49 Use it or lose it: should marketing give budget back?
08:14 Shared accountability and deferred blame
10:56 Leading vs lagging indicators
12:08 The promise to the customer
13:49 Mapping mental and physical availability
14:13 The price problem: priced premium, wasn't
16:08 You can't isolate one P: the clock
17:00 Making quality decisions under pressure
19:28 Why extremes are the best teachers
Chapters
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Transcript
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SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sleeping Barber Podcast.
SPEAKER_02: Omar's wife had said it's a shitshow from day one. Like that, that's so fascinating. That there's so much energy, so much interest, so much desire, so much passion, and then no matter what, it was almost doomed to fail from the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sleeping Barber Podcast, the place for business leaders to get the best and most credible information on marketing, strategy, and innovation. Your hosts, Mark Binkley and Vasily Storos, share their experiences as they gather insights from the world's leading experts. Now, on with the show.