The Higher Story.

Most marketing consultants charge by the hour, by the project or on a monthly retainer, and rates vary widely with experience. Hiring one is an investment, so fit matters as much as price: what you need, whether their expertise matches it, and what the work will cost. Ask for results with real numbers and how they'd approach your problem before you sign. My AI Visibility Audit starts free with The Spark, paid tiers start at $3,000, and the Integrated Marketing Dashboard has set pricing. A 1-hour strategy session on any topic is $300. Everything else is priced by scope.

A fractional CMO is a part-time chief marketing officer who joins your leadership team, owns the marketing plan and manages the people doing the work. A marketing consultant comes in for strategy and specific projects, like repositioning a brand, building a campaign or auditing how AI sees you. If you need someone to run your marketing, look at a fractional CMO. If you need the strategy and the right moves first, start with a consultant.

Brand positioning is the place your brand holds in a customer's mind compared with the alternatives: who it's for, what it does better and why anyone should believe it. Brand storytelling is how you bring that position to life so people care. Positioning without a story gets ignored. A story without positioning gets forgotten. The Higher Story connects the two: find the bigger story your brand is part of, then build the positioning around it.

Cause marketing, now often called social impact marketing, is when a brand ties its marketing to a cause people care about, so it makes a real difference while building its own brand equity. It works when the cause fits the brand and the impact is real, and it can drive sales, not just goodwill. For EHT, a brain health supplement sold through tens of thousands of independent reps, I had two Super Bowl champions pledge to donate their brains to science. The story earned close to a billion media impressions, gave the field team something real to sell, and the product sold out so fast that orders were filled in phases. At Target ALS, it helped grow site traffic 400x, and at Eating Recovery Center, a campaign built on former patients' real stories lifted patient intake 54%. I've also worked on programs including the American Heart Association's iconic Go Red for Women initiative, PNC Bank's Grow Up Great pre-K initiative and Procter & Gamble's global cause marketing platform.

More and more customers ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI answers what to buy before they ever visit a website, so it's worth knowing what those tools say about you. The Higher Story AI Visibility Audit shows whether AI names your brand, who it names instead, and what it's worth in sales. You can start with The Spark, a free first look.