They Clicked Ignore. Will You?

Stephanie.triggiani@gmail.com (Stephanie Triggiani) — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:19:04 GMT

I have a confession... I love 90s nostalgia and I miss it.

Maybe it's because I grew up in the era of late-night dial-up internet and discovered my creative, problem-solving skills long before I ever worked in marketing. After all, it took a surprising amount of ingenuity to muffle the screeching sound of a modem so my parents wouldn't catch me logging on to AOL Instant Messenger to see if my crush was online.

Or maybe it's because I loved Friday nights at Blockbuster. Not just the movies, but the ritual of it. Wandering the aisles with my family. Debating why Flubber was clearly a better choice than yet another Jean-Claude Van Damme movie (a position I still stand by, by the way). Or trying to convince my parents that renting three movies instead of one was a perfectly reasonable financial decision.

Maybe it's because life felt simpler then. Or maybe it's because the 90s were genuinely the greatest decade and I'm willing to defend that position.

Whatever the reason, I've found myself thinking about Blockbuster a lot lately.

Not because I miss racing to the New Releases section only to discover that the one movie I wanted was gone, leaving behind nothing but an empty display box and disappointment. Nobody misses hearing the store clerk say, "That one's checked out until next Friday."

But I do miss what Blockbuster represented.

It wasn't just a store. It was an experience.

I think about Blockbuster because their story is one of the most fascinating and, quite frankly, memorable business lessons of our time. Here was a company with thousands of stores, millions of loyal customers, incredible brand recognition, and a level of market dominance most companies would kill for. Yet somehow, they became the cautionary tale.

The popular version of the story is that Netflix came along and disrupted them. That's true, but I think it's incomplete.

Blockbuster didn't fail because Netflix existed. They failed because they stopped listening.

The signals and data were there. Customers were changing. Technology was changing. Consumer expectations were changing. The people closest to those changes could see them happening in real time. Yet somewhere along the way, certainty became louder than curiosity.

That idea has stayed with me throughout my career because I've seen versions of it play out inside companies of every size.

Years ago, I walked into a role where my carefully crafted 90-day plan became a 30-day plan almost overnight. Actually, that's not entirely true. My CMO knew exactly what he was doing. In fact, I'm fairly certain that if he had told me the full truth during the interview process, I would've thanked him for the opportunity and quietly backed out of the room. After all, I was gainfully employed at the time.

They had just spun off from a well-recognized brand, which sounds a lot more glamorous than it actually was.

Yes, people knew the parent company. No, they didn't know us. There was no established brand foundation. No clear positioning. No real identity in the market. Just a new name, a gradient logo, and a dream.

The awareness we did have belonged to the company we came from, not the company we were trying to become. The messaging wasn't differentiated. The roadmap I thought I was inheriting turned out to be more of a suggestion than a reality. What sat in front of me wasn't a marketing strategy. It was essentially a blank page disguised as a job description.

The funny thing is that my CMO wasn't worried. He had seen me build before. Years earlier, he had hired me at another company. Now he was bringing me back to help build something entirely new.

He saw something in me before I saw it in myself. And once I realized that, I couldn't let him down.

At the same time, I was raising two young children on my own. I still am. Back then, failure wasn't a luxury I could afford. Today, it still isn't. When two little people are counting on you, self-doubt doesn't get a vote for very long. You acknowledge it, you feel it, and then you figure it out.

With only 30 days on the clock, disappearing into a conference room to build a strategy deck would've been the easy answer. There were competitor websites to analyze, sales presentations to review, and enough marketing jargon available online to create a 50-slide deck that looked incredibly impressive.

It also would've been completely wrong.

But instead, I spent my time talking to people.

Sales. Customer service. Operations. Field technicians. Anyone who touched a customer. And, if I'm being honest, anyone willing to accept a calendar invite from the new marketing leader.

I asked them all some version of the same question:

What does this company mean to you?

The answers surprised me.

Nobody started talking about products. Nobody launched into a list of feeds and speeds. Nobody recited the latest marketing messaging (tbh I wouldn't have either). And nobody even mentioned the parent company's name.

They talked about people.

They talked about technicians who willingly spent weekends and holidays away from their families because a customer needed help. They talked about decades of hard-earned expertise — knowledge built through years of trial, error, problem-solving, and experience that couldn't simply be replaced with a new hire or a training manual. They talked about relationships that had been built over years, sometimes decades.

They talked about trust.

In fact, one sales rep went so far as to send me a box of chocolates from his hometown in Ohio after I casually mentioned my love for a particular type of buttercream. Not because he had to. Not because it was part of a customer loyalty program. Simply because that's who he was.

That's when it hit me.

These people weren't selling products. They were building relationships. And those relationships were the brand.

What I realized in those conversations changed the way I think about branding. The brand wasn't missing, it was already there.

It was living inside the people who showed up every day and delivered an experience customers couldn't get anywhere else. Nobody had taken the time to identify it, articulate it, and build around it. That's what I did next.

The messaging changed. The values became clearer. The culture became stronger. The brand started reflecting the people who had created it in the first place.

But the first sign that I was headed in the right direction wasn't a marketing metric. It was a sales rep from Florida who pulled me aside at an event and said, "This company is fun again and I feel like I am part of something again."

Years later, I still think about that comment.

Yes, it was flattering, but it revealed something important. People don't connect with logos. They don't build loyalty to taglines. They connect with experiences. They remember how a company makes them feel.

A customer reinforced that lesson a few months later when he walked up to our trade show booth and said, "We know who you guys are, we've been seeing you guys everywhere lately. Is there anywhere you aren't?"

He couldn't tell me which campaign drove him there or quote a slogan. He couldn't remember a single piece of content. What he remembered was the feeling.

That's what brand really is.

Which brings me back to Blockbuster.

I don't think Blockbuster failed because of Netflix. I think Blockbuster failed because nobody was listening to what was happening right in front of them. The signals existed. The customers were talking. The market was changing. But somewhere along the way, certainty became more valuable than curiosity.

And if I'm being honest, that's the part of the story that feels very relevant right now.

AI is changing how people search. AI is changing how brands are discovered. AI is changing buying behavior, candidate discovery, and entire business models. The next Blockbuster won't look like Blockbuster. The next Netflix won't arrive in a red envelope.

The companies that thrive won't necessarily be the biggest. They'll be the ones paying attention. The ones willing to challenge assumptions. The ones willing to ask uncomfortable questions before the market forces them to.

And they'll be the ones hiring leaders who know how to listen.

Because eventually every company gets its version of a Netflix meeting.

The question isn't whether that moment arrives. The question is who's sitting in the room when it does.

The best marketers I know aren't the loudest ones in the room. They're the ones paying attention when everyone else has already made up their mind. That skill won't show up in an AI recruiter scan. But eventually, every organization finds out whether they have it or not.

Stephanie Triggiani is a Senior Marketing Executive with 15+ years building brands, teams, and revenue engines across global markets.

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They Clicked Ignore. Will You?