Breaking Boundaries
The Advanced Marketing Playbook
- Author
- Bruce T. Dugan
- Edition
- Second edition, 2026
- First published
- August 24, 2023
- Length
- 111 pages
- Format
- Kindle edition, $5.99
- Publisher
- I2 Publishing
- ASIN
- B0CCZJYR8Z
What it is
Many founders fail not for lack of vision, purpose, or passion, but because they strategize themselves out of business while trying to get everything perfect. It will never be perfect; you have to leap and adjust along the way.
At its core, marketing is about one thing and one thing only: telling a story. Everything else is simply the delivery mechanism to tell that story.
Breaking Boundaries — Book One in The Business Marketing Series — turns the complex moving parts of modern brand-building into a plug-and-play blueprint. It is designed to help you construct a solid operational foundation before you spend your next dollar on disjointed tactical campaigns.
Foundational vs. transactional marketing
One of the most expensive mistakes a business owner can make is confusing transactional activities with foundational tasks.
| Marketing task type | Operational focus | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Foundational tasks | Long-term assets that establish your business identity and keep execution consistent. | Developing your Brand Bible, Style Guide, Narrative Map, and core marketing budget. |
| Transactional tasks | Ongoing, interactive day-to-day actions used to distribute your message. | Managing active ad campaigns, posting on social media, running SEO audits, and handling support. |
By organizing your marketing plan around this division, you can prioritize the foundational tasks, which lets your transactional execution run more efficiently and drive higher customer satisfaction.
Your step-by-step blueprint
This playbook breaks the complex world of modern brand development into six practical, operational chapters, each containing example blueprints you can plug your own business directly into:
| Chapter | Title and focus | What you will master |
|---|---|---|
| Chapter 1 | What is Marketing? | Modern marketing fundamentals, navigating the digital SEO and AEO landscape, and managing the four Ps of the marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion. |
| Chapter 2 | Why vs. What | The power of purpose-driven lead generation. Why communicating your brand’s core mission builds emotional connection and loyalty far better than listing product features. |
| Chapter 3 | The Three Stages of the Buyer Journey | Design and align your content to match the three milestones of a prospect’s decision: awareness, evaluation, and consideration. |
| Chapter 4 | Budgeting | Build a consistent, risk-adjusted marketing budget that prevents over- or under-spending, and map out clear tracking metrics for ROI. |
| Chapter 5 | An Effective Narrative Map | A visual, step-by-step guide to plotting your core brand story and the smaller narrative blocks, showing exactly when and where to promote them. |
| Chapter 6 | Building a Cohesive Brand | Writing a robust Brand Bible and Style Guide to align your internal team, customer service protocols, and corporate identity across every touchpoint. |
Turn your story into operational growth
Breaking Boundaries is not an academic textbook. It is an operator’s manual. Whether you are handling your own promotion, managing an in-house team, or auditing an external agency, this playbook gives you the strategic blueprint required to build a consistent, recognizable brand and scale with confidence.