The Marketing Advice I No Longer Believe
When you have worked in marketing for long enough, you accumulate a strange collection of things you are supposed to believe. Some come from books, some from conferences, some fro…
After enough years in the industry, I have become much less interested in declaring things dead or insisting that there is one correct way to do marketing. I have worked with different kinds of businesses, different industries, different budgets and very different audiences, and one of the most useful lessons has been that marketing advice rarely survives contact with context. Something that works brilliantly for a consumer brand can be completely inappropriate for a B2B company. A tactic that produces excellent results in one country can perform poorly in another. A strategy that works when a company has an enormous budget can be impossible to execute when the marketing team consists of two people and a spreadsheet.
This has changed the way I think about marketing advice itself. I still learn from other marketers. I still read, listen, experiment and pay attention to what is changing. But I am much more likely now to ask why something worked, under what circumstances it worked, and whether those circumstances exist in the business I am dealing with. I have become suspicious of universal rules because marketing is fundamentally about people, and people rarely behave according to universal rules.
There are quite a few pieces of marketing advice I used to accept more readily than I do today.
"You need to be everywhere"
For years, marketers were encouraged to build a presence on every possible channel. The logic was understandable. If customers are spending time on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, X, Pinterest and whatever comes next, why would a business deliberately choose not to be there? More channels mean more opportunities to reach people, and more opportunities should mean more growth.
The problem is that being present on a platform and being effective on a platform are completely different things.
I have seen companies create accounts everywhere because someone in a meeting decided that the brand "needed to be on TikTok" or "should also be on Pinterest," only for those accounts to become abandoned a few months later. The problem was rarely the platform itself. The problem was that the company did not have a clear reason for being there, did not understand what its audience wanted from that particular channel and did not have the resources to create good content consistently.
There is also a tendency to treat every platform as though it should be managed in the same way. It should not. People use different platforms for different reasons, and the way a person responds to a company on LinkedIn can be very different from the way they respond to that same company on Instagram or TikTok. A B2B company selling specialist equipment to procurement managers does not suddenly become a consumer entertainment brand because somebody has created a TikTok account for it.
I would much rather see a company understand two or three channels properly than spread itself across seven or eight platforms without doing any of them particularly well. Marketing is not a competition to see who can collect the most social media accounts. The objective is to reach the right people in environments where the company has something worthwhile to contribute.
"You have to post every day"
Consistency is useful, but I think marketing has confused consistency with frequency.
There are certainly businesses for which publishing frequently makes sense. A media organization, entertainment company or creator may have very different content requirements from a specialist engineering business. Some audiences actively expect frequent updates, while others may only need to hear from a company when it has something genuinely useful to communicate.
Yet marketers have increasingly treated the content calendar as evidence of productivity. If there are seven posts scheduled for next week, everyone feels that marketing is moving. If there are only two, somebody starts asking whether the team is doing enough.
That can lead to a dangerous situation in which the objective becomes filling the calendar rather than communicating something meaningful.
I have never believed that a mediocre post becomes good marketing simply because it was published on schedule. If a company has something useful to say, it should say it. If it has something interesting to show, it should show it. If it has a genuinely valuable insight for its customers, it should share it. But there is no inherent strategic value in producing content simply because the calendar says Tuesday.
This matters even more now that artificial intelligence has made it possible to produce large amounts of competent-looking content very quickly. We have made the production of content easier, but that does not mean we have made content more valuable. In fact, the opposite may be happening. As more companies produce more generic material, the ability to say something specific, useful and genuinely interesting becomes more important.
The question I would rather ask is not how often a company can publish. It is whether the company has anything worth saying.
"Content is king"
I understand why this phrase became popular. Content can educate customers, establish expertise, generate search traffic, build awareness, support sales and keep a brand visible. But the phrase has encouraged an enormous amount of content production without necessarily improving the quality of marketing.
Content is not automatically valuable simply because it is content.
A company can publish a hundred blog posts and still have no meaningful position in the market. It can create dozens of social posts every month without giving its audience a single reason to remember it. It can produce beautifully designed videos that communicate absolutely nothing that matters to the people watching them.
The more useful question is what the content is supposed to accomplish. Is it explaining something customers do not understand? Is it addressing an objection? Is it demonstrating expertise? Is it making the company more memorable? Is it helping a salesperson close a deal? Is it making an unfamiliar brand more credible?
Once you ask those questions, the amount of content often becomes less important.
I have become much more interested in the idea that content is a tool rather than the product. Sometimes you need a long article. Sometimes you need a short video. Sometimes you need a case study. Sometimes you need an email. Sometimes the best thing you can produce is a useful piece of information that answers a question your customers keep asking.
The format should follow the purpose, not the other way around.
"The customer is always right"
This is a difficult one because the intention behind the advice is good. Businesses should listen to their customers. They should take complaints seriously, understand customer expectations and avoid the arrogance of assuming that the company automatically knows more about the customer than the customer knows about themselves.
But customers are not always right about everything.
A customer can accurately describe a frustrating experience while being wrong about what caused it. They can tell you what they want without understanding what would actually solve their problem. They can ask for a feature because they believe it will make their lives easier when another solution would address the underlying need much better.
This is one reason research requires interpretation rather than simply collecting opinions.
If customers were always able to tell companies exactly what they needed, innovation would be considerably easier. Businesses would simply ask people what product they wanted, build it and sell it. In reality, customers often describe the world as they currently experience it. It is the responsibility of the business to understand that information and decide what to do with it.
Listening is essential. Blind obedience is not.
"Know your audience"
This is probably the most universally repeated piece of marketing advice, and it is also one of the easiest to pretend you are following.
Most marketing presentations contain some version of an audience profile. There is usually a name, age, occupation, income bracket, location and collection of interests. Sometimes the persona even has a photograph.
None of that necessarily means the marketing team understands the customer.
Real audience understanding comes from observing behaviour and asking difficult questions. Why do people choose one supplier over another? What makes them hesitate? Who actually influences the decision? What happens between awareness and purchase? What do they complain about after buying? What do they tell salespeople that they will never tell a survey?
Some of the best customer insights do not come from marketing research at all. They come from the sales team, customer service department, technicians, account managers and people who deal with customers every day.
A marketer can spend weeks building a beautiful persona document while a salesperson can explain the five objections that actually stop customers from buying in a fifteen-minute conversation.
I still believe strongly in understanding the audience. I simply no longer believe that creating a demographic profile is the same thing as understanding people.
"Data doesn't lie"
Data can be extremely useful, but the phrase "data doesn't lie" gives data more authority than it deserves.
Data can be accurate while our interpretation of it is completely wrong.
A campaign can have an impressive click-through rate without generating meaningful business. A social post can receive thousands of interactions from people who have absolutely no intention of becoming customers. A landing page can have an excellent conversion rate because the audience arriving there was already highly motivated.
The numbers may all be correct.
The conclusion may not be.
This is why I have become increasingly interested in the questions behind the metrics. Who actually converted? What happened after conversion? Did those people become customers? Did the campaign influence the purchase or simply appear somewhere along the journey? Would those customers have bought anyway?
Marketing has more data available to it than ever before, but having more numbers does not automatically create better decisions. In some organizations, the opposite has happened. Teams spend so much time reporting metrics that they have less time to think about what the metrics actually mean.
Good marketers need analytical skills, but they also need judgment.
"If you can't measure it, don't do it"
I understand the frustration behind this advice. Marketing has historically struggled to prove its value, and marketers should absolutely be accountable for what they spend and what they produce. Measurement matters, particularly when significant budgets are involved.
But I no longer accept the idea that something has little or no value simply because it cannot be measured perfectly.
Brand awareness is difficult to attribute to a single activity. Reputation is difficult to put into a spreadsheet. Relationships with journalists, partners, industry organizations or influential people may not produce an immediate conversion. A strong executive presence may influence a future decision without providing a convenient tracking parameter.
The answer is not to stop measuring. It is to accept that different objectives require different forms of measurement.
A direct-response campaign might be judged heavily on conversions and revenue. A brand-building initiative may require awareness, consideration, reach, search behaviour or other indicators. A thought-leadership program may be evaluated through invitations, relationships, inbound opportunities and changes in perception.
Not everything valuable happens inside an attribution window.
"Organic reach is dead"
I have heard some version of this claim for years, usually from people selling paid media services.
Organic reach is certainly harder than it once was on many platforms. Algorithms have changed, competition has increased and platforms have become much more commercial. But saying that organic marketing is dead is an exaggeration.
People still share things they find useful. Customers still recommend companies. Employees still influence how organizations are perceived. Journalists still write about businesses. People still search organically. Communities still form around useful information and strong brands.
Paid media is powerful because it gives you distribution and control. But paying for attention does not automatically make that attention valuable.
The strongest marketing strategies often combine paid and organic activity. Advertising can help you reach people, while useful content, credibility, reputation, customer experiences and word of mouth give people reasons to believe you.
Paid media can accelerate awareness. It cannot manufacture trust indefinitely.
"More budget means better marketing"
Money obviously helps. I have worked with enough advertising budgets to know that having resources can make an enormous difference. A larger budget can give you more reach, more testing opportunities, better production, more data and the ability to keep campaigns running long enough to learn from them.
But money does not compensate for poor thinking.
A company can spend a huge amount of money promoting the wrong message to the wrong people. It can buy enormous amounts of traffic and send that traffic to a terrible website. It can spend heavily on beautiful creative that does not communicate the value of the product.
I have also seen limited budgets produce surprisingly effective marketing because the people responsible were forced to think carefully about where every dollar would make the greatest difference.
A constraint can sometimes create discipline.
The question is not simply how much money a business can spend. It is whether the business understands where spending will actually create value.
"Creativity is the most important thing"
I have enormous respect for creativity in marketing. Without it, much of the industry would become a collection of identical campaigns using identical language and identical stock photographs.
But creativity is not a substitute for strategy.
A campaign can be clever without being effective. A slogan can be memorable without communicating what the company actually does. A video can receive millions of views from people who will never become customers.
There is a temptation to judge creative work by whether people liked it rather than whether it achieved its purpose.
The best creative work usually begins with a clear problem. It understands the audience, the context, the proposition and the objective, and then finds an unexpected way to communicate something that matters.
Creativity is valuable because it can make communication more effective. It should not exist simply to prove that the marketing department is creative.
"Marketing should make people buy"
Marketing absolutely has a role in generating sales, and marketers should never become so focused on awareness that they forget the business ultimately needs customers and revenue.
But marketing does not always produce an immediate transaction.
A person might see a brand today and not need the product until six months from now. Someone might encounter a company through an article, remember its name and eventually recommend it to a colleague. A potential customer might repeatedly see a brand before finally becoming comfortable enough to contact sales.
Not every valuable marketing interaction can be connected to an immediate purchase.
This is particularly important in industries with long sales cycles. If a company sells expensive industrial equipment, enterprise software or professional services, expecting every marketing activity to produce an immediate sale is not realistic.
Marketing can create demand, capture demand, support sales, strengthen reputation and build preference. Direct response is one part of the job, not the entire definition of it.
"You need to follow every trend"
This is one of the easiest traps for marketers because trends create a sense of urgency.
A new platform appears and everyone asks whether the brand should be there. A meme becomes popular and someone wants to adapt it. A new content format suddenly gets attention and marketing teams start producing their own version.
Sometimes this is smart. Often it is simply fear of missing out disguised as strategy.
A trend only matters if it has some meaningful connection to the brand, the audience and the objective. There is little value in participating in a trend simply because other companies are doing it.
In fact, trying to imitate every trend can make a brand less distinctive. If every company uses the same format, joke, sound or visual style, the result is not differentiation. It is a crowded room where everyone is shouting the same thing.
Good marketing requires knowing when to participate and when to ignore something.
"Your competitors should be your benchmark"
Competitor analysis is necessary. You need to understand what other businesses are offering, how they position themselves, what they charge, where they advertise and what customers appear to think about them.
But competitors should not become the source of every marketing decision.
If a competitor launches a podcast and your response is to launch a podcast, you are not necessarily being strategic. You may simply be following.
This happens constantly. One company redesigns its website and three competitors announce redesigns. One brand starts producing short-form video and suddenly everyone is making short-form video. One company introduces a loyalty program and everyone else develops one.
Eventually, the market becomes full of companies copying one another.
The more interesting question is often what customers are not getting from anyone.
That question can lead to differentiation. Competitor benchmarking can tell you where everyone else is. It does not necessarily tell you where you should go.
"Marketing strategy needs to be complicated"
There is a tendency within marketing to confuse complexity with sophistication.
A long strategy document can look impressive. A complicated funnel diagram can make a presentation feel strategic. A framework with fifteen boxes can create the impression that an enormous amount of thinking has taken place.
Sometimes it has. Sometimes it has simply been turned into a diagram.
A good strategy should be able to answer some fairly straightforward questions. Who are we trying to reach? What problem are we solving? What do we want people to believe? Why should they believe us? What makes us different? What action do we want them to take? How will we know whether it is working?
The answers may be complicated. The strategy itself should not be unnecessarily complicated.
If the people responsible for implementing a strategy cannot explain it clearly to someone else, there is a good chance the strategy needs to be simplified.
"Marketing can control the message"
This may have been more realistic when brands had fewer channels through which people could respond to them.
Today, companies can carefully craft their messaging, but they cannot control the conversation around it.
Customers have opinions. Employees have opinions. Former employees have opinions. Journalists have opinions. Influencers have opinions. Competitors have opinions. And all of them have platforms through which those opinions can travel.
A company can publish a carefully written campaign about customer service and then have someone publicly document a terrible customer experience. It can spend months developing brand guidelines and still discover that people perceive the company very differently from how its marketing department intended.
The job of marketing is therefore less about controlling perception and more about influencing it.
You can control what you say. You can control the promises you make. You can influence expectations and create consistent experiences. But ultimately, the audience gets a vote.
That is not a weakness of marketing. It is simply the reality of communicating in public.
"The marketing funnel is linear"
The funnel remains useful because it provides a simple way of thinking about stages of customer behavior. Awareness, consideration and conversion are useful concepts.
But real people do not behave like a diagram.
Someone might discover a brand, forget about it, encounter it again six months later, search for reviews, speak to a friend, visit the website, leave, see an advertisement and finally contact the company. Another person may see the brand once and immediately buy.
A customer might enter through a referral rather than an advertisement. Someone else might discover a company through its CEO's LinkedIn post. Another person may become aware of a business through an employee before ever seeing an official marketing message.
The funnel is a useful model. It is not a description of human psychology.
The mistake is not using the funnel. The mistake is believing the funnel is reality.
"If something worked once, scale it"
Successful campaigns deserve investigation, but success does not automatically mean something can be scaled indefinitely.
A campaign can work because it is new. It can work because it reaches a particularly responsive audience. It can work because the timing is unusually good. It can work because a particular person or relationship makes it successful.
Scaling changes the conditions.
The audience becomes larger and less qualified. The creative becomes familiar. Costs increase. Frequency rises. Performance starts to decline.
Before scaling something, I want to understand why it worked.
If we know the underlying reason, we have a much better chance of reproducing the result. If all we know is that the campaign generated good numbers, scaling becomes little more than copying something that happened to work once.
"Marketing can fix a bad product"
This is one piece of advice I no longer believe at all.
Marketing can create awareness around a bad product. It can generate trial. It can convince someone to give a company a chance. It can temporarily make weaknesses less visible.
It cannot permanently compensate for a poor customer experience.
Eventually the customer gets the product. Eventually the service gets delivered. Eventually the promise meets reality.
This is why marketers should care about what happens outside the marketing department. Product quality, customer service, operations, sales and fulfilment all affect the brand.
A beautiful campaign creates an expectation. The business then has to deliver against it.
When that happens consistently, marketing becomes much easier because the experience itself becomes part of the story.
What I believe now
None of this means I have stopped believing in marketing. Quite the opposite. I think I believe in it more now because I have become more skeptical of the formulas surrounding it.
I believe marketing works best when it starts with understanding people rather than platforms. I believe strategy is more important than activity, and that a full calendar is not evidence of a good strategy. I believe content should have a purpose beyond filling a content schedule. I believe data is essential but interpretation matters just as much as measurement. I believe creativity is powerful when it solves a real communication problem rather than simply making something look impressive.
I also believe marketers should spend more time talking to customers and less time talking to other marketers about what marketers should be doing.
The industry can become remarkably self-referential. We write content for marketers about how to create content for marketers. We create trends that marketers follow because other marketers are following them. We measure engagement from an audience that sometimes consists primarily of other people working in marketing.
Meanwhile, the customer is somewhere else entirely, trying to decide whether they trust the company enough to buy from it.
That is probably the biggest thing my relationship with marketing advice has changed. I am less interested in what is supposed to work and more interested in what actually works for the specific problem in front of me.
Sometimes that will mean paid advertising. Sometimes it will mean content. Sometimes it will mean SEO. Sometimes it will mean a sales enablement project, a better website, an event, a partnership, a customer referral program or simply fixing something that is broken in the customer experience.
Sometimes the right marketing decision is to do more.
Sometimes it is to stop doing something.
And sometimes the best marketing decision has very little to do with marketing at all.
The longer I work in this industry, the more comfortable I have become with uncertainty. I no longer think every marketer needs to have a definitive answer immediately. I think we need to ask better questions, test our assumptions and be willing to change our minds when the evidence tells us to.
That may not be as satisfying as a list of ten rules for guaranteed marketing success. It certainly does not make for as convenient a LinkedIn carousel.
But after years of working with different businesses, audiences, markets and budgets, I have come to trust context more than certainty.
Most marketing advice contains some truth. The mistake is assuming that the truth is universal.
A tactic that worked yesterday may work tomorrow, but it may not. A strategy that transformed one company may be completely wrong for another. A channel that is essential for one audience may be irrelevant to the next.
That is why I no longer believe there is a single playbook for good marketing.
There are principles worth learning, mistakes worth remembering and experiments worth running. There are patterns that become visible after enough years of doing the work. But there is also something that no framework can completely replace: judgment.
Good marketers need to know the rules, but they also need to know when the rules no longer fit the situation.
That is probably the most useful marketing lesson I have learned so far, and perhaps the reason I am less interested today in telling other marketers what they should believe.
I would rather ask them what they have seen, what they have tested, what surprised them, what failed, what worked for reasons they did not expect, and what they have changed their minds about.
Because after enough time in marketing, changing your mind is not necessarily a sign that you were wrong before.
Sometimes it is simply evidence that you have learned something.