Marketing creative is a lightning rod, not a magic wand
Almost every company spins a certain yarn about itself; a pithy positioning statement about who they are, the problem they solve, and why it matters. It’s lofty, idealistic and inspiring. It usually lives in pitch decks, investor updates, and the banners hanging in the office. And it works well in these places.
But then someone has to actually build something with it.
A content writer sits down to ideate thought leadership and realizes that there’s no actual point of view to anchor to. A graphic designer tries to execute a bold and disruptive brand, but can’t get traction unless they present something that looks exactly like the competition’s latest campaign. A copywriter is told to make the website appeal to an ‘upmarket’ client, but nothing about the product has changed to meaningfully support that market.
This is the moment where catchphrases meet reality. And in many organizations, it’s the content and creative teams who straddle that divide, trying to turn all that inside thinking into an outward reality.
In love with the idea of being something
I have run enough branding exercises to know every company wants to see itself as the badass challenger or disruptor/visionary in their category. But when the rubber hits the road, that disruptive DNA often isn’t really there.
Here’s how it plays out: The content and creative functions are almost always the first teams to surface those strategic gaps in an organization. Not because they’re looking for problems. But because their job requires them to operationalize the strategy—to take the abstractions and turn them into tangible, public-facing work.
You say you’re creating a brand new category? Great. But when your content team sits down to write about it, can they find a single differentiated perspective that isn’t just a recycled industry take with your proprietary mumbo jumbo jargon slapped on top?
You say your product solves X for Y audience? Wonderful. But when someone goes to build the website, do those benefits actually map to what the product does, or are they product marketing’s ideas retrofitted onto whatever the product team shipped?
You say you want to be the Liquid Death of your category—the brand that breaks every convention? Fantastic. But is your creative team supported when they push the creative to uncomfortable places? Or do execs just pull up the competitor’s latest campaign and say, “Why aren’t we doing that?”
You might have the grabbiest elevator pitch in the world. But the content and creative teams are where that pitch has to become a 2,000-word article. A product page. A data report. And when the story falls apart under the weight of specifics, that’s not necessarily their fault. That’s a strategy problem wearing a content costume. And it represents a huge opportunity for an organization to sanity check its own spin.
The blame usually flows downhill
Marketing creatives turn themselves inside out about this: When these gaps surface (and they always surface), the instinct in most organizations is to blame the people doing the work. The content “isn’t sharp enough.” The creative “doesn’t feel premium.” The thought leadership “isn’t landing.” The website copy “doesn’t capture who we are.” It just all needs to be “tighter”, to “pop more”, to “really hit”…
So they hire a new writer. Hop around agencies. Start talking about a website redesign or a rebrand. Because they think the right creative can just wave a wand to make these problems disappear. But then the exact same problems show up again, because the problems were never about talent. They were about the fact that nobody higher up has made the hard strategic decisions that would give these teams something coherent to work with.
What they need isn’t a new logo or colour set; it’s for the leaders to commit to a category and not lose focus. To build the actual product for the market they want to reach, not just say “upmarket, upmarket, upmarket” as if it’s Beetlejuice. To have leaders willing to step forward and put a strong opinion into the world and absorb the pushback.
The reframe: A stress test you didn’t know you were running
Here’s the reframe I want to offer, and it’s the whole point of this piece:
When your content or creative team pushes back or when they struggle to come up with compelling copy or design, when they ask hard questions, when they tell you something isn’t working, when they flag that the messaging doesn’t line up with the product reality or the brand identity doesn’t support the ambition —don’t roll your eyes and think “UGH, CREATIVES”.
Instead, think of this as a real stress test of your brand, your product, and its positioning,
Think for a moment about what these teams actually do: Most other functions in the company get to operate inside the organization’s own bubble. Leadership crafts the narrative that sounds good at the board meeting. Product builds the product to sate that vision. Even other marketing teams build decks with frameworks to support the same inside-out perspective. It all gets ruminated and iterated at boardroom tables by leadership who share internal assumptions, logic, and even vocabulary.
But then along comes the marketing makers, and they’re going to have to flip that: They take all that inside-out thinking and put it through an outside-in filter. They have to ask: Does this make sense to someone who doesn’t work here? Will this resonate with someone who has no context, no loyalty, and no patience? Is this story compelling enough to earn attention from people who owe us absolutely nothing?
That switcheroo—from internal narrative to external marketing materials—is where strategic weaknesses and gaps become impossible to ignore. And, sure, you can treat that as a big pain in the ass. OR you can treat it like one of the most valuable feedback loops your company has.
Yes, but what about manifestation?
Okay, I anticipate some of you are going here, so let me meet you: Isn’t it precisely the job of content and creative to bring these ideas to life?
Sure: Great content and creative teams absolutely can manifest a vision. They can pull a brand forward. They can shape perception ahead of reality. They can tell the story of the company you’re becoming, not just the company you are today. That’s a real and valuable function, and the best teams do it well.
But there’s a line between manifesting a direction the company is actively building toward and papering over the fact that nobody has made hard choices. Between telling a forward-looking story and constructing a fiction. Between aspiration and delusion.
Treating content and creative like a magic trick—handing them the incoherent, unresolved, half-baked strategy and expecting them to spin it into something compelling? That’s not manifestation. That’s delusion.
When the stories simply don’t add up… when the content team can’t find coherence because there isn’t any, when the creative team can’t execute a vision because the vision was never defined beyond a mood board and a competitors-we-admire list… it’s rarely the storyteller that’s the problem.
So the next time your content feels flat, your creative feels generic, or your thought leadership feels like it could have been written by any company in your space, resist the urge to look at the team first. Instead, look at what you gave them to work with.
Your content and creative teams likely aren’t the problem. They’re the diagnostic. Start treating them that way, and you’ll be amazed at how often the thing you need to fix isn’t at the writing or design level; it’s at the product, positioning, and brand level. It points to exec chasing shiny ideas that can’t necessarily co-exist. It points to products that have Frankensteined together a bunch of features without any real thought into why or for whom. It points to brands that may have disrupted something once, a long time ago, but have now become table stakes.
That is to say: Those content and creative executional challenges often point to the things your organization really needs to fix, not just a word in a headline that needs to be tweaked.
🍓 Sweet treats before you go!
If you read one thing…
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If you buy one thing…
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