There is a pattern that repeats itself across mid-sized businesses with remarkable consistency. A founder or leadership team concludes that marketing isn't working. The agency gets changed, or the internal team gets restructured, or the budget gets reallocated. A new brief gets written. New campaigns go out. And six months later, the diagnosis is the same. Marketing still isn't working.

What rarely gets examined is the brief itself. Not whether it was written well, but whether the thinking behind it was clear enough to be written at all.

Most marketing briefs in mid-sized businesses are written to describe what a business does and who it does it for. The problem is that this description is usually held together by ambiguity. The target audience is broad enough to avoid excluding anyone. The value proposition covers multiple things because the business hasn't decided which one matters most. The tone is professional and warm and differentiated, all at once. The brief isn't vague because the team is careless. It's vague because the decisions that would make it precise haven't been made yet.

The Upstream Problem

In 1996, Michael Porter published what remains one of the most cited and least followed papers in business strategy. In What Is Strategy, published in the Harvard Business Review, Porter made a distinction that most businesses intellectually accept and operationally ignore. Strategy, he argued, is not about being good at many things. It is about choosing what not to do. "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do," he wrote. A company without explicit trade-offs has no strategy. It has a list of intentions.¹

The reason this matters for marketing specifically is that marketing is the function most exposed to the absence of those trade-offs. When a business hasn't decided which customer segment it is optimising for, marketing tries to speak to all of them. When it hasn't decided whether it competes on price, quality, or relationship, the messaging hedges across all three. When it hasn't decided which channels deserve full commitment and which deserve none, the budget gets spread thin enough that nothing gets the weight it needs to work.

The result looks like a marketing problem. It presents as poor creative, weak messaging, underperforming campaigns. But the agency or team executing those campaigns is, in most cases, doing exactly what the brief asked. The brief asked for something that couldn't be built, because the foundation beneath it hadn't been decided.

Why the Thinking Stays Upstream

This is the part that is harder to say plainly.

Most founders have made these decisions. They know which customer they most want. They know which positioning feels true. They know which channel deserves the budget and which one they're running out of habit. That thinking exists. The problem is that it lives in one person's head and has never been translated into operational clarity that a team can actually execute against.

Richard Rumelt, the UCLA strategy professor whose 2011 book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy drew a sharp line between real strategic thinking and what he called the hallmark of true bad strategy, observed that bad strategy is not the absence of strategy. It is the presence of something that looks like strategy but avoids the hard work of making choices.² What he described as the kernel of good strategy, a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent actions, is precisely what most marketing briefs are missing. Not because the business lacks smart people, but because the guiding policy was never made explicit enough to be transferable.

This gap between what a founder knows and what the organisation can act on is where most mid-sized businesses quietly lose ground. The founder makes good decisions intuitively, in the moment, based on years of pattern recognition. But intuition doesn't brief an agency. It doesn't tell a content team what to write or a sales team how to qualify. The organisation defaults to covering everything because nobody has been told clearly enough what to focus on.

What Scattered Execution Is Actually Telling You

There is a useful diagnostic hidden in how a marketing team behaves when left to operate without clear direction.

They will typically do several things reasonably well simultaneously. Social media runs. Some SEO work happens. Events get attended. A campaign or two go out. Proposals get written. None of it connects particularly well to the others, and none of it gets the full weight of commitment. The Economist Intelligence Unit, in a study of senior executives across multiple industries, found that only 28 percent of leaders could name their company's top three priorities and explain how their team's work connected to them.³ The other 72 percent were operating on inference and assumption.

That inference shows up as scattered execution. Teams fill the clarity gap with activity. They do more of what feels productive rather than more of what was decided to be important, because what was decided to be important was never made sufficiently clear.

This is not a failure of talent or effort. It is a failure of translation. The strategic thinking that exists at the top of a business has not been converted into the kind of operational clarity that tells a team not just what to do, but what to stop doing, and why.

The Cost of Trying to Do Everything a Little

The compounding problem with this pattern is that the cost isn't immediately visible.

A business running eight marketing initiatives at 40 percent commitment each doesn't look broken. It looks busy. Dashboards show activity. Reports show reach. Some things work marginally. The cost is what doesn't happen, the depth of execution that comes from full commitment to fewer, better-chosen things.

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Marketing examined the relationship between marketing resource allocation and business performance across 800 firms. The finding was consistent with what Porter had argued two decades earlier: businesses that concentrated resources against clearly defined priorities outperformed those that spread resources across broad activity sets, even when the total resource levels were comparable.⁴ The advantage wasn't budget. It was the clarity that made focused deployment possible.

That clarity is a decision-making output. It cannot be created inside the marketing function. It has to come from above it.

A Question Worth Sitting With

There is a simple test for whether this is true of your business.

Ask three people in your organisation, not in the same room, not together, to write down the two or three types of customers your business has decided it is not trying to serve. And the two or three things your business has decided not to compete on.

If the answers are consistent, the decisions have been made and communicated. If the answers vary, or if the question produces hesitation, the decisions haven't been made clearly enough to be operational. And the marketing problem you are trying to solve is, at its root, a decision that hasn't been made yet.

That is not a criticism of marketing teams or agencies. It is an observation about where the work actually needs to happen first.

Falgun has worked with founder-led businesses across telecom, hospitality, and premium consumer brands for 28 years. He writes from experience, not observation.

References

Porter, Michael E. What Is Strategy? Harvard Business Review, November–December 1996.
Rumelt, Richard. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Crown Business, 2011.
Economist Intelligence Unit. Mind the Gap: Bridging the Strategy-to-Execution Gap. The Economist Group, 2013.
Dotson, J.P. and Allenby, G.M. Investigating the Strategic Influence of Customer and Employee Satisfaction on Firm Financial Performance. Journal of Marketing, 2017. (Verify exact volume and issue before publishing)