Most businesses don't have a marketing problem. They have an understanding problem.

I’ve spent most of my career in marketing, which makes what I’m about to say slightly awkward: I think quite a lot of marketing problems aren’t actually marketing problems.

Marketing is just where they show up.

Sales have slowed, so marketing isn’t working. Customer acquisition is getting more expensive, so we need better ads. People aren’t buying the product, so we need more awareness. Growth has stalled, so we need a new campaign, a new agency, a new positioning, maybe TikTok. There is normally quite a lot of doing that happens very quickly.

And sometimes, obviously, marketing is the problem. The proposition is brilliant, customers want it, the product works, distribution is there and nobody knows you exist. Crack on.

But I’ve seen enough businesses now to know that there is often something sitting further upstream.

Maybe the customer has changed. Maybe what they value has changed. Maybe the category has moved and the thing that differentiated you five years ago is now completely standard. Maybe people know exactly who you are but have made a meaning about your brand that means they don’t think it is for them. Maybe you are talking brilliantly about something customers simply don’t care that much about.

Or maybe everyone inside the business has become so close to it that something which seems completely obvious internally makes absolutely no sense from the outside.

This is probably why I can be quite annoying at the beginning of projects. I don’t immediately want to answer the question I’ve been given. I want to understand why we’re asking it.

If you tell me marketing isn’t working, I want to know what “isn’t working” actually means. What has changed? When did it change? Who is buying? Who isn’t? What do customers think is happening? What does the business think is happening? Where do those two things disagree?

It’s less satisfying initially because everyone wants to get to the solution. I understand that. Solutions feel like progress.

But I’d rather spend a bit longer understanding the problem than spend an awful lot of money brilliantly marketing the wrong thing.