Why Most Marketing Fails Before It Starts

Most marketing doesn’t fail because it’s bad.

It fails before it ever starts.

Teams spend weeks planning campaigns. They create content, debate channels, adjust timelines, and ship work they’re proud of. Then results come in—or don’t—and everyone feels uneasy. The effort was real. The intentions were good. The outcome is still disappointing.

That gap is rarely a creativity problem.

It’s almost always a decision problem.

The Pattern I See Over and Over

When marketing stalls, teams usually respond by doing more:

• More content

• More meetings

• More revisions

• More platforms

Activity increases. Clarity doesn’t.

What’s missing is not another tactic. It’s the one decision that gives every tactic meaning.

The Decision Most Marketing Never Makes

Before any marketing begins, someone has to answer this question clearly:

What decision is this marketing supposed to support?

Not awareness.

Not engagement.

Not traffic.

A real decision, like:

• Hire us

• Donate

• Trust us enough to take the next step

• Change a belief

• Stop doing one thing and start doing another

If you can’t name the decision, everything downstream breaks.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

When the decision is unclear:

• Success can’t be defined

• Evaluation becomes subjective

• Optimization turns into guesswork

• Teams argue based on taste instead of outcomes

You end up busy, but not effective.

This is why so many teams feel like they’re “doing marketing” without being able to say whether it’s working. There’s no shared standard, because there was no shared decision.

Evaluation Depends on the Decision

Last week, I wrote about how poorly most organizations evaluate marketing. This is why.

You can’t evaluate performance against a goal that was never set. You can’t improve work when you don’t know what it was supposed to move.

Once the decision is clear, evaluation gets simpler:

• Did this help someone make the decision we intended?

• If not, what got in the way?

• What should change next time?

That’s when marketing becomes a system instead of a pile of tactics.

This Is a Leadership Issue, Not a Marketing One

The hardest part of marketing isn’t execution.

It’s choosing.

Choosing what matters.

Choosing what you’re asking people to do.

Choosing what success looks like before you start.

When leaders avoid that decision, marketing absorbs the ambiguity. The work carries the weight the decision should have held.

Start Here

Before your next campaign, post, or project, pause and answer one sentence:

This marketing exists to help someone decide to _______.

If you can say that clearly, marketing has a chance to compound.

If you can’t, it’s already failing—no matter how good the execution looks.

Some of my favorites are:
to develop a relationship.
to make a small donation.
to connect with our social media.
to subscribe to our email list.
to buy our product.