Summary (TL;DR)
The reason companies struggle isn’t just bad products or tough competition—it’s botched marketing. Too many businesses rush brand formation, pile on unnecessary messaging, and end up with cluttered, ineffective communication.
Learn how to refine your brand identity, craft a compelling story, and use a repeatable, scientific approach to break through the noise and resonate with customers. Whether you’re launching a startup or refreshing an established brand, your words fuel your marketing success.
Before you build a “revenue engine,” you need the right fuel. Learn how to sharpen your message, tell a story that attracts media attention, and set the foundation for sustainable growth. 🚀
Why Most Companies Fail (at Marketing)
There has never been more marketing information available at our fingertips. And yet, most of the marketing leaders I speak with are more confused and frustrated than ever – desperate to figure out the answer to poor performance, low leads, and no sales. I have done marketing for hundreds of companies for more than 10 years alongside my team at Van Bram. Dozens of those companies became very successful, but most grew slowly, and some of them failed. I hope to help your company become a success story.
*As a person who’s very keen on having people “get to the point already,” on this topic, I have to take the scenic route. If it was easy to explain you’d already know it by now.
Seeing the Matrix
I remember the first time my agency led marketing for a failing client company. It was incredibly frustrating. Five years and 50 companies later, we had tested nearly every tactic in the book numerous times. Some strategies worked well for one company but not for another, and sometimes nothing worked. There was a huge replicability problem for our success stories.
Around that time, a mentor told me it was important to learn “first principles” if I hoped to improve upon them.” So, over months and years, I did what was necessary to find answers: I read books, watched videos, tried new tools, and went to events.
After 10 years and a couple hundred companies, we continued to come across those that we couldn’t help (or failed to help), but that’s when something changed. It was like I finally had enough pieces of the puzzle to see the big picture – to see the Matrix. That’s the perspective advantage of operating an agency: way more data points. I wish I knew 10 years ago what I know now.
Evidently, 9 out of 10 companies fail. The underlying causes for failure are often not the fault of marketing or even sales. My intent is to show you what the problem is to the extent that marketing can fix it. In other words, I’m writing to marketers and marketing-minded executives. How your company chooses to develop products or deliver services is a separate challenge.
Meaningless Marketing
Marketing is commonly seen as an empty and deceptive discipline, driven by tricks and gimmicks to siren-call hapless buyers. A survey from a couple of years back found that marketers were ranked third on a list of least trusted professions, only to be outdone by politicians and used car salesmen. In order for marketing to be effective, it cannot be empty.
The infamous oil tycoon, John D. Rockefeller, wrote a book toward the end of his life titled Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (which I think is a hilarious title). Rockefeller was the wealthiest man on earth during his lifetime and was perceived as a villain by many of his contemporaries, not unlike the ultra-billionaires of our own day. In the book, he observes, “the man will be most successful who confers the greatest service on the world” and “the penalty of a selfish attempt to make the world confer [success] without contributing to the progress or happiness of mankind is generally a failure to the individual.” We must do and say things that provide real value, or the result will invariably be failure.
Sadly, many of the marketing strategies I’ve seen over 10 years were premised on activity and volume over clarity and quality. I saw companies produce mountains of marketing content over the years (some of which I made), and much of it was garbage. It’s no wonder nobody read it. For one thing, it was mostly unoriginal. Writing or doing something original is always harder. According to Rockefeller, “It requires a better type of mind to seek out and create the new than to follow the worn paths of accepted success.” Creating products and messaging that convey real value is harder but it’s a necessary condition for success.
The Deeper Problem
The problem with marketing usually runs deeper than content and taglines. It goes to the root of a brand’s identity and message. In an interview with PR veteran Brooke Hammerling, she said, “I can’t tell you how many times we’ve met with early-stage companies, and they start by telling us their big vision… But when we ask them what they actually do, they can’t tell us. If you can’t answer that question, don’t do anything else until you can.”
Almost without exception, companies come to Van Bram looking for us to provide and execute a successful turnkey marketing strategy. They have their product or service, and they want us to build their revenue engine. But the engine won’t run on bad fuel. The core messaging around a company and its product(s) is the fuel. Very often, we find the fuel is unrefined and messy – founders and investors that don’t agree on what the product is, companies that want to be something they’re not, CEOs who insist on verbose text, marketers that want to blend 10 core messages, endless acronyms, and so on.
Unfortunately, many executives hear “this engine won’t run unless we fix your messaging” as some kind of filibuster strategy to suck money out of their company without generating any business. They only want the result. “Just reach into your bag of marketing tricks and make revenue appear.” Then eager, hopeful marketing agencies and directors say, “Sure, we can do that” (while holding their breath), and the initiative is dead before it’s begun. This is almost exactly the underlying ask for many agency-client relationships and even many CEOs to their marketing team. I have a hat in my office that says, “I’m a marketer, not a magician,” because I’ve seen this play out so many times. Here’s the good news: the results of your marketing will feel magical if you get the fundamentals right. When a brand gets it right at the root level, revenue growth comes easier, and everyone looks like a genius.
The emergence of marketing technology has made people think of marketing solely as a machine to be measured and optimized, leveraging tools to maximize opportunities through volume and automation. Here’s the problem: all these tools have caused people to forget what marketing is! I started my career in the finance sector in New York so I’m all for taking a scientific approach, but the art of creating clear, resonant messaging has been largely lost.
Forming Your Message
I took a creative writing class in college, and the professor began the first class with an exercise. He placed an apple on his desk at the front of the room and asked each student to come up with a single word to describe the apple. One student said “red,” another said “round,” another “juicy.” Then a female student across the room from me said a word that I found absurd…“spiritual.” I was sure the professor would scoff at her answer. Instead, he said “wooow,” and, pulling up a chair, he proceeded to tease out the profound insight he perceived behind the word.
In that moment, I thought, “I’m gonna fail this class.” Why? Because the standard seemed impossibly arbitrary, and clearly, I didn’t understand the rules. That’s how most small and medium-sized companies approach brand identity. There’s a bunch of stuff written down, but it’s unclear if any of the words are correct or compelling.
Our approach to developing brand clarity is structured semantic workshops based on a framework we developed and tested with experts. You don’t have to use our approach. Others use a narrative approach. Donald Miller, founder of StoryBrand, recommends a story-based model for finding clarity. He says, “If you confuse, you lose.”
If you don’t have a clear and resonant message you’re going to lose the customer and lose the sale. So be sure you’re taking a close look at every word. Create a clear messaging hierarchy. And don’t say too much. The studies around information retention are clear: if you say less, they will retain more. Almost every company we work with initially wants to market 4-6 “essential” messages or value statements. My response is always the same. Pick 1 or 2. Companies with lots of funding (probably more than you) didn’t make it because they confused the customer. Keep it simple.
What’s the point here (conclusion)
If you think this article is about the importance of good messaging…give it another read. This article is first about why most companies fail and how botched marketing plays a role in that failure. Messaging just happens to be a root cause.
And now, some final thoughts.
Don’t try to fast-forward brand formation. Develop clear, succinct messaging and cut out everything else. You can add other stuff later. Use a cohesive and scientific (i.e. repeatable) approach to forging and sharpening your words so they 1) cut through the noise and 2)resonate with customers. At the end of that process you should have very clear left-brain (scientific) messaging, including a brand definition and value proposition, and also right-brain (creative) messaging, namely a compelling story.
The clarity of your words will drive marketing assets like ads, collateral, and web pages. Your story will drive media attention – as long as it’s authentic, personal, and compelling.
Maybe you’re already way down the road, and growth is slow. Your brand might need some re-forming. Years ago, I did a messaging exercise for my own agency where I noted, “Small companies need to develop their identity and build a revenue engine from scratch. Established companies need to reform or refresh their brand and build a modern revenue engine.” In every case, you have to refine the words that make up your brand before you can expect the marketing machinery to perform.
Once you’ve done the work of refining your fuel, it is time to build an engine (or vehicle) to bring your message to the market. How you choose to do that will depend on a handful of important factors, but you will need at least three things: tools (technology), a team (people), and a plan (strategy). In an upcoming article, I’ll talk about these three ingredients in more detail.
If your growth is anemic and/or marketing is not working, we’re happy to connect. Hopefully, it’s a marketing problem that we can fix. You can reach my team at marketing@vanbram.co or call us at (703) 651-2675
