In years of looking at struggling marketing, in businesses of every size and sector, I can count on one hand the times the problem was a shortage of ideas. The whiteboards are always full. The problem, almost without exception, is the opposite: too many ideas, too little follow-through, and nobody empowered to say the word that fixes both. No.
Ideas are the cheapest asset in marketing
The industry worships creativity, so this lands as heresy, but it’s observably true: ideas are abundant, cheap and perishable. Every team already has more plausible marketing ideas than it could execute in three years. What’s scarce is everything that turns an idea into results: focus, sequencing, consistency, and the discipline to keep doing a working thing long after it stops being interesting. Businesses don’t fail at marketing because they couldn’t think of anything. They fail because they tried to do everything, thinly, briefly, and then moved on.
The half-finished graveyard
Look at any underperforming marketing function and you’ll find the graveyard: the podcast that ran for six episodes, the newsletter that lapsed, the campaign that launched and was never optimised, the channel opened and abandoned. Each was a good idea. Each consumed set-up cost, the most expensive phase, and died before the compounding phase, the only phase that pays. The pattern isn’t a creativity failure; it’s a portfolio failure. Too many positions, none held long enough to return.
Why the new idea always wins the meeting
There’s a structural reason this keeps happening. In any planning meeting, the new idea has every advantage: it’s unburdened by results, flattering to propose, and exciting to discuss. The existing activity, meanwhile, sits there with its imperfect numbers and its familiar problems. So attention flows to novelty, resource follows attention, and the working-but-boring activity gets starved to fund the promising-but-unproven one. Repeat quarterly for three years and you have a marketing function that has started everything and finished nothing. The bias isn’t stupidity. It’s physics, and it needs a counterweight.
The counterweight is a decision, not a talent
The businesses whose marketing compounds aren’t more creative; they’re more decided. Somewhere, someone with authority has said: these two or three things are our marketing, we will do them properly for years, and everything else, however clever, is a no by default. That single decision does more for marketing performance than any tactic I could name, because it protects the compounding phase from the novelty bias. Strategy, stripped of its mystique, is mostly this: choosing what not to do, and having the standing to make the choice stick.
What to do with the ideas instead
Keep them. Write them down, park them, review the list twice a year, promote one only when it can displace something weaker, fully resourced, or when a standing activity has genuinely earned retirement under honest measurement . An idea that’s still compelling after six months in the car park has passed a better filter than any brainstorm. Most won’t be, which is the point.
So if your marketing feels stuck, resist the instinct to generate. Audit what you’ve started, finish or kill the half-done, and give your two or three load-bearing activities the focus they’ve been quietly starved of. Your marketing doesn’t need more ideas. It needs fewer, held longer, done properly. That’s less exciting to say in a meeting, and it’s the entire difference.
When resources are limited, deciding what not to do is part of the strategy. NAMA explores that principle in Budgets – The Hard Choices Behind Strategy.
