In the coming weeks, System1’s Andrew Tindall will explore the common ways brands fail and offer remedies. He’ll be joined by a co-author too; today, it’s experienced CFO Joe Kelly.
After recently conducting an effectiveness consultancy and some workshops for a global brand, something struck me on the flight home. Across several sessions, totally different topics, and three different teams, it became clear that most brands face the same fundamental issues, the exact same ones I saw when I worked brand-side at big FMCGs.
But this is great news.
It proves that there are well-documented rules and patterns for how marketing works, and those rarely change across markets or categories. Most marketers lose sleep over the same things. Yet case studies, whitepapers and marketing media tend to focus solely on what worked. The big wins. The hero stories.
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Maybe I’m about to ruin the consultancy business model here. In my coming columns, I’ll be sharing a couple of common mistakes brands make that limit growth and how to avoid them every week. And because real growth comes from P&L-owning marketers who can work across the whole business, I’ve invited a guest each week to share a killer mistake they see their clients make. Someone from outside the usual marketing bubble.
This week, that’s Joe Kelly. Former mergers and acquisitions expert turned finance director of a green startup. He’ll bring a financial lens to the table to close out the article.
But first, here are a few classic modern marketing failures to sink your teeth into; the innovation downfall, the over-reliance on performance, and a bad relationship with the CFO.
I once had a chart burned into my brain.
I can’t legally share it, so I’ve redrawn a worse version from memory below. It came from a major company’s innovation training program designed to teach marketers how innovation could unlock future brand growth.
In hindsight, the chart showed the opposite. It was actually a masterclass in how brands use incremental innovation to plug leaks in a sinking ship. As one exec at the same company succinctly put it, “Innovation needs to do what marketing can’t,” which cuts to the core of the issue here.
Innovation is supposed to unlock new customer value beyond what strategy, price, promotion and distribution alone can do. It should serve current customers better, recruit new ones, or create new categories.
Instead, I saw a brand using constant low-risk flavor extensions to temporarily bump sales and re-recruit lapsed users.
It was plugging holes, not steering the ship.
This kind of incrementalism isn’t inherently bad.
P&G and Unilever do it well, handing back value to customers. So does Walkers, combining new flavor launches with proper positioning and big emotional campaigns. However, growth is only driven when paired with effective marketing.
It comes down to proper strategy. ‘Playing to Win’ by Alan G. Lafley lays it out perfectly. You need to decide where to play, how to win, and then align systems, marketing and innovation behind that. Most brands skip straight to “let’s do something new” when things aren’t looking great.
This is a classic Les Binet and Peter Field warning, but it keeps happening. Brands over-invest in performance marketing (ads that capture short-term, in-market demand) and under-invest in long-term brand building.
Without emotional, broad-reach campaigns that build mental availability and future demand, your performance campaigns lose effectiveness over time.
Here’s what typically happens:
Your base sales shrink. Fewer people are aware of you, and fewer choose you by default.
Your price elasticity worsens. Less brand equity means less pricing power.
Your performance ads become less efficient. The same spend gets you less return.
If your overall media budget has stayed flat but your value share is down, you’re probably slipping. Especially if your media plan is skewed towards lower-funnel, highly targeted or rational stuff.
The solution?
Audit your media properly. Understand which campaigns are building long-term demand and which are capturing short-term intent. And make sure your budget reflects a healthy mix. Les and Peter recommend 60:40 brand to activation. Most brands do the opposite.
This one’s sneakier. You’re not losing share, but you’re not growing it either.
Meanwhile, your performance spend increases every year, and you’ve got platform data saying it’s all working.
Great CTRs, ROI holding steady, and everyone’s happy.
Except you’re stuck.
You’re a performance ostrich. Your head is buried in data that doesn’t reflect reality. You’re shoveling more and more money into media designed to nudge the same people, which is becoming less efficient.
Market share flat.
No meaningful growth. No brand equity is being built.
Airbnb spotted this. It has spoken publicly about shifting away from performance-led strategies and back into big, emotional storytelling. It’s also what McDonald’s did in one of the best IPA case studies ever written.
WARC’s ‘The Multiplier Effect’ study backs this up: campaigns that combine long and short-term messages deliver 90% better ROI. If your share is flat and your spend’s going up, this is your wake-up call.
So make performance media your follow-up act, not your opening line. Invest in campaigns that entertain and build memory structures. Do it well, and your performance spend will start working harder, too.
Now, over to our guest this week.
Finance doesn’t create business value by itself.
But it does understand the levers that do. It sees the whole machine (marketing, ops, supply chain) and helps coordinate efforts. Then, it translates it all into numbers so leadership can make smart bets.
Forget the LinkedIn cliché that finance is the creativity killer. A good CFO is as narrative-obsessed as any CMO. We love it when a story comes together across a couple of charts and the boardroom leans forward.
And yes, a good CFO can be a creative partner. They can help you find new revenue streams, allocate resources differently, and bring credibility to big ideas.
But if your CFO doesn’t get what you do? They’re a blocker. That’s not sustainable. You’ll either need to educate them, build a board-level coalition, or frankly replace them.
The best marketing teams are aligned with finance. They know the numbers, speak the language, and take accountability. They’re not trying to win internal battles; they’re trying to win outside the market.
So stop treating finance like the enemy. Make them an ally. Learn their world. Invite them into yours. And you’ll find more opportunities to grow than you thought possible.
That’s it for part one. More brand-breaking mistakes and how to dodge them next week.
Continue the conversation with Andrew here. Read more from Andrew.
