This isn’t a takedown or a manifesto. It’s an inside look at what I keep seeing behind the scenes, and why it matters for anyone investing in strategy work right now.
(Okay, and a little bit of a rant. I’m usually all about possibilities. This one trends a bit more toward problems.)
The sleight of hand
Some people call it strategy. I call it smoke and mirrors, and I’ve seen too much of it lately.
When everything falls into place, it feels like magic. But effective marketing isn’t magic; it’s the result of clarity.
Lately, what I’m seeing is more illusion: perfectly branded decks packed with useless content.
Here’s why it pisses me off and why I decided to talk about it here. I’ve talked to too many smart, capable business owners who keep paying for work that looks the part but doesn’t give them anything they can actually use.
What they’ve been sold is theater: bad thinking disguised by good design. And it breaks trust between clients, marketers, and the industry as a whole. (If you haven’t heard, trust is already at an all-time low.)
The illusion: what clients think they’re buying
From the outside, it all looks premium. The language sounds sophisticated enough to make you nod along (even if you’re not totally sure what it means). You walk away feeling confident because you’ve invested in your business, and done the “right” thing.
But somehow your team’s still not aligned, your content still sounds generic, and your website still isn’t converting.
You start to wonder:
Nope. What you were given wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t built on real insight or designed to drive decisions, and is totally disconnected from how your buyers actually think and decide.
If you’ve ever opened your “brand strategy,” stared at it, and thought, I guess this is fine?—it’s not. That uneasy feeling is your instinct catching what the work missed.
Cue the oh-shit moment. You’ve done all the “right” things, and suddenly it hits you that the thing holding you back might actually be the thing you paid for. Fun, right?
I get it. Redoing that work can feel like admitting you made the wrong choice. But you didn’t. You trusted experts who should’ve known better. And you shouldn’t have to rebuild your business around their shortcuts.
(Stay with me here. Just a bit more of me on my soapbox and then we’ll get to some tangible takeaways.)
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Why this keeps happening
Most of this bad work doesn’t start with bad intentions.
It starts with people who don’t understand how their piece fits into the whole.
- Designers who know how to make something look good but not how design supports conversion
- Strategists who run a workshop well but don’t know how to translate insights into messaging that actually sells
- Copywriters handed a half-baked framework and told to “make it sound good”
Each person works in isolation, doing what they think is their job, but no one connects the dots.
😤Then there’s the other side of it—the agencies that know better but do it anyway.
The agencies that hand over a presentation template with your logo swapped in, more focused on the wow factor than the actual thinking.
And because clients don’t always know what real strategy should look like, the surface-level stuff keeps getting rewarded, and you end up with glossy deliverables with no practical use.
This isn’t about bashing agencies
This isn’t about bashing agencies. (Okay… maybe a little.)
Mostly, it’s about accountability.
Hear me out. There are plenty of smart, well-intentioned people inside agencies who care deeply about doing good work. And some agencies do it the right way: They align a plan with your actual business goals and needs.
More often than not, though, they take a cookie-cutter process and apply it to your brand regardless of what’s already in place (or not) inside your business.
The problem is, the system rewards speed, volume, and optics, not depth. This means agencies end up running marketing mills that churn out shiny work built on shallow thinking.
Somewhere between the kickoff call and the final presentation, “strategic” quietly turns into “slide deck.” That’s when clients end up paying for brand clarity and getting buzzword bullsh*t instead.
Where it all breaks down
Most of the messes I clean up start long before I ever show up.
Sometimes I’m brought in for copy, to make what’s already written actually connect. Other times, it’s for positioning or messaging because the last “strategy” didn’t get results.
But lately, I’ve been seeing a different kind of problem: people think they already have what they need.
The business is growing, the marketing feels consistent, and they’ve decided it’s finally time to redo the website because that’s the next logical step. They’ve invested in audience research, a POV exercise, a “we help” statement, or a brand narrative.
🔎 But then I start reviewing what they’ve been given to build from—the audience research, the messaging framework, the brand positioning—and it’s clear it was never truly strategic.
It looks great, it sounds “smart” (aka jargon-y), but it doesn’t actually say anything. The insights aren’t real insights, the differentiators don’t differentiate, and the messaging doesn’t map to how people make buying decisions.
So they start doing what good business owners do: testing new offers, tweaking website copy… trying to fix a downstream problem that was never tactical to begin with.
And that’s the part that lit a fire under me to write this.
What they don’t realize (and shouldn’t have to) is the pieces they were given were never strategic, just nicely packaged deliverables that didn’t connect to the real business.
That’s when even great businesses start solving the wrong problems.
So, what now?
If that little voice is saying, “Is this us?”, start with curiosity.
Don’t rush to rewrite the website. Ask what actually went into the strategy you’re using. When positioning and messaging are done well, there’s research and reasoning behind every choice. If you can’t trace it, dig.
Questions to ask:
- Do we truly know what makes us different, or are we assuming our audience does?
- What market research informed this? Who did we talk to, and what did we learn?
- Were direct and indirect competitors analyzed in depth, or just referenced?
- Do our mission, vision, and values reflect how we actually operate today?
- When we read our brand story, is it immediately clear, or are we filling in gaps because we already know what we meant?
What solid positioning work includes (at least)
- Mission, vision, values refined as real non-negotiables for decisions and marketing (not statements drafted by HR and then hung as pretty posters on the wall)
- Competitor research on both direct and indirect players to find true white space
- Market and audience research with real input from buyers through interviews or surveys
- Personas built around psychographics, not just demographics, so you know how clients think and decide
- Values, benefits, and features articulated, then shaped into positioning statements that explain your unique value and why your ideal client should care
What solid messaging work includes (at least)
- Defined brand voice and tone so everything from emails to proposals sounds like you
- Key messaging statements and a clear hierarchy so the story scales across channels
- A mapped customer journey that ties what buyers need to hear at each stage to the actions you want
- Voice-of-customer language gathered from client interviews, surveys, forums, and sales conversations to capture real objections, priorities, and phrasing
If most of this is unfamiliar, it doesn’t automatically mean the work was bad. It means there are likely gaps, and that’s why execution keeps feeling harder than it should.
A quick clarity test:
Read your core messaging out loud. If you have to explain what it really means, or it could belong to any company in your space, it’s too vague to work. Real strategy doesn’t just make you sound smart. It makes your audience feel seen.
You don’t always need to burn it down (but sometimes you do)
Sometimes the strategy’s close. It just just needs tightening, not a total reset.
Sometimes you do have to burn it all down. And it sucks when that happens. But it’s better than pouring more time, money, and energy into a foundation with cracks.
If you want a sounding board, reach out and tell me what you discovered as you read this. No pitch. Just a real conversation about what you have, what’s missing, and what to do next.
Stacy
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