Parliament: Why Marketing Teams Play It Safe
Colleen deCourcy became CMO of Sonos in January. In an interview last week she described the goal the company was founded on: to fill every home with music. A decidedly different goal, she said, than to beat Sony at their TV soundbar.
A company trying to fill every home with music can be strange. It can make something hand-drawn, or run a spot about puncturing your calloused soul, which is a real line from the campaign Sonos put out last week (Love the Sound. Feel the System).
None of that needs anyone's permission, because the swing connects to the thing the company is for.
A company trying to beat Sony can't do any of it, and nobody there has to forbid it. When the goal is a competitor, anything wild reads as deviation from the benchmark, and every interesting idea dies to the question of why we would do that. The only answers available are comparisons.
deCourcy put it better than I'm going to: you can get wilder, have more fun, work with fewer rules, because you fundamentally know who you are.
I think most marketing teams recognize the symptom and misdiagnose the cause. The work is safe, and the explanation on offer is usually that leadership is risk-averse, or that the category doesn't allow for it.
It's simpler than that. There's nothing underneath the work to make the bold version defensible. The team is being asked to produce distinctive marketing for a company that has never decided what it is, so every idea gets judged against the only criteria in the room: what competitors are doing, what the metrics say, and whether it looks professional. Those three have never produced anything anyone remembered.
This is the distinction between the being and the doing, and it isn't philosophical. The doing is campaigns, channels, calendars, budget. The being is what any of it is for. Teams working only on the doing aren't timid or uncreative. They're being asked to be brave without a leadership team willing to back them up. Either because they won't walk the talk, or because there was no alignment in the first place.
The part people get wrong is thinking the being is something you invent in a workshop. Usually it's already there and nobody has said it out loud in a decade. It's in the origin story — what made the founder angry enough to start, what they wanted to exist that didn't.
deCourcy has another line about this. The truth about a brand, she says, is usually in a box in the attic.
That's where I'd start. Not with a positioning exercise, and not with a competitive audit. With the founder, and with whatever the reason was that any of this got built in the first place.
Start there.
Kristen Graham Brown is the founder of Hoot Design Company and the creator of The Brand Being Method™, which helps founder-led companies get what they believe out of their heads and into words their teams can run on.
