On a kind of fatigue that’s earned, and what it actually takes to come back from it.
I’ve spoken with enough founders over the past two years to know that there’s a particular kind of weariness setting in around marketing, and it’s not the kind that responds to a better pitch or a more confident promise of results. It’s the weariness of someone who has tried, sometimes more than once, with people who used the right words and produced something less than what those words suggested. The campaigns ran, the reports came in, the budget went out. And what came back, in the language that actually matters to a business, was less than what was promised and harder to explain than it should have been.
When this has happened a couple of times, the rational response is exactly what I’ve been hearing: a quiet decision to stop trusting any of it. Not a dramatic rejection, just a slow withdrawal, where marketing becomes something the founder handles personally, in whatever time is left, with whatever attention is left, because the cost of being disappointed again has come to feel higher than the cost of doing it badly themselves.
I want to say something specific to founders in this position, because I think it’s been said badly by too many people. The skepticism is correct; the reflex to protect yourself from another version of the same disappointment is correct. What’s worth examining is whether what you got disappointed with was actually marketing, or whether it was something marketed as marketing that didn’t have the structure underneath it to produce what marketing is supposed to produce. Those two things look very similar from the outside, and the difference between them is rarely visible until after the money has gone out.
What I’ve found, in the conversations that have led to engagements after this kind of fatigue, is that what these founders are looking for is not better promises. It’s evidence of a different way of working, the kind that starts with understanding their business before recommending anything, that connects whatever it proposes to a decision the founder needs to make, that says clearly when something isn’t likely to work, and that doesn’t grow expensive on the back of confusion. When that way of working is present, trust can rebuild. It tends to take longer to rebuild than it took to lose, which is fair.
If you’re a founder who’s stopped believing in marketing, I don’t think you’re wrong to be where you are. I think the right next step, when one comes, is to choose differently the next time, and to take seriously the question of what you’re actually buying when someone offers to help.
What would you need to see, specifically, from someone proposing to work on your marketing, to consider engaging again?
The Founders Who Stopped Believing in Marketing Have a Point was originally published in DataDrivenInvestor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
