Your growth problems aren’t marketing problems.

Time and time again, you see the same thing; a dashboard full of green arrows. Your engagement is up, your bounce rates are down, people are browsing, but your growth is red?

When growth slows, most teams reach for the readily available levers. More content. More ads. More spend. More optimization. More More More. They rarely stop to ask a very uncomfortable question; “Am I optimizing inside of a bad decision frame?”.

Most growth problems aren’t marketing problems, they’re priority, positioning, or strategy problems.

Marketing is visible, executives like to see good marketing because it comes with dashboards and levers they can pull for immediate change. It can feel like you’re making meaningful change. But marketing has become a place where people do things instead of questioning decisions.

Strategy, positioning, and innovation are the behind-the-scene growth drivers. In companies that do it well, these are the same knot. Not separate disciplines. Together they determine how we could be doing better things instead of just doing things better.

These factors become a singular system, a brand system. How your company approaches any one of these things is a result of how built out your brand is. If you aren’t aligned with your brand, your growth will stall no matter how good your execution is.

I saw this firsthand with a recent political campaign. His team was distributing door flyers to neighborhoods in a recent political campaign. These flyers emphasized where the candidate was on certain hot-button issues. The creative was solid, the message was clear, and his team of volunteers was fired up and well informed on how to speak to his campaign. The problem? They were distributing and holding conversations in neighborhoods who were almost guaranteed to vote for him.

Instead of thinking strategically about undecided voters, they opted to communicate with those who had already made their minds up. It wasn’t about how good the creative was, it wasn’t about the story behind the candidate, and it absolutely was not about optimizing any of those approaches.

They didn’t know which levers to pull to activate the right audience.

Once they started seeing that the people they needed to reach didn’t respond to their current approach, everything had to change. What felt like on-brand communication for some audiences didn’t align with his brand in a way that energized non-partisan or undecided voters.

I’ve seen this pattern across several industries in which clients were aiming those marketing cannons at the wrong audience or audiences that simply weren’t there. You could have the greatest creative and still miss if your underlying decisions are wrong.

Executing marketing strategies well matters. Diagnosing and fixing growth problems matters far more.

Trying to solve strategic problems with marketing is a way to stay very busy and very stressed.