Fix Your Marketing Execution, or the Decisions Under It?

An executive education programme I worked with had a clear problem: the market treated a rival as the obvious first choice. Their response was to argue. They had a better position in the annual international ranking. They had stronger salary-progression figures for graduates. They put both in the advertising, repeatedly and competently.

It barely moved. Not because the campaigns were poor — they were well made — but because perception and emotion beat rational arguments almost every time. They were executing beautifully against a decision they had never actually made about what the programme stood for.

The two problems look identical from where you sit

From the owner's chair, both failures produce the same picture: money goes out every month, work gets made, and nothing changes in the pipeline. That symptom cannot tell them apart, which is why so many businesses cycle through agencies. Each new supplier is an attempt to fix execution, and if the problem is upstream, each one produces the same result at a different price.

It helps to name the three ways this goes wrong, plainly. The tracking is broken, so nobody can see what worked. Or a decision — who you are for, what you sell them, why it should be you — was never actually made. Or the decisions and measurement are sound and the execution is genuinely weak. Most businesses assume the third and have the second.

The five-answer test

Ask five people in your business, separately, two questions. Who is this company for? And why do those people choose us instead of the nearest alternative? Don't coach them. Write down what you get.

If the five answers are recognisably the same answer in different words, the decision exists. Whatever is wrong lives downstream, in the work: the wrong channels, weak copy, a slow site, a media plan nobody is holding to anything. That is an execution problem and it is genuinely fixable by better hands.

If you get five different answers — or, more often, four vague ones and one confident one from whoever last thought about it — you do not have an execution problem. You have five versions of the company being marketed at once, and hiring better people will simply distribute the confusion more efficiently.

Why fixing execution is so much more tempting

Because it can be delegated. An execution problem has suppliers, quotes, timelines and someone else to hold responsible. A decision problem has none of that. It requires a room, a few uncomfortable hours, and a choice that closes off customers you have been happily taking money from.

That last part is the real obstacle. Deciding who you are for means deciding who you are not for, and that feels like turning away revenue in a month when revenue is already thin. So the decision gets postponed, and the postponement gets dressed as a search for a better agency — which is exactly the loop behind whether a diagnostic is worth paying for at all.

That is the quiet advantage of settling the decision. A good one constrains what your competitor can say back. A rational argument invites them to produce a better statistic; a position they cannot occupy leaves them nothing to answer with.

• Run the five-answer test this week, separately, without coaching anyone.
• Write the answers down verbatim. Vagueness in your own team is the finding, not a formatting problem.
• If you get one answer, audit the work: channels, message consistency, speed, follow-up.
• If you get five, stop buying execution until the sentence exists and is written down.
• Test any candidate decision by asking whether your closest competitor could claim the same thing. If they could, keep going.

Neither answer is bad news. Knowing which problem you have is the difference between a fix that takes a quarter and a search that takes years — the difference between diagnosing and fixing, and the argument running through Reports, Not Revenue.