Three questions every marketing decision has to survive
Every marketing decision that disappointed you had at least one question unanswered. You may not have known it at the time. In hindsight it’s almost always obvious which one was missing.
The campaign that ran and produced nothing. The launch that felt right internally and landed flat externally. The messaging that everyone in the room approved and nobody outside the room understood. The problem, in most of these cases, wasn’t the execution. The brief was wrong. And the brief was wrong because someone assumed the answer to a question that was never actually asked.
Three questions. Asked in order, before anything goes further. Once a year in a strategy session is not enough. Every time, on every decision. Especially on the ones that feel obvious, because obvious is where assumptions hide.
They function as an acid test: stress-test whether you’re ready to make a decision before you make it.
The three questions are simple. Who is this for, what’s the story worth telling, and how do we make ourselves heard. In that order, every time.
Who is this actually for?
The specific person, in a specific situation, with a specific reason to care about what you’re offering right now. A segment or a persona is a starting point. The answer to this question tells you what you’re actually looking for.
Knowing who your customer is means more than having a demographic profile. It means knowing what situation triggers the need for what you’re offering, what happened in their day, their quarter, their business that makes them suddenly receptive. It means knowing what they’re comparing you to when they decide, which is rarely just your direct competitors. It means knowing what they believe about the problem before they encounter your solution, because that belief is what your story has to meet first.
And it means checking whether all of that is still true. Markets move. Behaviour shifts. The customer you understood well two years ago may have changed what they need, how they buy, what they trust, or what they’re willing to pay attention to. The answer requires someone to have talked to real customers recently, not necassarily in a structured survey, but in a real conversation about how things have changed.
Treat it as settled and you end up making something precisely addressed to a person who no longer exists quite the way you remember them.
What’s the story worth telling?
The thing that is genuinely true about what you’re offering that the right person actually wants to hear, in language they’d use themselves, connected to something they already care about.
The story is the stable core: the value proposition, what this product stands for, why it exists for this specific person. The message is the surface expression of that story, which can and should vary by channel, by moment, by audience. A product launch and a retention campaign can carry very different messages. The story underneath should be the same.
This is where most businesses lose the thread. The story gets diluted as the decision moves through the organisation. Legal adjusts the wording. Finance changes the offer. Product adds a feature that shifts the emphasis. Leadership wants a different tone. Each change is reasonable in isolation. Together they can produce a message that no longer connects to anything coherent underneath.
There was a time I kept our value propositions on a flip-chart and made every campaign memo answer to them before it moved. I tortured my colleagues with it. It helped more than they admitted. The flaw I only recognised later: nobody had tested those propositions with real customers. We were aligning around assumptions we’d never verified.
There is more to verify here than it looks. Does the story align your product’s real strengths with your customer’s actual needs? Is it specific enough to be meaningful and simple enough to be remembered? And after it has passed through every set of hands that touched it, is the story still visible underneath the message? If the answer to that last question is uncertain, the execution isn’t ready.
A description of what the product does is raw material. The story is what makes that description matter to a specific person in a specific moment. If you can’t feel the difference between the two, that’s the work still to be done.
How do we make ourselves heard?
This is where every marketing conversation starts. It should be the last question you answer, not the first.
Channel decisions are easy to make and easy to justify. They’re concrete, they have budgets attached, they produce things you can point to. But a channel is a route, and a route only makes sense once you know where you’re going and who you’re taking with you.
The useful version of this question starts with whether you actually have access to the person you identified in question one, through owned channels, earned relationships, or paid reach that genuinely targets them. It asks whether the format fits the story: some stories need space to breathe, others work in a single image. It asks whether the moment is right, the same message lands differently depending on where the customer is in their decision process.
When the answer is honest, it sometimes reveals that the channel you were planning to use doesn’t actually reach the person you identified, or that the story doesn’t fit the format you had in mind.
The three questions work as a system because they have to be answered in order. The right channel depends on the story. The right story depends on who it’s for. Skipping ahead may feel efficient but it’s not. It just moves the problem further down the line, closer to the moment when it’s expensive to fix.
Use them every time. Print them and pin them above your desk. Put them at the top of every marketing brief, as a gate, not a formality. Check them before the brief goes anywhere. Then check them again after it comes back, and against every deliverable that follows. A marketing decision rarely arrives at execution looking the way it started, it passes through legal, finance, product, leadership, each one adding something, removing something, adjusting the edge. If the final proposal still answers who it’s for, what story it’s telling, and how it reaches that person, it doesn’t matter how many hands touched it. If it doesn’t, something got lost along the way. Find it before it goes out.
Most marketing decisions that disappoint are clarity failures that happened upstream, before the brief was written, before the budget was approved.
These three questions are where that clarity either gets built or gets lost. The decisions don’t get easier. But they get cleaner. And clean decisions, even imperfect ones, beat confused decisions with bigger budgets almost every time.
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