Marketing doesn’t become expensive because teams are careless.
It becomes expensive because sensible decisions, made under pressure and with good intent, slowly reset value instead of carrying it forward.
Performance metrics can look healthy while underlying efficiency quietly erodes. Costs creep up. Results feel harder to sustain. Growth becomes less stable, even though nothing appears “broken”.
Below are 50 decisions experienced teams regularly make. None of them are stupid. Many are necessary in the right context.
The risk lies in what they quietly do to memory, recognition, and accumulated value over time.
Strategy resets and reinvention
1. “Let’s refresh the messaging.”
Feels sensible: Engagement is dipping and there’s pressure to act.
Hidden cost: People who had started to recognise you now have to re-learn who you are and why you matter, so future campaigns need more spend to achieve the same response.
Stress test: What exactly is broken here, how we’re saying it or what we’re known for?
2. “We need clearer positioning.”
Feels sensible: Competitive noise makes differentiation feel urgent.
Hidden cost: Any mental shortcuts buyers had already formed about you are weakened, meaning more explanation is required before trust returns.
Stress test: Are we clarifying what people already think about us, or replacing it?
3. “This year needs a new story.”
Feels sensible: Annual planning rewards novelty and ambition.
Hidden cost: Familiarity and partial understanding built last year is forgotten, so this year’s spend starts from a lower baseline.
Stress test: What understanding from last year are we deliberately reinforcing?
4. “Our audience has evolved.”
Feels sensible: Markets genuinely do change.
Hidden cost: If this assumption is wrong or overstated, marketing is rebuilt for a shift that hasn’t happened, increasing cost without improving relevance.
Stress test: What buyer behaviour has demonstrably changed?
5. “We’ve outgrown our original angle.”
Feels sensible: Growth ambitions demand credibility.
Hidden cost: The quickest way people used to understand and remember you is removed, making recognition slower and more expensive.
Stress test: Which parts of the original angle still help people ‘get’ us quickly?
6. “We should simplify the proposition.”
Feels sensible: Complexity is blamed for friction.
Hidden cost: In removing nuance, the proposition starts to sound like everyone else’s, reducing memorability and increasing substitution risk.
Stress test: What makes us recognisable after the simplification?
7. “Let’s align with the new leadership vision.”
Feels sensible: Internal coherence matters.
Hidden cost: External audiences experience a sudden shift without context, which quietly reduces confidence.
Stress test: What must stay consistent for customers, regardless of internal change?
8. “The strategy hasn’t landed.”
Feels sensible: Early results disappoint.
Hidden cost: The strategy is abandoned before people have seen it enough times to remember or trust it.
Stress test: Has this been given enough time to register?
9. “We need to modernise how we talk.”
Feels sensible: Language and tone date.
Hidden cost: If meaning changes as well as style, existing customers feel a disconnect and recognition weakens.
Stress test: What still needs to feel familiar after the update?
10. “Let’s start again and do it properly.”
Feels sensible: Clean slates feel efficient.
Hidden cost: Previous understanding is wiped, so spend has to work harder just to get back to where you were.
Stress test: What value are we mistakenly throwing away?
Paid media and performance behaviour
11. “Turn off anything underperforming.”
Feels sensible: You’re protecting budget.
Hidden cost: Money already spent on learning is wasted, meaning future campaigns must pay again to discover the same things.
Stress test: Is this genuinely inefficient, or just unfinished?
12. “Scale what converts fastest.”
Feels sensible: Proven efficiency feels safer.
Hidden cost: You keep paying more to reach the same people, pushing costs up while limiting future growth options.
Stress test: What happens when this audience is exhausted?
13. “Retargeting is where the ROI is.”
Feels sensible: Conversion rates are higher.
Hidden cost: Growth depends on repeatedly paying to reach people who already know you, rather than creating new demand.
Stress test: Where are new buyers coming from?
14. “Optimise for this quarter.”
Feels sensible: Forecast and board pressure.
Hidden cost: Actions that would reduce future costs are delayed, making every quarter harder to hit.
Stress test: What cost are we pushing into the future?
15. “We need more lower-funnel spend.”
Feels sensible: Revenue urgency.
Hidden cost: You borrow demand from the future, making later quarters more expensive to sustain.
Stress test: What is feeding the funnel six months from now?
16. “Let’s test new audiences.”
Feels sensible: Saturation fears.
Hidden cost: Budget is spread thinly, so no audience receives enough exposure to become efficient.
Stress test: Which audiences will we commit to if a test works?
17. “Refresh the ads.”
Feels sensible: Frequency metrics rise.
Hidden cost: If the underlying message changes with every refresh, recognition drops and spend must increase to compensate.
Stress test: Does this new creative reinforce the same core idea?
18. “Pause until performance improves.”
Feels sensible: Cost control.
Hidden cost: Attention decays while paused, so restarting costs more than continuing would have.
Stress test: What will it cost to rebuild momentum?
19. “The platform will optimise.”
Feels sensible: Automation promises efficiency.
Hidden cost: Optimisation favours short-term signals, making performance less predictable over time.
Stress test: What behaviour are we training the platform to reward?
20. “Paid will carry growth this year.”
Feels sensible: Organic growth feels uncertain.
Hidden cost: Results disappear the moment spend slows, increasing financial risk.
Stress test: What still works if spend drops?
Creative, campaigns, and churn
21. “This creative is tired.”
Feels sensible: Internal teams are bored.
Hidden cost: Familiar cues that helped people recognise and trust you are removed, so new creative must rebuild that trust.
Stress test: Are buyers tired of this, or are we?
22. “Let’s do something bolder.”
Feels sensible: Standing out feels necessary.
Hidden cost: Existing customers feel less sure it’s you, quietly reducing confidence.
Stress test: Will people still know it’s us?
23. “Every campaign needs a new idea.”
Feels sensible: Creative momentum is valued.
Hidden cost: No idea runs long enough to become familiar, so every campaign pays the full cost of introduction.
Stress test: What idea are we reinforcing over time?
24. “Tailor messaging per channel.”
Feels sensible: Platform best practice.
Hidden cost: People encounter different versions of you everywhere, weakening overall recognition.
Stress test: Would someone recognise us across channels?
25. “Let’s lead with a different angle.”
Feels sensible: Variety feels persuasive.
Hidden cost: Buyers struggle to remember what you actually stand for, increasing explanation time.
Stress test: What stays consistent across angles?
26. “Brand work didn’t convert.”
Feels sensible: It didn’t show immediate ROI.
Hidden cost: Work that made later conversion easier is removed, forcing performance channels to work harder.
Stress test: What influenced buyers before they converted?
27. “This needs to feel more premium.”
Feels sensible: Price or positioning is increasing.
Hidden cost: Familiar trust signals are removed before new credibility is established, causing hesitation.
Stress test: What proof supports the higher signal?
28. “Align creative to the trend.”
Feels sensible: Relevance anxiety.
Hidden cost: Following irrelevant trends makes you blend in, reducing distinctiveness.
Stress test: Does this trend help buyers recognise us?
29. “Experiment with new formats.”
Feels sensible: Platform incentives.
Hidden cost: Meaning is lost as format changes faster than understanding.
Stress test: What meaning survives the experiment?
30. “We need more content.”
Feels sensible: Visibility pressure.
Hidden cost: Output increases while clarity declines, making marketing busy but less effective.
Stress test: What is all this content reinforcing?
Measurement and decision signals
31. “If it can’t be measured, we won’t invest.”
Feels sensible: Accountability matters.
Hidden cost: Only immediately trackable actions are funded, even if they make future sales slower.
Stress test: Are sales conversations getting easier or harder?
32. “Last-click is safest.”
Feels sensible: Simplicity.
Hidden cost: Work that shaped preference earlier is undervalued, increasing pressure on closing activity.
Stress test: What influenced the decision before the final click?
33. “Dashboards look healthy.”
Feels sensible: Metrics are stable.
Hidden cost: Each campaign has to work harder to get the same result, even though nothing looks broken.
Stress test: Why does growth feel harder anyway?
34. “Benchmark against competitors.”
Feels sensible: Context is reassuring.
Hidden cost: Rising costs are normalised because everyone else is inefficient too.
Stress test: Are costs rising faster than profit?
35. “Review monthly.”
Feels sensible: Regular oversight.
Hidden cost: Slow declines in efficiency go unnoticed until they’re expensive to fix.
Stress test: What has changed over six months?
36. “This channel isn’t attributable.”
Feels sensible: Precision bias.
Hidden cost: Valuable influence is removed, increasing friction at conversion.
Stress test: Where do already-convinced buyers come from?
37. “We need cleaner data first.”
Feels sensible: Rigour.
Hidden cost: While analysis continues, inefficiency compounds.
Stress test: What decision are we avoiding?
38. “Let’s change the KPI.”
Feels sensible: Misalignment frustration.
Hidden cost: Teams change behaviour without improving underlying efficiency.
Stress test: What behaviour does this KPI reward?
39. “The numbers justify it.”
Feels sensible: ROI looks positive.
Hidden cost: Sustainability is never tested.
Stress test: Would this still work next year?
40. “We’ll know when it stops working.”
Feels sensible: Confidence in responsiveness.
Hidden cost: Decline is gradual, so costs rise long before anyone reacts.
Stress test: What’s quietly getting harder?
Structure, incentives, and scale
41. “Each team owns their channel.”
Feels sensible: Accountability.
Hidden cost: Messaging fragments, weakening recognition and increasing spend.
Stress test: Who owns consistency?
42. “We need specialist agencies.”
Feels sensible: Expertise promises performance.
Hidden cost: Learning doesn’t accumulate internally, so efficiency resets with change.
Stress test: What knowledge are we retaining?
43. “Let’s switch agencies.”
Feels sensible: Results pressure.
Hidden cost: Context and understanding are lost, increasing ramp-up cost.
Stress test: What didn’t transfer last time?
44. “Budgets reset annually.”
Feels sensible: Financial control.
Hidden cost: Long-term efficiency work is deprioritised.
Stress test: What benefits from continuity?
45. “Marketing must prove itself quarterly.”
Feels sensible: Accountability.
Hidden cost: Work that reduces future costs is sidelined.
Stress test: What only pays off with patience?
46. “We’ll invest once results improve.”
Feels sensible: Risk aversion.
Hidden cost: Underinvestment prevents the improvements needed to reduce costs.
Stress test: What’s blocking improvement now?
47. “Sales and marketing have different targets.”
Feels sensible: Role clarity.
Hidden cost: Leads look good on paper but convert slowly, increasing cost and friction.
Stress test: What does success look like end-to-end?
48. “Tools will fix this.”
Feels sensible: Technology promises leverage.
Hidden cost: Complexity increases workload without improving outcomes.
Stress test: What problem are we actually solving?
49. “We need more people.”
Feels sensible: Everyone is busy.
Hidden cost: Headcount absorbs inefficiency instead of fixing it, locking in permanent costs.
Stress test: Why is the work increasing?
50. “This is just the cost of growth.”
Feels sensible: Scale assumptions.
Hidden cost: Avoidable inefficiencies are accepted as inevitable, reducing profit over time.
Stress test: What cost should not be rising?
Caroline Thomas helps leadership teams understand why marketing looks busy but underperforms, and how to tell whether it’s learning and compounding to be as efficient as possible.
Many of these decisions become far more expensive when they are followed by increased marketing spend.
Adding budget on top of unresolved inefficiencies often locks these problems in and makes them harder to spot later. Before spending more, it’s critical to understand which issues need to be fixed first and which ones will simply scale.
I explore this decision in depth in what you should fix before increasing marketing spend, focusing on how to reduce risk before budgets rise.
If many of these decisions felt familiar, that isn’t incompetence.
They are the natural outcome of modern marketing structures, incentives, and pressure.
ROI erosion is rarely caused by poor execution.
It usually happens because value is forgotten, fragmented, or rebuilt repeatedly instead of carried forward.
Performance can look healthy while efficiency quietly declines.
By the time the problem is obvious, it feels cultural rather than fixable.
Recognising the pattern is the first step to regaining control.
If several of these decisions felt uncomfortably familiar, the issue usually isn’t effort, creativity, or intent.
It’s that too much marketing value is being lost between campaigns.
I built a short Recall Monetisation Diagnostic to help founders and teams see whether their marketing is compounding or quietly resetting.
It shows where revenue relies on reacquisition rather than recognition, where spend is being re-earned instead of carried forward, and whether growth is supported by memory or constant reinvention.
It takes about 20 minutes and gives you a clear signal, not a scorecard.
