Fifteen years ago, I was brought in as a consultant to fix the marketing for an engineering firm that was struggling to keep up with its competition.
Within a week, it was obvious why. They were pouring money into SEO-enhanced content — keyword-stuffed, search-optimized, and almost entirely useless to anyone who actually read it. Meanwhile, companies like HubSpot and the Content Marketing Institute were proving that genuinely helpful content was the future. Their competitors were doing it. Their own clients — Fortune 100 and 500 companies — were doing it. The evidence was everywhere.
I came back with the research, the competitive analysis, the case for flipping the switch. The response? We don’t follow the competition.
This is from a company that had hired me specifically because the competition was beating them.
What followed was six weeks of back-and-forth that went nowhere. Every idea I brought was met with the same wall — that’s not how we do things here, you need a buy-in from the CEO, that’s not the style we’re looking for. I eventually quit. Not dramatically. Just quietly, because I wasn’t getting to do the work I was hired to do, and I’d run out of ways to explain why the work mattered.
For a while after, I questioned myself. Is marketing consulting even a viable profession? Why is there so much resistance even after there’s a supposed buy-in? Why can’t these organizations see that innovation requires stretching past comfort for a while before the rewards arrive?
It took time to see what was actually happening in that room.
The leadership wasn’t being stupid. They were being exactly what most business schools would call “good management” — protecting a profitable operating model, avoiding unproven bets, not rocking a boat that hadn’t sunk yet. What they couldn’t see was that they’d confused their core ideology with their operating practices. The engineering firm’s soul — its mission, its reason for existing — was service delivery. That was timeless and worth protecting. But their marketing practices? Those needed to die. And they were defending them as if they were the same thing.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand since: visionary companies protect their soul fiercely and ruthlessly destroy their practices. They reinvent the how constantly, precisely because the what matters so much. This firm did the opposite — defended its practices, let its mission drift, and chose mediocrity when it could have chosen relevance.
They don’t exist anymore. I looked them up recently. Gone.
The shift that might have changed everything wasn’t a better strategy deck or a more persuasive consultant. It was a single question someone in that leadership team needed to ask: Are we protecting what we actually stand for, or just protecting what we’re used to?
Most organizations never ask it. They find out the answer anyway.