Episode 139 – The Problems With Early-Stage Marketing: Doubt and a Design Bias

April 1, 2025

The average CPG founder, believe it or not, does not really believe in consumer marketing. Some of these folks would not admit this, if confronted. But they don’t. Most founders are innovators, yes, but believing in your vision and your product design is not the same as believing in marketing. Consumer marketing at its most effective is the power of story or the power of sampling. Even though gift-giving and storytelling are the essential glue of human community, most founders choose to live in the cozy ROI found in spreadsheets. 

They operate in a pure B2B mode without contact with their consumers, except, often, in so far as they receive e-mail complaints. If this is the only contact they have with consumers, they can easily develop an irritated view of them, and an entitled self-identity as heroic founder. I’ve met these folks. They rarely scale with this attitude.

While many think marketing is too expensive early on, this too is based on a shallow understanding of what consumer marketing involves. It’s ultimately about creativity, energy and time…loads of time. Time is what is most abundant for founders. Yet, many treat it as a resource as a precious as cash. 

The struggle of many early-stage companies when it comes to treating marketing fairly starts with how marketing teams form when the founder is not committed to it at the start as key element of the growth playbook.

Marketing teams generally form with the following task list:

• Brand identity
• Package design
• Trade marketing materials
• Organic social posts
• PR visual and copy assets

This is ultimately a graphic design role with a minor emphasis on copywriting. It’s NOT a storytelling team. Graphic designers are NOT storytellers. I’ve worked with them before. Image and symbol have a powerful impact on brand memorability. Absolutely. Great design uses symbolism to make unconscious symbolic arguments to potential consumers. This is worth fussing over, yes, as one of the cheapest trial generating tools in your toolkit. 

But 2D symbolism can not offer the kind of acceleration found in storytelling or field marketing done superbly. Design elements are too static, essentially to have this kind of power. They can never match the power of modern videographic entertainment.

Marketing that provides substantial acceleration of your baseline growth rate requires dynamic, emotionally charged storytelling/entertainment. 

Static vs. Dynamic

When founders don’t understand storytelling, the marketing team will never add more than minimal value as a basic design and signaling function. In some cases, this is enough to produce double digit or otherwise acceptable growth. Usually, marketing gets treated like an internal design function, not a growth driver. 

The ubiquity of marketing teams acting as graphics teams only reinforces the doubt of many founders inexperienced with field marketing or storytelling/entertainment media. The doubt self-perpetuates as these teams try to take on something like social media. 

It would be far better to hire a videographer or a novelist to lead your marketing team from the start. The graphical work can be rented very easily. Story skills are far more rare.

If the founder doesn’t really believe in the power of story and human interaction to build awareness and trial, then…she will hire the wrong person to lead marketing…someone who also shares her mistrust and hesitancy…I see this all the time.

This doubt originates from a founder psychology feeds on the ambiguity-filled lag time between the generation of awareness through marketing stories and the purchase of your brand. How do you even know the ad persuaded this or that purchase? Without clarity on causality, limited cash gravitates towards that which can be measured in a near instant feedback loop. A purchase order from a sales meeting. Trade marketing ads on retailer websites like Walmart.com. 

If you’ve ever wondered why every DTC brand believes so much in consumer outreach, it’s because they have no choice. Doubt is not an option when you are playing the retailer. You have to drive traffic to your site. 

Doubt at the top is a cancer for marketing teams. This doubt is a major reason why nine figure brands slow down…founders hire risk-averse, executive marketing admins, not creative storytellers…

Because, secretly, these founders don’t believe in the art of story.