SBR 74: You’re probably solving the wrong problems this year.

Most businesses don't underinvest in doing STUFF.
They underinvest in deciding what to do.

Here's an expensive habit nobody in FMCG likes to name. A brand starts to wobble. Sales soften. Distribution gets shaky. The pack feels tired, the team's frustrated, retailers want reassurance, the board wants action. So you go to an agency and ask what to do. And the agency tells you.

That’s where the story ends for many marketers, but that's the trap. Because the answer you get depends on who you ask, not what’s best for your brand. if you ask a pack design agency what to do, the answer inevitably involves design. Ask a media agency, the answer involves media. Ask a performance agency, the answer involves performance spend. Every business has a centre of gravity, and when your model is built on making something, you can't help but diagnose the problem in a way that ends with you making that thing.

But we already know this. The uncomfortable part is that we keep asking anyway.

The bias is human, not malicious. We like action. We like momentum. We like a visible output. We like being able to walk into a meeting and say we’re taking rapid action – that’s defensible in a boardroom.  And in food and drink marketing the symptoms all wear a cloak of creativity. The brand feels flat. The pack feels familiar. The comms stop cutting through. The range looks confused. A competitor feels fresher. The retailer asks what the plan is.

So you write a redesign brief. It feels productive. It might even be right.

But how often have you stepped back to look at all the other possibilities before landing on the thing you’re briefing? Have you walked through the full set of Marketing Ps and ruled them out one by one, or did you ask your lead agency’s strategist for guidance? I know I’ve done that before when I was client side. And with the benefit of hindsight, it was wrong.

Because honestly, how often could the problem be pricing? Or distribution? Or an underperforming sales team? Or a product that's quietly underperforming? Or a brand that's lost mental availability because you starved it of spend? Or a range architecture asking too much of a shopper with eight seconds? Or a sales story that doesn't land? Or, the one nobody wants to say out loud, a team that mistook its own boredom with a campaign for consumer wear-out?

Kevin Chesters put it well in a recent post: you wouldn't ask a fishmonger what to have for tea.

Fortunately, a handful of simple questions (answered by an independent voice, with no agenda) does most of the work.

None of this is anti-agency. Good agencies are worth their weight. Distinctive design, sharp comms, strong media, better digital plumbing, all of it can build real commercial advantage. But execution only works as hard as the diagnosis that sits beneath it.

So, before you dive into making more stuff and things, take a moment to step back and ask yourself what’s really going on.