Why marketing sounds right, but doesn’t resonate

There has never been a better time to create marketing. There has also never been a harder time to create marketing that people actually care about.

Today’s tools can help build a polished website, write competent copy, design professional-looking graphics, launch campaigns, and publish content faster than ever. AI has accelerated all of it.

Standing out is another story.

For decades, we’ve been talking with companies trying to solve what appear to be tactical problems. The website isn’t generating enough leads. Sales keeps hearing the same objections. A new service isn’t gaining traction. Marketing feels busy, but somehow nothing seems to be moving the business forward. On paper, everything looks reasonable. The messaging sounds fine. The website looks modern. The campaigns are running.

Yet something isn’t connecting.

We’ve learned that marketing rarely struggles because it’s unprofessional. More often than not, it struggles because it isn’t relevant enough to earn someone’s attention. That’s a much harder problem to recognize because relevance isn’t something you add during copywriting. It’s the result of understanding your customers well enough that what you say feels immediately meaningful to them.

That’s why some marketing can be technically correct and still fall flat.

Before they get you, you’ve got to get them

One of the ideas we’ve believed for years is surprisingly simple:

Before they get you, you’ve got to get them. No, not “get them” in a sinister or paranoid way. We mean to understand them.

Every company wants customers to understand who they are, what they do, and why they’re different. That’s reasonable. The mistake is assuming that’s where marketing begins. It doesn’t. Marketing begins by understanding the customer.

That sounds obvious until you start paying attention to the way many companies communicate. A surprising amount of marketing talks more about the company than the customer. It leads with capabilities before establishing why they matter. It explains services before acknowledging the problems those services solve. Sometimes it tries so hard to sound professional that it forgets to sound human.

Just about every client we’ve worked with has been excited to fix these issues once they were aware they existed. Most organizations are under pressure to produce results, launch campaigns, support sales, and keep everything moving. When deadlines are tight, it’s much easier to describe what you do than it is to spend the time understanding how someone else experiences the problem you’re trying to solve.

That’s one of the reasons we’ve always placed so much emphasis on research. Not because it’s glamorous, but because it changes the conversation before anyone starts writing. Customer interviews, employee interviews, competitor reviews, sales conversations, support requests, online reviews—they all become pieces of a larger picture. Individually, they may not tell you much. Together, they reveal patterns that no brainstorming session ever will.

We’ve been talking about marketing amid information overload since the late 1990s. Back then, we were speaking about the growing challenge of communicating in a world where people were overwhelmed by interruptions.

That problem has become the defining challenge of modern marketing. People aren’t waiting for more information. They’re filtering it. Every email, every ad, every social post, every headline, every notification competes with countless other interruptions happening all day, every day. If something doesn’t feel relevant almost immediately, it disappears before anyone consciously evaluates it.

That isn’t a flaw in human attention; it’s one of its strengths. Our brains constantly filter information to protect us from overload. The more interruptions we experience, the better those filters become. Relevance isn’t simply helpful, it’s the price of admission.

That’s why relevance matters so much and understanding your customer isn’t an optional step in the marketing process. It’s the work that makes every step after it more effective. When you understand what people care about, what frustrates them, what they’re trying to accomplish, and how they describe those challenges in their own words, your marketing stops feeling like another interruption. It starts feeling useful.

What happens when you understand people better

It’s easy to assume great marketing begins with creativity. In our experience, understanding comes first. Creativity gives people a memorable way to experience that understanding, but without the strategic work underneath it, even great creative has very little to hold onto. We’ve seen this play out hundreds of times.

Sometimes, customer interviews uncover language that’s far more compelling than anything the company would have written about itself. Sometimes they reveal that customers value something the company considered ordinary. Other times, they expose a disconnect between what the company believes makes it different and what customers actually appreciate.

Those moments change more than headlines. They change the direction of the marketing and can even change the business itself.

One consulting firm we worked with specialized in improving the performance of expensive sawmill equipment used by large lumber companies. Like many consulting firms, our client emphasized expertise, process, and operational improvement in their marketing. Everything they said was accurate, but they were struggling to stand out against much larger, more established competitors.

The breakthrough came when we started talking with their customers.

Due to lost efficiency, the lumber mills were trying to decide if they needed to replace equipment that cost millions of dollars. So instead of positioning the company as another consultant, we positioned them as an alternative to buying new equipment. We called this “the invisible upgrade.” The ROI was far greater for the sawmills, and there would be significantly less disruption. The strategy came from understanding what decision customers were actually trying to make, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the conversations we had with their customers.

We’ve seen similar moments in companies of every size.

Sometimes the insight becomes a positioning statement. Sometimes it becomes the foundation for new messaging. Occasionally, it influences a product, a service, or even the name of the company itself. Those breakthroughs rarely happen because someone had a flash of creative inspiration. More often, they’re the reward for slowing down long enough to understand people better.

Over the years, we’ve also learned to pay attention to a handful of recurring patterns. None of them proves your marketing isn’t resonating. But when several begin showing up together, it’s worth asking whether the issue is bigger than copy, design, or the latest campaign.

We start paying attention when we see marketing that:

• Talks more about the company than the customer.
• Leads with features before establishing why they matter.
• Sounds polished, but could belong to almost anyone in the category.
• Makes big claims without offering meaningful proof.
• Relies on AI before anyone has done the strategic thinking.
• Produces more content instead of creating greater clarity.
• Asks customers to understand the company before taking the time to understand them.

We don’t recall ever working with a client that did any of these things deliberately, and most want to correct the problem as soon as they are aware. These are strategic problems, and strategic problems can be solved.

AI can hide weak thinking

Artificial intelligence has changed marketing in ways that would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago. Today, it’s easier to produce writing that is grammatically correct and well-organized. That’s helpful, and we use AI ourselves every day.

What AI hasn’t changed is where good marketing comes from.

We’ve started seeing a new pattern over the past couple of years. Companies are asking AI to solve problems that aren’t writing problems at all. The messaging feels generic because the positioning isn’t clear. The website sounds like everyone else because nobody has taken the time to understand what customers actually value. The copy lacks conviction because the underlying strategy was never fully developed. AI didn’t create those problems, but it made them harder to recognize.

That’s one of the reasons so much marketing now sounds competent but accomplishes little. The writing is smoother than it used to be, but smooth writing isn’t the same as meaningful communication. We’ve reviewed pages of polished copy that never gave a prospect a reason to pay attention, let alone care.

Used well, AI can be a good thought partner. It helps organize ideas, explore alternatives, tighten language, and accelerate production. But those benefits appear after the strategic work has been done, not before. If you understand your customer, know what you want to be known for, and have done the work to uncover meaningful insights, AI can help bring those ideas to life. If you haven’t, it mostly makes weak thinking easier than ever to multiply and amplify, but harder to spot.

The battle for attention starts with relevance

When people think about competition, they usually think about another company. We’ve rarely found that to be the first obstacle.

Long before someone compares your company to a competitor, they’re deciding whether to pay attention at all. Every day is filled with interruptions competing for the same finite resource. Meetings run long. Phones vibrate. Email piles up. Slack messages appear. Customers need something. Kids need to be picked up. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, your marketing gets a few seconds—if it’s lucky.

That reality isn’t new. We’ve been talking about marketing amid information overload since the late 1990s. The tools have changed dramatically since then, and the challenge has grown. People have become exceptionally good at filtering out anything that doesn’t immediately connect with what they’re trying to accomplish.

That’s a healthy response. The brain is constantly filtering information because it has to. We simply couldn’t function if we stopped to evaluate every email, every notification, every advertisement, and every interruption competing for our attention. The more information we’re forced to process, the better those filters become.

We often hear people say that great marketing needs to capture attention. We come to believe it earns attention first. If something reflects a problem we’re already trying to solve, a question we’re already asking, or a frustration we already recognize, we’re willing to give it another moment.

If it doesn’t, we move on. We call these ‘invisible words.’ They’re perfectly readable and may be well written. But they disappear because they never survive the brain’s filtering process. The implications go far beyond copywriting.

When your marketing becomes invisible, it changes everything downstream. Sales spends more time explaining. Marketing produces more content in hopes that something sticks. Budgets grow while returns become harder to explain. Teams conclude they have an execution problem when they’re often facing a relevance problem.

That’s why understanding your customer has such an outsized impact. It changes the way you write, the questions you ask during research, how products are described, how sales conversations begin, and even which opportunities deserve your marketing budget. Companies that consistently stay close to their customers tend to make better decisions long before anyone opens a blank document or launches a campaign.

Respect earns attention

Over the years, we’ve come to think of relevance as a form of respect.

When you understand what your customers are trying to accomplish, respect their time, communicate clearly, and give them a reason to care before asking them to care about you, your marketing starts to feel different. It no longer feels like another interruption competing for attention. It feels like something worth paying attention to.

That’s one of the reasons respect has always been a core value at Outmark. It extends well beyond how we work with clients. It shapes how we think, how we communicate, and ultimately, how we approach marketing itself. We respect the battle for attention, so we work hard to earn it instead of assuming we’re entitled to it.

That single idea has implications everywhere. It changes the questions you ask during research. It changes how you write. It changes what you leave out. It changes how you present evidence, how products are described, how sales conversations begin, and even how you measure whether your marketing is working.

It also changes the confidence you have in your marketing. When you’ve done the work to understand your customers, you’re no longer hoping your message will connect. You know why it should. You’re not writing to fill a page or launch another campaign. You’re helping people solve a problem you’ve taken the time to understand. That confidence comes from understanding.

The closer you are to your customer, the easier those decisions become. You stop trying to sound impressive and start trying to be useful. You stop asking people to understand your business before you’ve demonstrated that you understand theirs.

That’s the thinking behind a phrase we’ve been using for years:
Before they get you, you’ve got to get them.