Fools rush in

Marketing has a strange relationship with speed. 

We say we want strategy, but reward quick answers. And pile the pressure on teams to get something out, get something live, get something moving, before defining the outcome. 

Somewhere along the way, rushing started to look like confidence. But it’s usually what happens when people are uncomfortable with not knowing yet. 

And that’s where a lot of bad marketing begins. Not with a terrible idea or a lazy team. But with impatience. Impatience to move before the groundwork is done, to launch before the proposition is clear or to change direction before the market has even had a chance to notice what you’re doing. 

Pensions isn’t a market where you can get away with vague thinking dressed up as activity. In D2C it’s more complex… the trust hurdle is higher. In D2B the buying process and decision making is long!  

The work people rush is usually the work that matters most 

Don’t be tempted to rush the bits doing the heaviest lifting. Research, segmentation, audience understanding, positioning, message development… strong foundations. 

These stages feel slow because they’re less visible. There’s no shiny campaign yet. No ad in market. No social post to point at. No quick internal win. Just questions, choices, trade-offsand a growing sense that the work isn’t ready. 

Moving too quickly at this stage doesn’t save time. You just push uncertainty further down the process, where it becomes more expensive. 

Weak segmentation creates vague messaging. Vague messaging leads to generic creative. Generic creative struggles to land. Then everyone blames execution, when the real problem started much earlier. 

A scheme’s customers aren’t one audience. Neither are trustees. Nor employers, providers, advisers or consultants. They come with different levels of knowledge, motivations, hesitations, pressures and very different reasons to care. 

Treat them as one homogenous group and the messaging quickly loses shape.  

That’s why the foundation work matters. Not because some (ahem) consultancy wants to charge you for months of additional work, not because your marketing director wants some intellectually satisfying report, but because it gives the rest of the work a chance of being sharp, relevant and useful. 

There’s no shortcut to clarity. 

Fast isn’t the same as decisive 

Move quickly. Make the call. Back the first answer. Keep things moving. All often mistaken for strong and decisive leadership. Don’t get me wrong… sometimes that’s exactly right. But just as often, it’s theatre… a distraction technique to avoid the more uncomfortable truth that you don’t know enough yet. 

Good strategy doesn’t arrive fully formed in the first meeting. Good segmentation needs testing. Good messaging improves when it’s challenged. And campaigns are stronger for having those answers.  

That’s not hesitation. It’s discipline. Marketing teams love novelty. Markets, on the other hand, reward consistency. 

There’s two moments marketers lose their nerve 

The first is before launch. That’s when thinking is rushed, research isn’t properly understood, audiences are set too broadly, messaging is just good enough. Hard conversations are skipped because deadlines feel more urgent than clarity. 

The second is after launch. That’s when the market is expected to respond to make the metrics work, rather than match how brands actually grow. The campaign has only just started doing its job, and already someone wants to refresh it, reframe it or replace it. 

Strong marketing results take longer than organisations can tolerate 

I get it, we compile annual accounts too… and success is being better than last year – right? 

You’ve got a quarterly Board meeting and a campaign calendar planned, so results need to be reported on. That’s not how brands work. 

Trust, recognition and distinctiveness aren’t built overnight. And in a category like pensions, where audiences aren’t hanging around waiting to hear from you, it can take even longer. 

Even Joe Wicks, aka ‘The Body Coach,’ describes his massive global wellness empire as a ‘10-year overnight success.’ Before becoming a household name with best-selling books and millions of followers, he spent years handing out flyers at Richmond Station and running empty boot camps in London parks. 

Trust the process. This is where strategic patience matters. Not in a vague, woolly sense. In a practical one. 

Give yourself long enough to understand the audience properly, sharpen the proposition, challenge whether the first answer is actually the right one. Long enough, once the work is live, to see whether consistency starts to do what consistency does best: build memory, recognition and return. 

The smarter move isn’t always the faster one 

The world seems to be moving faster than ever, every business seems obsessed with pace, so I get you’ll think patience can look unfashionable. 

Speed has its place. But speed without clarity is just a more efficient route to mediocre work. So yes, move. Decide. Get on with it. 

But don’t confuse rushing with confidence, or impatience with commercial instinct. Fools rush in, the smarter ones know when not to!