Why most marketing advice fails mid-market firms

The most interesting question I was asked the past week came from a seasoned and highly respected executive who challenged me: "How does your consulting framework help a company become what it should be, rather than what it is not?"

That question hit a nerve—in the best way.

Here's the reality: if you're running a mid-market company, you don't have the luxury of strategy that ignores your constraints.

You're past the startup phase where pivots are expected, but you might lack the enterprise resources to absorb multi-year transformation projects. You're already deploying growth capital under intense pressure with limited bandwidth. The clock is ticking on every decision.

And most of the marketing advice you read online pretends none of that is true.

The Theoretical Trap

Take a scroll through "marketing LinkedIn" and you'll find a cascade of idealist takes delivered by people who've never walked into a mid-market firm, let alone worked in one:

• "You should start with segmentation."
• "You need to be customer-obsessed."
• "Research first."
• "Fix your brand positioning."
• Tactics, tactics, and more tactics ...

No argument with the theory—but it's delivered as if your business isn't already in motion. You've built teams, habits, systems, and incentives around how you actually operate—not how you wish you did.

Remember Jaguar's colossal rebrand disaster? That's what happens when aspirational strategy collides with operational reality.

And it's not just automakers. Consultants still churn out slide decks full of elegant models that sit in drawers, disconnected from execution. They torch capital by ignoring identity, underestimating friction, and overestimating your organization's appetite for reinvention.

Identity-first strategy

What operating companies need isn't marketing orthodoxy. They need diagnosis.

Before we talk about brand, or segmentation, or customer journeys, we have to start with identity:

• How does this business actually behave?
• What beliefs govern its decision-making?
• Where is growth capital actually being deployed—and what does that reveal about its priorities?

That tension—between belief and behavior, aspiration and allocation—is where strategy lives. Real strategy, anyway. Not therapy.

Most mid-market firms can't undertake a sweeping cultural reinvention in parallel with quarterly targets. They don't need transformation. They need alignment. They need to ensure capital is being deployed in coherence with how the business actually operates today.

If you want to evolve, perfect and I highly encourage any transformation that gets us closer to the customer. But you'll need to embed that evolution within the cadence of existing systems, not around them.

Research & segmentation reality check

"Start with segmentation" is another classic idealist trap that assumes you're designing in a vacuum. But you're not. You have:

• An existing product architecture
• Embedded channel relationships
• Sales and service teams with muscle memory
• A reporting cadence that rewards specific behaviors

In that context, segmentation and the research that should precede it, is one part of a broader diagnostic tool that includes your firm's go-to-market orientations and how they impact capital deployment. The question isn't, "How should we segment our market?" It's, "How do we actually serve what the market values today, and what does that reveal about where we can deploy capital most effectively?"

You can't redesign an operating company's segmentation from scratch (with some exceptions such as for new products). But you can reverse-engineer from reality: understand how you actually operate, research what the market values today, then build segmentation that helps you deploy growth capital efficiently within your existing capabilities.

Aspirations vs delusion

Let me be clear: there's nothing wrong with aspiring to be more market-oriented. In fact, bringing customer insights into your decision-making—regularly, not just during an offsite—is critical.

You can probably do that today. Add Voice of the Customer (VOC) insights to your monthly meetings. Tune your win-loss process. Start logging operationally useful insights.

But don't kid yourself: you are not going to flip a switch and become "customer-obsessed" overnight. Culture doesn't move that fast. And in 2025, with cost of capital elevated, customer spending selective, and economic uncertainty the only certainty, trying to act like you're something you're not leads to confused teams, disconnected initiatives, and wasted capital.

Nobody has time for fantasyland experiments anymore. Operate with clarity. Integrate aspirations through existing behavior, not against it.

What good consulting actually looks like

Alright, enough consultant-bashing. In an environment where every dollar of growth capital matters and strategic missteps can be fatal, what should you actually expect from strategic counsel?

Here's the test: can your strategy actually influence where capital goes next quarter? If not, it's entertainment.

Good diagnosis for an operating company starts with brutal honesty about identity. It maps beliefs against behaviors. It identifies where your current deployment of capital aligns with market reality—and where it doesn't. It builds from your operational strengths rather than around your aspirational weaknesses.

The deliverable isn't a beautiful brand pyramid that lives in a drawer. It's clarity about what your business actually is, what the market actually values, and how to deploy your next dollar of growth capital accordingly.

If your consultants aren't starting with identity, they're selling you theory without application. And theories don't generate returns.

Final thoughts on strategy

Growth strategy for an operating company is not about becoming someone else. It's about seeing yourself clearly, accepting what that means, and allocating capital accordingly.

Aspiration is healthy. But denial is expensive—especially now.

For more on modern segmentation approaches for operating companies, see my previous analysis of dual-speed economy dynamics.