Perfect marketing is the beige cardigan of business. It’s safe, respectable, and nobody remembers it five minutes later.
You can spot it from a mile away. Every brand is “innovative.” Every product “redefines the future.” Every tagline could double as a TED Talk or a skincare commercial. Somewhere in a meeting room, someone said, “Let’s make sure it appeals to everyone” and that’s exactly when the soul left the project.
Perfect marketing isn’t bad. It’s just boring. It’s written by committees and polished by legal until it sounds like it was generated by an AI trained exclusively on buzzwords and Q4 optimism.
I get why it happens. Approval chains are long and no one wants to be the person who suggested humor in front of compliance. But it’s how you end up with paragraphs that use “authenticity” six times without ever sounding human once.
The best marketing doesn’t try to sound smart. It just tries to sound like a person. It says, “Here’s who we are. Here’s what we do. Hope you like it.” It risks being wrong in order to sound real.
Somewhere, a CMO is reading this thinking, “But we have brand guidelines.” I promise, your guidelines can survive a sentence that sounds like an actual human wrote it.
The goal isn’t to sound perfect. It’s to sound alive.
