Why the most important marketing work produces nothing you can show anyone

It was February 2014. I was on an afternoon video call with Best Buy, representing Google as the marketing lead for the upcoming Nexus phone launch in retail, and the buyer asked a question so simple yet so cutting that I remember it today: who exactly is going to buy this phone?

The question should have been so simple to answer. Instead, I found myself explaining the general idea of Google fanboys who prefer a cleaner version of Android than they get with a Samsung Galaxy. But they weren’t looking for a persona sketch. They were looking for a sense that units would move, that we could target an audience and get the customers in-store. Our premise, unspoken until that moment, was to target everyone which in many ways feels like targeting no one.

We were Google. We were Android. We had the brand, the awareness, and the engineering prowess. We told ourselves that at Google’s scale, if you build it, demand will materialize. The same logic had given Chrome “For Everyone” as its tagline, a campaign positioning which worked because a browser with a TAM of every person on the internet is genuinely for everyone. But hardware never is. We transplanted the same instinct to a completely different problem and hoped the scale of Google would compensate.

Best Buy noticed the gap. Apple had a clear buyer. Samsung had a clear buyer. Nexus had a great phone and a shrug. So we paid our way in. A dedicated retail footprint, branded endcaps, all for the simple payment of $20,000 per store for the right to merchandise our products. Put another way, Best Buy knew we had the money to counterbalance a bleak sales forecast in stores. We were financing the absence of a positioning strategy with distribution spend.

Google cut these deals at retailers across the world, because the product wasn’t properly positioned for growth. So in the circular ads that went out to millions of households, we defaulted to the recursive positioning of “Nexus: the phone built by Google.” Technically true and emotionally inert. Google scrapped the Nexus line and relaunched it as Pixel. Better phones, better marketing — but a tension that has never fully resolved. Google has never quite answered who its hardware is for, and why someone already holding an iPhone or a Galaxy should switch to Pixel.

I led marketing on those last three Nexus phones. I’m not blaming anyone else. The problem wasn’t campaign quality or budget or execution. The problem was that the brief didn’t exist at the product definition level, which meant marketing was building a house from the second floor up.

This is the failure mode nobody talks about. Talking about it requires admitting that the most important marketing work produces nothing shiny. It produces a document, a positioning brief, and an audience definition: a crisp articulation of who this is for, what they currently use instead, why they would switch, and what they’d tell a friend about it. It looks like a Google Doc and it takes weeks to get right, and it requires halting all the downstream work, the campaigns, the creative briefs, the media plans, until it’s solid. That’s precisely why it gets glossed over by so many teams. The outputs are invisible, while mediocre outcomes are apparent to anyone watching.

On one end of the marketing spectrum, you have brand. The Super Bowl ad, the Times Square takeover, the campaign that wins at Cannes and gets screenshotted into decks for the next three years. On the other end, performance — dashboards, CAC, conversion rates, payback periods, genuine rigor about where the money goes. Both can work. Both can produce real results. Yet both are completely downstream of whether you actually know who you’re talking to and why they should care. Bad positioning doesn’t get fixed by better creative. It gets amplified. Bad positioning doesn’t get fixed by more efficient spend either — you get cheaper traffic to a page nobody converts on, because nothing about the offer is clearly differentiated for the person staring at it.

Marketing isn’t rocket science. But it’s remarkably hard to do well, and the reason is almost never execution. It’s that the foundational work got skipped because it’s slow, produces nothing observable while you’re doing it, and requires saying no to visible progress until you’re ready to sprint in the right direction.

When AI is running your campaigns, generating your creative, and optimizing your spend, the brief is the only thing left that requires a human who actually knows what they’re doing. Directing an AI-powered marketing function is the same skill as directing a great marketing team: clear context, clear audience, clear differentiated value, and a clear reason to believe. The floor for world-class marketing is writing the spec that makes all downstream decisions coherent. AI doesn’t have patience for vague briefs. It will execute exactly what you tell it, at speed and scale, in every direction at once. If you don’t know who you’re talking to or why they should care, you’ll find out the expensive way, faster than ever before.

The best marketing is a great product. Same fundamental work at its core: who is the product for, what problem does it solve, what are the right tradeoffs. A great product can survive mediocre marketing. Great marketing cannot carry a weak product for long. That’s not an excuse for bad marketing; it’s a reminder that if you can’t write a clean brief, you may not have a clean product. Sometimes the reason positioning is hard is that the product hasn’t decided what it is yet. The brief is the strategy meeting you didn’t know you needed to have.

Figure out the positioning first. Everything else follows.