Your Marketing Isn’t Working Because It’s Built for Your CEO, Not Your Customers

There’s a hard truth most businesses don’t like to admit:

A lot of marketing is created to impress the CEO, not the customer.
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And honestly? It shows.
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So many brands put out content that looks great, checks all the “internal approval” boxes, and makes everyone feel warm and validated… but completely misses what the actual customer cares about.
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Why? Because too often, the wrong person is steering the creative direction.

Let’s talk about it.

The HiPPO Effect: When the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion Leads the Strategy

There’s a name for this dynamic: the HiPPO — the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

It’s what happens when the CEO, founder, or a top exec, usually with the best of intentions, makes marketing decisions based on personal taste instead of customer data.
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• “I don’t like that font.”
• “My wife says the website should have more blue.”
• “I don’t think our customers care about blogs.”
• “I would never click on that ad.”
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The problem?
You are not your audience. And your CEO isn’t either.
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When a campaign becomes a reflection of someone’s ego instead of the customer’s needs, it stops performing. Fast.

Why This Happens (And Why It’s So Common)

This isn’t about blaming CEOs. Most genuinely want what’s best for the business. But several natural tendencies get in the way:

1. Proximity Bias

When you live and breathe the business every day, you forget that customers don’t understand your brand as you do. What feels “too simple” to you is actually the clarity your audience desperately needs.

2. Emotional Ownership

Founders and executives see the brand as an extension of themselves. That connection is beautiful, but it can cloud strategic judgment.

3. Legacy Thinking

If a company used to succeed with a certain message or style, leadership often clings to it long after the audience has evolved.

4. Risk Aversion

Bold creative feels scary. Comfortable creative feels “safe.”
But 'safe' is usually code for 'forgettable'.
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When these dynamics take over, marketing gets watered down to avoid friction rather than amplified to create impact.

What Happens When You Create Marketing for Internal Approval Instead of the Buyer

You end up with:

• Generic messaging that could belong to any competitor.
• Content that’s overly formal, overly polished, or overly complicated.
• Campaigns slowed down by approval chains instead of being driven by insights.\
• Creativity replaced with compliance.
• Marketing that “feels good internally” but falls flat externally.
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Here’s the line every company needs to hear:

Your customers don’t care who approved the campaign.
They care whether it solves their problem.

So, What Should Marketing Actually Look Like?

1. Audience-first, not ego-first

Let the audience lead the strategy, not personal preference.
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What are they searching for?
What problems are they trying to solve?
What content do they actually respond to?

2. Use customer language

Not jargon. Not buzzwords. Not corporate-speak.

Real people want real words.

3. Test > Assume

You don’t need to guess.
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You can test:

• Which headline gets more clicks
• Which creative drives more conversions
• Which message resonates with the right people

Let the data be the tie-breaker, not someone’s title.

4. Give your marketing team (or agency 😉) room to do their job

Executives should set a vision.
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Marketers should translate that vision into something customers care about.

When those roles blur, results suffer.

Where TargetMarket Fits Into This Story

One of the biggest values an outside marketing partner brings is neutrality.
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We aren’t influenced by internal politics, personal taste, or “this is how we’ve always done it.”
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Instead, we:

• Speak directly to your audience
• Use your data to shape decisions
• Build campaigns around what works, not what “feels right”
• Advocate for your customers when internal bias creeps in
• Help brands evolve beyond old habits and narratives

Our job isn’t to validate the executives.
Our job is to make your marketing actually connect and convert.

Marketing Isn’t About You. It’s About Them.

If your marketing feels stale, safe, sluggish, or strangely unimpactful… it might be because it was created to please someone inside the business rather than someone trying to buy from it.
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The second you shift that focus outward?

Everything changes.
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Better engagement.
Better conversions.
Better ROI.
Better clarity.
Better creative.
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And yes, happier CEOs too, because strategy backed by customer behavior wins. 

Every. Single. Time.

Ready to create marketing that your audience actually cares about?

Let’s build something your customers remember, and your CEO can be proud of because it works.

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