The “Can’t Be Wrong” Culture That’s Quietly Killing Brands
When people are afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing, the brand starts to feel like everything else.
Just for Fun
The “Can’t Be Wrong” Culture That’s Quietly Killing Brands
My Observation
A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.
Teams are afraid of doing the wrong thing, so they do what’s safe and the brand sucks.
If every time someone makes a decision, leadership rolls it back, people won’t make decisions anymore. What happens is:
less bold ideas are presented
timelines get delayed because we need to make SURE sure it’s approved
bottlenecks happen waiting for boss man to get back in office for asset review
everyone is sad
Bold, exciting, standout brands got that way because they took risks. And a lot of those risks made egg-on-face situations that they had to observe, respond to, and learn from. The whole point of all this *waves vaguely at everything* is to try things, see if we can entertain or delight people, cause some controversy, shake up the social aesthetic a bit. It’s not to get it right every time all the time because that’s boring and frankly, bad for sales.
What This Signals
Why it matters, and where things are headed.
Brands that will win are the ones where messing up a little is allowed. We’ve created environments where being wrong is punished faster than being boring, so teams are playing it safe. They say the thing they know won’t get them in trouble, close laptop and go home.
The teams who are trying things within a safe internal bubble, supported by aspirational leadership, a strong brand platform, and a smart protocol for responding when things don’t go to plan (they usually don’t because we market to humans, who are messy and unpredictable) will WIN.
Category-dominating brands get to the top by making calls with the best information they have and living with the consequences.
Right now, the market is unforgiving to brands that hesitate or sound like AI-generic slop. Customers can feel when a company is over-managed and under-decided, when everything sounds approved and nothing sounds alive.
Your Decision Model
A simple framework to apply in your work.
Ask yourself and your team where fear is doing the driving.
Who is actually allowed to decide? Not who should decide. Who does, in practice.
What happens when someone gets it wrong? Do we respond as a team, coach each other, and learn? Or do we get punitive and shame people?
Which decisions are locked in, and which are still open? If everything is open to revision, we’re not really getting anything done. Be decisive! Carpe diem!
What’s the cost of delay right now? Indecision has a price. Inertia is the enemy.
Inside the Work
How I’ve handled it with a client + the template we used.
A mid-sized company in the middle of a growth push wanted to make a bold move in-market. The leadership team was explicit about the kind of work they admired and regularly sent examples of brands taking visible, opinionated swings as inspo. The message was that the brand needed to feel more modern, and provocative.
Working closely with the internal marketing team, we developed a set of concepts designed to meet that bar. The resulting concepts sat squarely within the brand’s existing strategy, used familiar language, and reflected the same level of ambition as the examples leadership had been circulating.
Then came approval time. 😐 Every single concept got killed and not because they missed the brief, but because leadership was afraid of the very thing they asked for. Here's what we did instead.
