A campaign for everyone is a campaign for no one

Somewhere in the third review round, something shifts. The headline was sharp, the audience was clear, the concept had a point. But the sales manager finds it a touch confrontational, the director would also like to address existing customers, and someone from HR asks whether it couldn't be a bit more inclusive. Three rounds later, you have a campaign nobody objects to. And one nobody responds to either.

This isn't the exception. It's how most campaigns get made.

Good intentions make bad campaigns

It rarely starts with a poor brief. It starts with the urge to avoid risk. A sharp tone becomes "a bit more accessible". A specific audience becomes "slightly broader". A confrontational headline becomes "more positive". Each adjustment, taken on its own, is understandable. The sum total is a campaign that no longer pushes anyone away and no longer moves anyone either.

What's at play here is a mechanism the behavioural economist Timur Kuran described in 1995 as preference falsification: in a group setting, people adjust their preference to what they think the group will accept. Not consciously, not out of bad faith, but as a social reflex. The result is that the group outcome is systematically flatter than what each individual would choose on their own. The first opinion voiced pulls everything that follows towards the middle. Applied to meetings: whoever is first to say "I find it a bit confrontational" changes the outcome for everyone.

The review round, then, isn't the place where a campaign gets better. It's the place where it gets sanded down.

Reach and resonance are not the same thing

The reasoning behind broad campaigns sounds logical: the more people you address, the bigger the effect. That reasoning is wrong.

Binet and Field analysed hundreds of campaigns in the IPA Effectiveness Databank and showed that emotional campaigns running for three years or longer are almost twice as likely as rational campaigns to deliver top-box profit growth. Not despite their specificity, but because of it. Emotionally resonant campaigns are remembered, passed on and associated with a brand, long after the media spend stops.

System1 Group studied more than 40,000 American TV ads and found that well over half of the ads scoring highest on short-term sales potential score low on long-term brand building. Activation and brand growth are two separate movements, and a campaign that tries to be both at once often does neither well.

Reach without resonance doesn't change behaviour. It just fills a media plan.

Choosing narrowly isn't a risk, it's the growth strategy

There's a stubborn assumption that a campaign which excludes people leaves opportunities on the table. Ehrenberg-Bass shows the opposite: brands with strong distinctive brand assets, a specific colour, a recognisable tone, a consistent image, build mental availability precisely because they aren't for everyone. They're instantly recognisable to those who know them. That's the whole point.

Ipsos and Jones Knowles Ritchie examined more than 5,000 brand assets and concluded that only 15 per cent are genuinely distinctive. The vast majority are too generic to lodge in memory. What that 15 per cent has in common: they are specific enough to stand out to a part of the market, and that part remembers them.

An example from our own work. For XPEL, the global market leader in paint protection film, we ran a campaign for two years that explicitly targeted one audience: owners of high-end cars who want to protect their paintwork, and the installers who do that work. No broad automotive message, no attempt to bring lease drivers or used-car buyers along too. The campaign spoke to one type of customer, in the tone and the places that suit that customer. The result: growth in product and brand awareness, growth in customers and in the installer network. Not despite the narrow choice, but thanks to it. Anyone trying to address all car owners wouldn't have stuck with any of them.

A campaign that opts for a recognisable tone, a sharply defined audience or a confrontational message deliberately excludes people. And in doing so makes itself more appealing to those it does reach. That isn't a side-effect of sharpness. That is how sharpness works.

The decision criterion comes before the first round

The problem isn't that people make bad decisions in review rounds. The problem is that there's no decision criterion in place at the moment the pressure starts. Without that criterion, the most cautious voice in the room always wins.

That criterion needs three questions, and they have to be answered before the first concept lands on the table.

The first: would this concept fit four comparable brands? If the answer is yes, it doesn't carry a specific brand. The second: who falls outside this campaign? If the answer is "nobody", the campaign isn't sharp enough. The third: do employees recognise this as what they do every day? If the answer is no, the concept has been invented from the outside in, and it won't hold up at the first execution.

These three questions turn matters of taste into a question of substance. Not "I find it a bit confrontational", but "does this fit who we are and who we're making it for". That's a conversation you can have without preference falsification dictating the outcome.

In practice it means: put the answers on paper before the first review round. Not as a document nobody reads, but as a decision criterion that's back on the table in every round. Anyone who wants to make a change has to explain why the change better aligns with the audience and the positioning. Not why they personally think the tone is too sharp.

Flatness isn't safe, flatness is expensive

There's one more assumption worth overturning. The idea that a broad, flat campaign carries less risk than a sharp one. It doesn't.

A campaign that pushes nobody away costs just as much as a sharp one. But it gets remembered less, passed on less, and changes less behaviour. The costs of flatness are simply less visible than the costs of pushing people away. Someone who doesn't feel addressed says nothing. Someone who feels offended says so.

The real risk assessment, then, isn't "could this push someone away". The real question is: what does it cost us if we are invisible again? And most clients don't ask that question in the review round, because the silent majority that doesn't respond doesn't make a sound. That's the problem, not the solution.

Choose earlier, don't push harder

The logic runs from the inside out. A brand that knows who it's there for, and that consistently chooses the tone and the imagery that fit, builds recognition that sticks. Not despite the choices it makes, but because of them.

That asks something of the decision-making process. Not a smaller review round, but a decision criterion that is stronger than the sum of individual caution. Protecting a campaign isn't a matter of pushing through against the group. It's a matter of asking the right question before the group begins.

A campaign for everyone is a campaign for no one. That isn't a reason to be cautious. It's a reason to choose earlier.

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Further reading

Branding and employer communications with Schwung