Why posting more content stops working, and what to cut instead The multiplication sign

The first couple of hours are always good. We talk about where the business is going, what it could be known for, who they want in the room in three years. Everyone contributes. The marketing manager who has been quiet all morning gets animated. Somebody says the thing they have clearly been wanting to say for a year and could not find a meeting for. The whiteboard fills up.

Then I change the question.

What does this brand stop doing?

And the room goes quiet.

Not defensive. Not annoyed. Quiet, in the specific way people go quiet when they are asked something reasonable that has genuinely never occurred to them. Somebody usually laughs. Then they look at each other, and then, if the session is going well, one of them will name something small and everyone will go very still, because they all know it is the wrong answer and they all know why.

I have run that moment enough times now to be sure it is not about the people in the room. Nobody has ever asked them. Every marketing conversation they have had, from their first agency briefing onwards, has been about addition. Another channel, another format, another campaign, another hire. The entire vocabulary assumes that growth means more.

Why more became the default

It is worth being fair about how we got here, because the people filling those calendars are not fools. They are responding to something real.

Volume is provable. Judgment is not.

You can demonstrate that you published twelve things. It goes in the report, it survives the board meeting, it is a fact. Nobody can demonstrate that they were right to cut nine of them, because the counterfactual does not exist, and there has never been a slide for the work that was correctly never made.

So under pressure, teams do the legible thing. The calendar fills, effort becomes visible, and the harder question of whether any of it is pointing the same direction gets quietly deferred. A full calendar starts to feel like an answer to that question.

It is not. A full calendar and a working brand are unrelated conditions. Plenty of companies have the first and not the second, and every so often you meet one with the second that publishes almost nothing and is doing extremely well.

What all that volume is standing in for

Once you have sat through enough of these sessions, the pattern underneath becomes hard to unsee.

When a company is not clear on what it is, publishing more is the only available response to the feeling that something is wrong. It looks like effort. It feels like progress. It fills the space where a decision should be, and it buys another quarter before anyone has to make one.

The tell is easy to catch, and you can catch it in your own company this week. Pick a piece of content from last month and ask what job it was doing. If the answer is about frequency, you have found it.

It was Tuesday. There was a gap. The channel needed something.

Those are scheduling reasons. They are not content reasons, and a brand running on them is paying good money to produce noise about itself, in public, on a schedule.

The question underneath the question

So the quiet in that room is not a failure of the session. It is the session.

What that question is really asking is whether the company has a standard, and a standard is just a decision about what it is, held firmly enough to exclude things. Without one, every argument about content is a matter of taste, and the person who wins is whoever is most senior or most tired.

With one, three things change, and they change fast enough that clients notice inside a month.

Briefs get shorter, because there is finally something to write against. Approvals get quicker, because there is a reason to say no that is not somebody's personal preference. And the endless arguments about tone mostly evaporate. 

That last one took me years to understand properly. Most tone arguments are clarity arguments wearing a disguise. Two people who cannot agree on whether something sounds right are almost always disagreeing about what the company is, and neither of them has noticed, so they keep trading adjectives instead.

None of this shows up as an output. All of it shows up in the year.

How to decide what to cut

If you want a version of this you can do without hiring anybody, it takes an afternoon and costs nothing.

Print everything your company published last month. Every email, page, post, deck. Put it in front of you all at once, rather than reviewing it piece by piece, which is how it was made and how it always gets approved.

Then go through it and answer one question for each item. What job was this doing, and for whom.

Not whether it was good. Not how it performed. What job.

Anything you cannot answer in a sentence is not a content problem waiting for better content. It is a piece that exists because the calendar had a hole in it.

Cut those, and see who complains. In my experience nobody does, and the brand starts reading as considerably more sure of itself, which is what you were trying to buy with the volume in the first place.