The listening problem brands keep calling a marketing problem
When I was growing up, my dad was in sales. Not the slick, corporate kind, it was 90s sales at its peak. The kind where you’re shouting down the phone constantly, building a team, and coaching juniors who are making every mistake you once made yourself. I’d overhear those calls and subconsciously absorb what was being said.
My dad was an incredible salesperson, possibly ahead of his time in methods. The phrase I heard him use most, whenever someone had talked themselves out of a deal or steamrollered a lead, was this: you’ve got two ears and one mouth for a reason.
He said it like it was the most obvious thing ever, but it’s the thing most people get wrong. I use it now all the time, with my kids, with my team, and when speaking with brands.
I’ve been working in retail for nearly 25 years and running a digital marketing agency for seven, working with e-commerce founders mostly in kids, baby, and women’s lifestyle. What strikes me about the best of them (the ones with brilliant products, genuine passion, real stories to tell) is that the marketing output is rarely the problem to their scale and growth. The listening that should sit behind it usually is. And that’s not because founders don’t care, it’s because no one’s ever told them where the focus should be.
So what do these gaps actually look like in practice? In my experience, it shows up in three distinct ways.
The first is the ‘vanity gap’. Brands lead with their own story, their founding moment, their values, their vision. A parent searching for a sleep solution for their toddler doesn’t care about your brand’s origin story. Not yet. They care whether you understand crippling loneliness that can hit hard when you see yet another 3am with a crying baby. The brands that open with a connection to the pain before identity consistently outperform the ones that front-load their own narrative.
The second is the trust gap. Polished, produced content has lost the authority it once had. Consumers, particularly in women’s lifestyle, are scanning for real proof before they’ll commit. They want to see reviews from people who are living the life they’re living, unscripted UGC, specific outcomes mixed in with more aspirational imagery. The gap opens when brands keep investing in the gloss while their customers are scrolling straight past it to the comments, what are the women like them saying.
The third is the channel gap. Brands build strategies around the platforms they’re comfortable with rather than understanding that their shoppers are everywhere and the majority need to see you show up anywhere from seven times before they commit to buy. Then decisions start to be made that can have a huge impact on overall performance. More investment goes in the wrong places and founders pull back on the stuff that is driving the interest. We see it all the time. Meta ads get turned off because performance is better in Google, but it was Meta that was driving the results.
These three gaps share a root cause. And it isn’t budget, or creative, or even strategy or current trends. It’s the thing my dad spotted in every junior salesperson who came through his team.
They weren’t listening.
It’s worth asking why this keeps happening, because it isn’t for lack of effort. Most founders I work with are deeply committed to their marketing. They’re posting consistently, testing creatives, and monitoring their numbers. The problem isn’t apathy. It’s that the whole system is set up to reward talking.
Internal metrics celebrate reach, impressions, and follower growth with all the output measuring how loudly you’re broadcasting, not how well you’re connecting. Agencies report on what’s easy to report on and what makes them look good – conversions on warm audiences rather than prospecting results. In turn, founders then optimise for what gets measured. And gradually, without anyone making a conscious decision, the marketing becomes diluted.
There’s a particular trap that catches founder-led brands. When you’ve built something from scratch, when you know every detail of your product, every decision behind it, and every problem it solves, it’s almost impossible to remember that your customer doesn’t know any of that yet. You’re so close to it that you assume the value is obvious. It isn’t. What feels like clarity from the inside reads as noise from the outside.
I see this most acutely in the kids, baby, and lifestyle space. These are emotional categories. Parents buying for their children are anxious, time-poor, and deeply sceptical of anything that feels like a sell. The brands that cut through are the ones that demonstrate understanding before they demonstrate product or brand. They’ve done the listening first through reviews and customer service conversations in the actual language their buyers use and then built their messaging around what they found.
The ones that struggle are still waiting for a better creative idea. They don’t need one. They need to stop talking.
The good news is that closing the gap doesn’t require a rebrand or a bigger budget. It just requires a different starting point.
The most effective thing any founder can do before touching their marketing is to go and read their reviews. Not to look for praise or flag complaints, but to mine the language. The specific words customers use to describe a problem and the phrases that come up again and again. That’s what should be shaping your messaging and creative strategies. Forget the language you’d use to describe your own product, you’re already sold on it. When your ad copy, your email subject lines, and your homepage headline all reflect the words your customers actually used, something shifts. It stops feeling like marketing and starts feeling like recognition.
The second shift is from polish to proof. In high-anxiety purchase categories especially, a screenshot of a genuine customer message consistently outperforms a beautifully produced campaign image. This isn’t an argument against good design; it’s an argument for sequencing. Earn trust first. Invest in gloss once the customer believes you.
The third is the hardest, because it requires honest internal scrutiny. Does your ad match your landing page? Does your landing page
match your email flow? Most don’t. Closing that gap alone can move conversion rates more than any single creative improvement.
Let me give you an example of what this looks like in reality: I worked with a children’s brand whose product pages were genuinely excellent but whose ads were leading with brand aesthetics rather than the specific sleep and safety concerns their customers were searching for. Nothing was wrong with the creative. But the listening hadn’t happened ahead of it. Once we realigned the messaging to reflect what their customers were actually anxious about, using the exact language from their reviews and inboxes, the ads started to fly. Not because they looked different. Because they sounded like someone who understood.
My dad is still working. He’s in his 80s and shows no signs of stopping; sales is simply part of who he is. He’s spent decades making people feel heard, not because he’d been on a course about active listening, but because he genuinely believed the person in front of him knew something he didn’t. His job was to find out what that was.
That instinct of curiosity before conclusion is exactly what’s missing from most brand marketing right now. We’ve built entire strategies around telling people what we think they want to hear, and we’ve called it creativity. We’ve invested in better visuals, sharper copy, hooks, and more consistent posting schedules. All of it talking at your customer. None of it listening.
The brands I see growing aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most polished content. They’re the ones who took the time to understand what their customer was actually trying to solve and then built their marketing around that answer rather than their own story.
It turns out my dad wasn’t just teaching his sales team something. He was describing the only marketing strategy that has ever really worked.
You’ve got two ears and one mouth for a reason.
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Startups Magazine. Click here to subscribe
