I went into marketing thinking the interesting part was the creative. The thinking, the concept, the way an idea gets expressed. I still think that part is interesting. But it’s not what campaigns have actually taught me.
What campaigns have taught me is how unreliable assumptions about people are.
Every campaign I’ve been part of starts with assumptions about the audience. Who they are, what they want, what’s going to make them stop and pay attention. Some of those assumptions come from data. Some come from experience. Some come from what worked last time. And then the campaign goes live, and the audience responds or doesn’t respond, and half the assumptions turn out to be approximately right and the other half get revised.
The revision is the interesting part.
One of the patterns I’ve noticed repeatedly at Signoraware: people respond more to recognition than to aspiration in this category. When the content shows something familiar — a kitchen that looks like their kitchen, a use case that matches a situation they’ve actually been in — it pulls better than content that shows something elevated and aspirational. The gap between “I want that” and “that is for me” matters more than I expected it to.
This has implications for how I think about briefs. The creative question that works is not always “what do we want people to feel?” Sometimes the better question is “what do people already feel, and how does this product fit into that?”
The other thing campaigns have shown me is how differently people process information depending on where they are in a decision. Someone encountering a brand for the first time needs something different from someone who has bought before. Someone researching a category actively is in a different mindset than someone who hasn’t thought about it yet. Treating all of them the same way produces average results.
None of this is new theory. It’s what every marketing textbook says. What’s different is encountering it in real data, on real campaigns, and having to make real adjustments based on what you’re seeing.
The textbook and the running campaign are not the same education.
What has experience taught you about people that surprised you?