From your Uber driver, boss’s spouse, or your periodontist – everyone has an opinion on marketing
I want you to think about the last time someone questioned your accounting. Or pulled your CFO aside to say,
“I just feel like the depreciation schedule is off. My neighbor runs a landscaping business, and he does it differently.”
Never happens.
Nobody corners the head of manufacturing at a cocktail party to share their hot take on injection molding tolerances.
The general counsel doesn’t get unsolicited feedback from his college roommate about contract language.
But marketing?
Oh, marketing is different.
Marketing is everyone’s sport.
Because everyone has seen an ad, everyone has bought something. And apparently, those two facts are sufficient credentials to weigh in.
The CMO’s Husband Didn’t Like the Color – Is He a Marketing Expert?
I once sat in a packaging review where the CMO’s husband had looked at the label over dinner the night before. He found it “too busy.” He preferred the old one with its darker colors.
He was a periodontist. A good one, I’m told.
We redesigned nothing. But we spent two meetings discussing it. And of course, the periodontist never read the 12-page brief about the redesign.
Marketing advice from the boss’s spouse is the kind of market research no one asked for, and no one can ignore.
The spouse focus group.
The parent panel.
The “my daughter showed it to her friends, and they thought it was weird” usability study.
Here’s what those conversations have in common: the person sharing the feedback is not the target consumer.
They don’t know the strategy.
They haven’t seen the research.
And they have exactly zero accountability for the outcome.
But they have opinions, and those opinions travel upward at the speed of dinner conversation.
My Husband Didn’t Understand the Message
This one is a close relative of the first. The message wasn’t confusing. The message was clear to the 38-year-old female endurance athlete for whom it was written.
The message confused a 61-year-old man who doesn’t run and doesn’t buy this product, who was reading the ad on his wife’s phone while waiting for the game to start.
Good marketing is not supposed to speak to everyone. It is supposed to be spoken clearly to someone.
When it confuses people who aren’t that someone, that’s not a failure. That’s targeting working exactly as intended.
But try explaining that in a brand review when the VP of Sales says his wife showed the new campaign to her book club and “nobody got it.”
The book club wasn’t the audience.
The book club didn’t need to get it.
The book club, I say this with all due respect, was irrelevant.
You can’t say that in a brand review. So instead, you nod, take notes, and quietly keep the campaign exactly as it was, or you spend three weeks revising it into beige.
The Uber Driver’s Restaurant Recommendation
I used to travel a lot. And I’ve noticed something. The moment I get into an Uber in a city I don’t know, my driver will recommend a restaurant. Confidently. Often immediately.
Now, I want to be fair. Sometimes the recommendation is excellent.
But here’s what my driver does not know: whether I eat meat, how much I want to spend, whether I’m eating alone or with clients, whether I’m exhausted or energized, whether I want something familiar or adventurous. He doesn’t know if I’m pescatarian, if I had Italian for lunch, or if I have a shellfish allergy.
He knows what he likes. And he is sharing that with certainty.
“Everybody loves this place. You should eat here. All the locals love it.”
I’m not everybody, and why should I take his advice on food when he knows my name and that I’m going to a Marriott Courtyard just outside the city?
This is, more or less, exactly how unsolicited marketing feedback works. It comes from a real place. It’s genuine. The person giving it is not trying to be difficult.
But it is based entirely on their own taste, their own frame of reference, and their own completely separate life situation. It has nothing to do with your consumer, your category, or your strategy.
And yet, when that same energy shows up in a conference room, we treat it like data.
Why This Happens to Marketing and Nobody Else – Everyone’s a Marketing Expert
Finance has a moat. The numbers are the numbers. Nobody looks at a balance sheet and says, “I just feel like this column should be on the left.”
Operations have complexity as a shield. Supply chain decisions involve enough variables that most people don’t even try.
Marketing has the misfortune of being visible. The output is a thing people can see and react to. Everyone interacts with brands every day. That creates the illusion of expertise.
It’s the same reason everyone thinks they can coach a sports team. You’ve watched the game your whole life. You understand what winning looks like. Surely the decisions can’t be that complicated.
They are, of course, complicated.
And what looks like a simple creative choice is usually the result of consumer research, positioning work, competitive analysis, channel strategy, and approximately forty-seven meetings.
But none of that is visible. Only the ad is visible. And the ad looks simple. So, the feedback comes.
The Chairman’s Cousin and Other Official Stakeholders
I’ve had campaigns reviewed by people who had no business being in the room. The founder’s college roommate. The board member’s daughter, who was visiting for the weekend. The customer service rep who “had some thoughts” after seeing a social post.
One time, at a small food brand I was advising, the company’s largest retail buyer mentioned that his kids hadn’t heard of it. His kids were eight and eleven.
The brand was targeted at adults over forty with disposable income and a preference for clean labels. His children were, with great affection, the least relevant sample population imaginable.
We spent an hour discussing youth awareness.
The thing is, you can’t always fight it. The chairman’s cousin is still the chairman’s cousin. The retail buyer is still the retail buyer. Some feedback arrives wearing a badge you have to take seriously, even when the feedback itself deserves none.
The skill isn’t in dismissing it. The skill is in thanking people warmly, writing things down with great ceremony, and then going back to what the strategy actually says.
Three Key Takeaways
1. Liking something is not the same as being the audience for it. The goal of great marketing is resonance with the right person, not universal approval. If your campaign is working on the target consumer, the fact that someone’s spouse found it confusing is a footnote, not a finding. Know who you’re talking to and measure against that. Everyone else’s reaction is interesting, but it isn’t the test.
2. Confidence is not expertise. The Uber driver gives the restaurant recommendation with the same certainty as a James Beard Award winner. In marketing, unsolicited opinions arrive with exactly the same energy regardless of the credentials behind them. Your job is to listen politely, then go back to the people who represent your actual consumers. Their opinion is data. Everyone else’s is noise dressed up as insight.
3. Strategy is the immune system. When the feedback starts flooding in from people who aren’t the target, who don’t know the strategy, and who aren’t accountable for the result, a documented strategy is what keeps you from redesigning everything into a product that offends no one and excites no one. Write down the strategy. Share it broadly. Point to it often. It is your professional defense against the well-meaning opinions that would otherwise drive every decision.
Everyone is a marketer until it’s time to be accountable for the result. That’s when the room gets very quiet, and the periodontist goes home.
What’s the most memorable piece of unsolicited marketing feedback you’ve ever received? Drop it in the comments. I have a feeling this thread is going to be very entertaining.
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