Let me be blunt: most brand campaigns do not work because the creative execution is poor. The initial confusion in their thinking ensures their failure.

Too many campaigns are built backwards. Companies start with the outputs—the film, the slogan, the visuals, and the media plan—before they have done the challenging part: deciding what they actually want the market to think, feel, or remember.

I've watched marketing and PR teams drown in software subscriptions while their actual output has worsened, not improved.

The average marketing department now uses 50+ different tools. The average PR agency? Not that far behind.

Yet when I ask teams what revenues their campaigns have generated in the last quarter, the answer is usually underwhelming.

Public relations has always positioned itself as an influential business function. It is said to shape perception, build credibility, and influence stakeholder behaviour.

For many CEOs and senior management teams, however, the real question is more practical: can PR actually persuade people to buy?

Many companies ask which tactics work best in B2B, as though the answer lies in choosing the right channels or formats. In reality, B2B marketing effectiveness depends less on the tactic itself and more on whether it reflects how B2B decisions are actually made.

Such an approach means that the most effective B2B marketing tactics are not those that generate the most visibility but those that reduce doubt and accelerate trust. That is the first principle.

The conversation about artificial intelligence in marketing has, for most organisations, collapsed into one of two positions.

The first is uncritical enthusiasm — AI as the answer to every inefficiency, the tool that will automate the work, reduce the headcount, and deliver better results at lower cost.

The second is defensive scepticism: a reluctance to seriously engage with a capability that is already reshaping the competitive landscape in ways that cannot be wished away.

Neither position serves the business well.

Most businesses gather market intelligence. Very few use it well.

The data exists. Customer feedback is collected. Competitor activity is monitored. Industry reports are commissioned and circulated. Sales teams return from the field with observations about what customers are saying, what objections are emerging, and where the competitive pressure is building.

And then, in most organisations, that intelligence just sits there.

The best marketers in the world share one quality that rarely makes it into a job description. - They could sell anything, not just a beneficial product with a clear value proposition. Anything. A flawed idea, a questionable cause, a narrative that flatters rather than informs.

The same craft that builds beloved brands and moves people to act can also do the opposite just as effectively, whether in the wrong hands or without any guiding principle.

That's not a warning. It's a starting point. Marketing must first consider what it is more than capable of doing before discussing what it should do. The talent for persuasion is not neutral. It never was.

Most company newsletters are digital junk mail. The industry average open rate is 15%, and the click-through percentage is 2%. Translation: 4 out of 5 people don't even open your newsletter.

At Lighthouse PR, we teach a fundamentally different approach—one that consistently achieves a minimum 25%+ open rates and 5%+ click-through rates.

Web traffic can look like momentum. In reality, it’s only potential energy. The businesses that will win in 2026 are not the ones that attract the most visitors but the ones that turn attention into decisions and decisions into revenue. Because the real growth leak is rarely “we need more awareness”.

It’s the gap between a first impression and a commercial outcome: unclear positioning, weak trust signals, vague offers, and slow follow-up that let high-intent interest cool down.

The first hour of a reputation incident can inflict the most damage. Not because the facts are always catastrophic, but because uncertainty is a vacuum—and the public, employees, customers, partners, and journalists will fill that vacuum with their assumptions if you don’t fill it with clarity.

Most businesses are excellent at answering.

Strategy decks full of them. Performance reviews are built around them. Leadership meetings structured to deliver them on time, on slide, and on brand. The problem isn't the answers. It's the questions that produced them. The wrong questions produce the wrong thinking

Disinformation is no longer a fringe issue confined to politics or “bad actors on social media”. It has become a structural feature of the modern information environment: cheap to produce, fast to distribute, and increasingly difficult to distinguish from legitimate reporting at a glance.

The World Economic Forum has repeatedly ranked misinformation and disinformation among the most significant short-term global risks, precisely because they erode trust and accelerate polarisation. (World Economic Forum)

Each generation of professionals inherits a more precise understanding of their profession than the last.

Marketing has been a serious commercial discipline for over a century. It has access to more data and technology that can track human behaviour in real time, at scale, across every channel a consumer touches.

So why isn't the success rate higher?

Let's address the issue that many European business leaders hesitate to publicly acknowledge. GDPR is killing small and medium enterprises. Not slowly. Not theoretically. Actually killing them.

I know this isn't a popular position. GDPR was marketed as a means of protecting citizens' privacy and creating a fair competition against Big Tech.

The reality? It's become a compliance nightmare that disproportionately hammers the very businesses it was supposed to protect

Romania is often described as a “price-driven” market. That’s broadly true, but incomplete. In 2025–2026, what’s really happening is more nuanced: price is the entry ticket, while quality and service decide preference, loyalty, and margin resilience.

Influencer marketing has matured. The audience can now spot a forced partnership in seconds. They recognise scripts, staged enthusiasm, awkward product placement, and briefs that have strangled the creator’s natural voice. The result is what many brands quietly experience: a campaign that delivers reach but not belief, content that creates impressions but not preference, and “activity” that fails to move real buying behaviour.

Marketing today has access to more data than at any point in history.

Behavioural tracking, CRM systems, analytics platforms, AI tools, attribution models. Every click, scroll, interaction, and conversion can be measured, segmented, and analysed.

On paper, these advancements should have made marketers sharper, faster, and more precise.In reality, something else has happened.

The challenge in CSR and ESG communications is not visibility. It is credibility.

Organisations that invest meaningfully in social and environmental programmes frequently undermine that investment through the way they choose to talk about it. Claims outrun evidence. Adjectives substitute for data. And the sophisticated, increasingly sceptical audience notices the gap between what is said and what can be demonstrated.