A few years back, I was doing research for a client project — interviewing senior marketing leaders about how they engage consumers from underrepresented and underserved communities.
One executive shared a story that stuck with me.
His billion-dollar brand had produced an ad. And when he reviewed it — he caught something. The cultural relevance wasn't there for one of the key audiences the campaign was supposed to reach. The work was going to miss.
Now, he only caught it because he was personally a member of that community. Without that, the ad goes out exactly as it was.
That error wasn’t free. The ad had already been shot. Which meant reshooting it — time, budget, resources — all spent fixing something that should have been done right the first time. And beyond the cost? A near-miss like that erodes trust. With the agency. With internal stakeholders. And if it had launched as-is, with the very consumers it was meant to reach.
When he debriefed the team, he found the answer to why the first ad didn’t deliver fairly quickly. The creative brief included the audience the brand wanted to reach, in the form of the buyer personas. But the personas for that community weren't specific enough — not deep enough, not real enough — to give the agency what it needed to produce work that was actually authentic.
The agency didn't fail. The creative brief didn't fail.
The buyer persona failed.
And in a separate interview, another exec — leading the marketing transformation at a different billion-dollar company — told me that one of the biggest investments his team had made was educating marketing teams across the organization on how to build a creative brief with sufficient culturally relevant insights. Because without that foundation, even the best creative teams couldn't produce work that resonated.
Just like in the first example — a major input into the creative brief are the buyer personas.
Here's what's the big impact not getting this right has on your brand.
Let's say your total addressable market is 100 people. You build a creative brief for work designed to reach all 100. You brief the agency. The work comes back. You launch.
And when those 100 people encounter what you made — maybe 40 of them see something that feels like it was made for someone like them. They lean in. They keep reading. They take the next step.
The other 60? They get a signal — sometimes obvious, sometimes barely perceptible — that this wasn't made with them in mind. And they do what brains do when something doesn't feel relevant: they move on. No complaint. No explanation. Just gone.
Here's what makes this so costly: those 60 people weren't strangers. They were in your brief. You named them as your ideal customers. You said you were trying to reach them.
And the work you produced — based on those personas — disqualified them before you ever had the chance to convert them.
I've audited creative briefs and reviewed creative across enough client engagements to tell you this pattern is not rare. It is the norm.
And every time I trace it back — the brief wasn't the problem.
The buyer persona was the problem. The brief was just the tool the persona got poured into. When the input is incomplete, everything downstream is incomplete. The brief. The creative. The campaign. The results.
Fix the persona — and you fix the foundation everything else is built on.
I've dedicated two recent podcast episodes to exactly this. If buyer personas are part of how your team works — and they almost certainly are — these are worth your time:
Ep. 209: Why most buyer personas lead to an underperforming growth marketing strategy — and how to fix them Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Ep. 210: Most brands' buyer personas are shrinking their market — how to fix yours Apple Podcasts | Spotify
And if you want to dig into where this is showing up in your own marketing — I can help with that. Whether it's a Friction Finder Growth Audit or a Roadmapping Session, this is exactly the kind of work I do with brand leaders who are ready to stop leaving growth on the table.
Let's talk.
Have a great weekend,
Sonia