You can't market a business that is operationally unsound. That used to be true.

That used to be true. Bill Bernbach said it as plainly as anyone ever has: "A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad."

When I came up in this business, that principle was pretty universally understood. Not because agencies were saints (we were not), but because it was demonstrably, financially true. The feedback loop between promise and experience was short. Tell people your car is reliable and it isn't? They find out. Tell people your restaurant is exceptional and the food is mediocre? The reservation book thins out. Reality had consequences.

Here's what I believed for most of my career: the internet would make that loop even tighter. Reviews travel at light speed now. Everyone can see everything. Surely, I thought, we were entering the golden age of accountability. Bernbach's principle, supercharged.

Let me tell you about my wife's sewing pattern. She bought a digital pattern that happened to originate in England, which required printing on A4 paper. Not exotic. Just A4. The Office Depot website said they had it. She drove to the store. The store said, oh, that's online only. Fine. She went to the Staples website, which said it needed to be ordered online. A step in the right direction, technically. She ordered it, shipped to store. She drove to the store to pick it up, opened the box, and found a calendar. A calendar.

To make a long story longer: she eventually walked out with two free reams of A4 paper and thirty-five dollars in store coupons. Which sounds like a happy ending until you notice what it actually was. Nobody fixed anything. Nobody seemed surprised. The apology machine worked flawlessly. The fulfillment machine, the thing the entire business allegedly exists to do, had failed three times in a row, and the institutional response was: here are some coupons. No. One. Cared.

And here's the part that would genuinely puzzle Bernbach: none of it matters. Staples spends heavily on advertising. The ads run. The stores stay open. The feedback moves at light speed, exactly as promised, and it changes nothing, because somewhere along the way large companies discovered they don't actually have to close the gap between promise and experience. They just have to budget for it. Free reams and coupons are cheaper than fixing the fulfillment system. The failure isn't a crisis. It's a line item.

So I have to amend the old adage. It turns out you can, in fact, market an operationally unsound business. Indefinitely, apparently, at sufficient scale and ad spend. Bernbach assumed a bad experience would kill the brand faster. What actually happened is that brands learned to price in the bad experience.

Which changes the question. It's no longer "can you get away with it?" Clearly you can. The question is whether you want to be that kind of company. Because the inverse is still true, and it's still the greatest competitive weapon available: a business whose operations actually deliver what its marketing promises is rare enough now to be remarkable. Literally. People remark on it.

The truth used to be mandatory. Now it's a strategy. Very few are using it. The campaigns I remember most were the ones that were already true before they ran.

— Gary Hopkins

Founder and principal of Method, a strategic marketing practice.