You Probably Don’t Have a Marketing Problem. You Have a Strategy Problem.

(And the 5-minute Growth Readiness Check that proves it.)

Most scaleups think they have a marketing problem. They are likely to be experiencing some of these issues:

• Pipeline is slowing down.

• CAC rising.

• Brand feels invisible.

• Creative stops landing.

  
  

Everyone blames marketing. But nine times out of ten, the real issue sits much higher up:

• Strategy• Positioning• Creative effectiveness• Messaging• Metrics• Internal alignment

Marketing simply becomes the place where the symptoms show. This is the brutal irony of growth-stage businesses: marketing takes the blame for decisions it never owned.

1. The Myth of the “Marketing Problem”

When growth plateaus, the easiest narrative to reach for is:

“We need better marketing.”

But here’s what OSER sees repeatedly inside £3m–£50m companies:

• The brand isn’t distinct enough to create demand

• The value proposition is too vague to cut through

• The market positioning is unclear or crowded

• Creative is safe, expected or forgettable

• The funnel is disconnected from the story

• The metrics being tracked don’t actually predict revenue

• The internal teams aren’t aligned on what growth even means

• The CEO, product and marketing all have different definitions of success

These are not “marketing problems". They’re strategic clarity problems being expressed through marketing activity.

And until the strategy is fixed, no amount of media spend, content, campaigns or hiring will unlock meaningful growth.

2. Strategy vs Execution: The Gap No One Talks About

Most teams are full of good people working hard. But execution without strategy is just motion. Here’s what happens inside 90% of scaleups: The CEO wants growth, the team are kept busy producing activity, and everyone hopes that the numbers will move.

This is why so many scaleups feel “busy but stuck.” It's because they’re trying to solve strategic problems with execution tools.

3. Creative Effectiveness: The Missing Growth Lever

One of the biggest blind spots is: Creative.

Most scaleups survive on functional, safe, familiar creative - the type that looks like everything else in their category. But creative is not decoration. It’s a growth lever.

Distinctive, memorable creative can outperform generic creative by 10x and in some cases 20x, yet it’s the area scaleups that underinvest in the most.

The problem isn’t that CEOs don’t value creativity. It’s that they don’t know how to measure it. So they default to performance metrics that reward short-term optimisation and punish long-term brand building. The result is strong products but weak brands, which, over time, results in stagnant growth.

4. The Real Problem: You Don’t Know Which Lever to Pull

Think of your business as a system:

Brand → story → strategy → creative → funnel → metrics → optimisation → revenue

If one link is weak, everything is weak.

Most scaleups are not failing because they lack ideas. They’re failing because they can’t see which part of the system is breaking their growth.

That’s why OSER built the Growth Readiness Check - a 5-minute diagnostic that reveals where your real growth blockers are hiding.

5. Introducing the OSER Growth Readiness Check

This short diagnostic looks across the five critical areas that determine whether a scaleup can grow:

1. Strategy – Are you clear on the lever that actually unlocks scale?

2. Positioning & Brand – Is your value proposition distinct, memorable and commercial?

3. Funnel & Demand – Are you generating the right type of demand, or just noise?4. Creative Effectiveness – Does your creative actually create mental availability?5. Metrics & Measurement – Are you measuring the things that lead revenue, not lag it?

In five minutes, you get a simple answer: Where is your biggest blocker - and what does that mean for your next move?

6. Why It Matters

Because growth is not a guessing game.

You can’t scale what you haven’t diagnosed. You can’t fix what you haven’t seen. You can’t hire your way out of misalignment.

The companies that grow the fastest are the ones that:

• Know exactly what type of growth they’re pursuing

• Build a system to support it

• Align brand, strategy and marketing

• Invest in creativity that cuts through

• Measure what actually affects revenue

• Solve problems at the root, not the surface

The Growth Readiness Check is the fastest way to expose what’s holding you back.

7. If You Want to Grow, Start Here

If your business feels busy but not impactful, or if your spend is rising but your returns aren’t. If your marketing team feels under pressure but unclear, or If your brand isn't meaningfully different, or If you’re doing everything “right” but growth still feels hard.

Then you don’t have a marketing problem - you have a clarity problem.

Take the Growth Readiness Check, receive your diagnosis, and discover the strategic lever that will unlock your next stage of growth.

Take Growth Readiness Check