In marketing, making it up as you go isn’t failure—it’s the job."
The Whining
For the longest time, I’ve been telling myself to start writing.
Not just for the sake of posting. But to share insights, get my thinking validated (or challenged), and document what it feels like to live inside the head of a marketer in the real world, not the fantasy Social media version.
And if you’ve been in marketing long enough, you know the drill.
- Someone questions the value of your work.
- Someone asks what the real definition of marketing is.
- Someone says, “Show me how those 12 LinkedIn posts turned into real revenue.”
We’ve all been there. And like many of you, I’ve had to develop my instinctual muscle for answering on the fly. Call it what you want—defensive reflex, survival mechanism, or let’s be honest, improvisation.
But here’s the honest confession: At least 25% of the time, we don’t have the perfect answer. We just try to make sense of it- in that moment, with whatever logic we can summon. Somehow, we manage to pull it off.
That, my friend, is how we earn the label: “Great storyteller.”
Which—let’s admit—is just a polite corporate way of saying “creative bullshit artist.” But here’s the kicker: No other profession gets glorified for making stuff up under pressure. Except maybe politicians and stand-up comedians.
Answer the Poll Here: https://honestmarketers.substack.com/p/best-marketing-strategies-are-born?r=1ms9ti
Blame the Blamer
But here’s what most people don’t realize— Within those improvised answers are seeds of some of our best solutions. Sometimes, the smartest strategy is hiding in a story you just made up to survive a meeting.
Let me give you an example.
I was once tasked with building a lead-gen strategy, with zero external spend. The only money I could use was for internal tools or domains for cold outreach. That’s it. No ads. No paid campaigns. Nada.
For an entire week, the pressure brewed in the back of my mind. But I still didn’t have a solid plan.
The aha! Moment
Then came Monday. Already feeling the blues, a new hire casually asked me: “How do we generate leads with zero budget, Sibu?”
And that’s when the superpower kicked in.
Something about the moment—the question, the responsibility, the need not to look dumb—triggered my improvisation engine. And before I knew it, I was speaking out a strategy on the spot that… surprisingly made complete sense.
It wasn’t rehearsed. It wasn’t in a Notion doc. But it was real. And it worked.
That moment made me realize something profound:
The marketer’s ability to improvise stories is not just a soft skill—it’s a superpower. It's our internal AI, trained on stress, doubt, and creativity.
Yes, sometimes we make it up as we go. But we also dig deep, make connections, and shape something useful out of chaos.
So, let’s stop treating this skill as a flaw. Let’s own it. Celebrate it. Sharpen it.
Because in the uncharted wilderness of marketing, it’s not always the ones with the right answers who win. It’s the ones who can find answers in the moment.
Welcome to Honest Marketers.
This is where we keep it real. Even if we’re making it up—just a little.
