Azleen here. As you know, many people are playing content now. They are playing it to win better attention on social media, on search engines, on AI assistants and so on. So are we. I noticed that we are still playing a volume game, believing that if we just post daily, we will eventually break through the noise. This somehow makes me a little worried. For our company I mean. Did you all know that the reality out there is rapidly changing, and your yesterday's thinking is no longer relevant? I hope that with this internal memo, you can consider changing the strategy immediately.
It's getting too noisy out there, and somehow we are also partly to blame here. Guess what, yesterday's weapons won't help us win the future wars.
Now, to navigate this new way of searchability or being found, our marketing team has to understand a new reality. It's a pretty harsh reality, actually. We need to realise that 57% of consumers now actively avoid brands that bombard them with poorly targeted marketing messages.Research from the Aimia Institute suggests that the sheer volume of digital communication has reached a breaking point, forcing many individuals to take drastic measures to protect their online presence. When more than half of our potential market is actively looking for the Unfollow button, the biggest risk we have to endure is that people look at our brand as annoying. If our content feels like spam rather than an asset, we are effectively pushing customers away. Our competitors will definitely benefit from this. Quietly.
This friction is usually a symptom of a deeper, conceptual misunderstanding. That is why keeping our brand marketing elegant is important. At the moment, we are treating our communication with customers as a one-way street. This is not good at all. To build a defence against those people who wanted to walk away from our brand, we must go back to the fundamentals of what brand marketing is all about and how it actually work especially now in a 2026 context. No, it is not the aesthetics but more on the structural integrity of our reputation. This is where our marketing blueprint and playbook come into the picture. These foundational layers will help our marketing with clarity. Without that clarity, our marketing efforts are just noise without a signal.
Even when we have the best marketing strategy and processes, these will still fail if they’re trapped inside a fractured organisation. I often see brilliant marketing ideas out there die because of the management team's ego, the operations team and the product teams aren't speaking the same language, and many more reasons. You see, true growth happens when we stop looking at marketing as a siloed department and start seeing it as a business-wide infrastructure. This is exactly what I explored in my conversation with Ooi Lay Tin, a senior business adviser and career coach on solving problems beyond silos. You see, only when we break those silos, we stop fighting internal battles and start winning external ones.
Now, once that internal architecture is fixed, we gain the right to play at a higher level. One of many ways to play content like a pro and break the noise is via user-generated content. Maybe we can consider executing sophisticated user-generated content tactics, the Airbnb style. Check out how they play social media. FYI, this travel giant is winning their Instagram game simply because it fits into their strategy to turn attention into its host community. From the community, they will then turn the audience (read: strangers) into paid customers. We need to emulate this example if we are really serious about winning more new customers and making the existing ones stay.
So, please. Let this memo be a strong reminder to all of you to stop generating massive amounts of content daily. Doing more is never the answer, believe me. Perhaps you should ask yourself if you are actually marketing it right or not. No, we do not need more activity. Instead, we need to better understand what to achieve and work on the right architecture to support the journey. And please, learn to keep the game simple.
Come and talk to me directly if you aren't sure what to do. Starting today, let's win more by doing less.
Azleen.
P.S. Thanks for reading.Text now if you require a CMO.
