Thinly Spread: More channels. More content. Less impact.

Growth

12 May

There are more TV channels today than ever before.

Hundreds of them. Streaming platforms everywhere. Infinite choice, on-demand content, personalised recommendations and entire libraries available at the touch of a button.

Yet somehow, most nights, people still end up scrolling endlessly, thinking: “There’s nothing worth watching.”

Modern branding and marketing feel very similar.

Businesses are under constant pressure to show up everywhere. LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, email marketing, podcasts, paid ads, blogs, reels, stories, shorts, carousels, animations and whatever new platform appears next week demanding attention.

The result is often an overwhelming amount of content, spread across an overwhelming number of channels, with very little of it actually making a lasting impression.

A lot of businesses have mistaken visibility for effectiveness.

Just because your brand can appear everywhere doesn’t necessarily mean it should.

That doesn’t mean businesses should ignore modern platforms or avoid digital marketing altogether. Clearly, brands today need to function online. In many cases, that’s where people will encounter them first.

But there’s a difference between building a brand that works digitally and exhausting yourself trying to dominate every channel equally.

For most SMEs, that simply isn’t realistic, necessary or commercially sensible.

Large multinational brands have entire internal marketing departments, production teams, media buyers, strategists and content creators dedicated to feeding those channels every day. Smaller businesses often have one marketing person, an owner juggling five roles, or someone in the office trying to keep things moving between everything else they already do.

Yet many are still measuring themselves against brands operating on completely different scales.

The reality is, most businesses don’t need a global content machine.

They need a recognisable, professional and consistent presence in the places their audience actually pays attention to.

There’s a famous story about Lamborghini being asked why they didn’t advertise on television.

Their response was supposedly: “Because people who buy Lamborghinis don’t sit around watching TV.”

Whether the quote is perfectly accurate or not, the thinking behind it is what matters.

They understood their audience.

They understood where attention existed, and perhaps more importantly, where it didn’t.

That level of focus feels increasingly rare today.

Many businesses are spreading themselves thin trying to adapt every message for every possible platform, when in reality, their ideal clients may only actively engage with one or two meaningful channels.

For some businesses, LinkedIn may genuinely matter.
For others, referrals, events and reputation might still outperform social media entirely.
Some audiences engage with detailed insight and expertise.
Others respond better to visuals, demonstrations or short-form content.

There isn’t one universal formula anymore, if there ever was one.

That’s why modern branding has become less about rigid consistency and more about adaptable consistency.

Your brand doesn’t need to look identical everywhere. It needs to feel recognisable.

A presentation deck doesn’t behave the same way as an exhibition stand.
A social media graphic isn’t viewed the same way as a website.
A van livery has a different job from a proposal document.

Trying to force every touchpoint into one perfectly controlled system often creates brands that are restrictive, difficult to use and impossible to maintain without a full internal creative team.

Ironically, the businesses trying hardest to appear everywhere often end up blending into the background.

Not because they lack effort, but because they’re producing endless variations of the same forgettable content everyone else is already producing.

Modern audiences are incredibly good at filtering noise.

They scroll past templated advice, recycled opinions and generic content at speed because they’ve seen it all before.

The brands that tend to cut through are usually the ones with enough confidence to focus on what actually matters to their audience, rather than trying to mimic every marketing trend at once.

That might mean producing fewer things, but producing better things.

There’s also a growing misconception that brands need massive guideline documents and highly complex systems to succeed in modern marketing.

In reality, most businesses benefit far more from having: