Marketing Is a Mess: Why a Creative Strategy Is Your Brand’s Best Investment Right Now
- arthursbeth
- Sep 22
- 3 min read
Marketing feels harder than ever. It's noisy out here. Staying relevant is an expensive and time-intensive game of jumping through algorithmic hoops, somehow staying unique whilst ticking content boxes and staying sane. The impossible multi-task.
But the problem isn’t just budget restraints or algorithm shifts. It’s the lack of a clear creative strategy to anchor brands through the chaos.
Budgets are down, expectations are up
Being very real, the marketing landscape in 2025 is brutal.
Marketing budgets, as a percentage of overall company revenue, have shrunk to just 7.7% - down from 11% in 2020. At the same time, content demands are rising, trends are accelerating, and cultural backlash is always one wrong post away.
If you own a business, you’re probably feeling it in someway or another. Tasked with doing more with less. Social media managers are rotating, and usually overextended. Founders are burning out trying to run Instagram at midnight. Team structures that once held a brand together are buckling under the pressure of daily content demands.
If you’ve ever felt like you're constantly reinventing your brand’s voice depending on who’s holding the phone - you’re genuinely not alone.
What happens when the people holding your brand… change?
In the past 18 months, over 40% of global brands have downsized their marketing teams. Social creators are ghosting brands. Freelancers cycle in and out. Gen Z interns know the trends but not the vision.
When there’s no creative strategy in place - no through-line, no spine - the result is branding that starts to fray at the edges. One week it’s beige sustainability. The next, it’s doomscroll infographics. Then a “silly little launch” that no one understands.
Creative strategy isn’t your colour palette or font file. It’s the deeper logic behind why your brand exists - and how it communicates across time, teams and trends.
It’s the difference between:
reacting vs resonating
chasing content vs building story
looking consistent vs sounding like everyone else
A creative strategy is your biggest money $aver
When a brand has no strategy, everything has to be built from scratch. Every post, every launch, every caption. That’s an expensive, exhausting way to operate.
Without a clear strategy, you’ll:
Brief and re-brief creatives from scratch
Spend hours rewriting captions that still don’t feel right
Drop way too many dollars into campaigns that don’t convert
Burn out your team trying to find "what works"
Watch your customers lose interest, because your brand doesn’t feel cohesive
With strategy in place?
New team members pick up and build without starting from zero
Content becomes easier, faster, cheaper to make
Campaigns ladder up to a brand story people can emotionally connect with
You finally feel like you're driving your brand forward, not just reacting to chaos (because it it chaos)
Irigai does build brands with backbone ONLY.
Irigai helps purpose-led fashion businesses, thrift store owners and upcycled product founders (& more) to stop playing catch-up with themselves and start building cultural credibility. That means:
Strategy that actually reflects your values
Human-founded and centred language
A creative lens that works across your platforms, no matter who’s posting
And we get your reality. We know marketing isn’t your only job.
We know budgets are tight and time is tighter. But we also know this: a smart creative strategy pays for itself - through consistency, confidence, and a community that actually sticks around.
how hard can you make your identity work? let's find out
Does it get better?
With a creative strategy, yeah kind of.
Marketing is noisy, expensive and fast-moving. A creative strategy is how your brand stays recognisable, resonant, and ready - no matter who’s on the team or what TikTok’s doing this week.
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