Big companies suck at marketing. You don't have to.

I designed probably 200+ Hollister girls’ t-shirts when I worked at Abercrombie & Fitch (and a couple dozen hoodies and sweatpants).

This was around 2011-2012 when it was the #1 teen apparel brand, so it was cool to be part of that, and know that millions of people were wearing things I designed.

But it also made me realize why big companies almost always suck at marketing— and that entrepreneurs will always have an advantage over them.

PROBLEM 1: Too many fking opinions (from people who shouldn’t have them)

The product we actually shipped to stores was about 90% less cool than the first concepts we came up with. Every design had to go through 4-5 layers of approvals and revisions, each of which made it worse.

My personal pet peeve is the people who have to blurt out their bad opinion because they think it will make them look smart or important— like if you’re in a design review, and the boss signed off on your concept. You breathe a sigh of relief, then some 23 year-old assistant designer has to pipe up with “Is it just me, or does anyone else think the ‘C’ looks like a toilet seat?” and instantly the boss is like “You know what, it does kinda look like a toilet seat…” and you’re back to square one.

Every big company is like this. A lot of small ones are too. It’s fking maddening getting even the tiniest thing across the finish line and you spend 95% of your energy on stakeholder management.

It doesn’t take long before you give up and stop even trying to do anything innovative. Why bother?

PROBLEM 2: Optimizing for internal optics, not results

Every week I would get sales reports for our department at Hollister, and I noticed that orange, yellow and bright green SKUs were ALWAYS the bottom sellers. They were like 2% of total sales.

I asked one of the product managers why we kept making them even though they sold like sht and our customers clearly didn’t like them. He shrugged and said, “I don’t know, Mike [the CEO] just likes them.”

And I get it: there’s no incentive for anyone at a big company to rock the boat. Internal politics are almost always more important than results.

→ If people like you, they’ll find a way to justify and excuse your failures

→ If people DON’T like you, they’ll find a way to discredit all your successes

This is why so many people at big companies “fail up” over and over.

(Random weird story: I saw the CEO of Abercrombie wearing nothing but a towel almost every morning in the gym locker room 🫣)

If they suck at marketing, why do they win so much?

Because they’re great at something else, and they don’t NEED to be good at marketing. For example how Microsoft crushed Slack by bundling it with Office.

Office prints cash, so Microsoft can afford to have a shtty YouTube channel. Why push for excellence when you’re making billions from being mediocre?

“OK Finn, I get it. What’s your point?”

Small companies/solopreneurs have a massive advantage when it comes to marketing: less layers of bullsht means you can move faster and ship ideas the big companies never will.

→ Make the most of this!

Move fast and take chances. Do things that the big dawgs would never do. Let yourself be weird, cringe, edgy, raw, honest, authentic, and all the other things they can’t be.

You’ll get way better results that way, and it also makes life a lot more fun ☺️