The Brief Nobody Could Fill

There is a particular kind of meeting that happens in organizations that do not yet know what they are.

Someone in marketing—usually junior, usually recent, usually enthusiastic and bright—has been asked to produce a strategy. A LinkedIn plan, a content calendar, and a brand positioning document. Something that will explain the company to the world and generate the right kind of attention in the right markets.

They have done their research. They have looked at competitors. They have prepared a framework. And now they need one thing before they can begin: a clear answer to the question of who this company is, what it stands for, and why a specific audience in a specific market should care.

So they ask.

The question travels upward through the organization with the efficiency of a well-designed internal process. Marketing asks management. Management asks the founder. The founder—who built the company from nothing, who knows every project, every partnership, and every hard decision that got them here—pauses.

And cannot answer.

Not because he is not intelligent. Not because the company has no identity. But because the identity that exists is partly inherited, partly assumed, and partly still being decided. The company knows what it came from. It is still figuring out what it is becoming. And the founder, who is also the person most responsible for making that decision, has not yet made it—because making it requires giving something up. And the thing that would need to be given up is still producing results.

So the question returns unanswered. Marketing is told to do their best. A Typeform goes out to employees: tell us three words that describe our company, tell us what our strengths are, and tell us how customers see us.

The employees look at the Typeform. Then at each other.

“We don't really know what sets us apart,” someone says quietly.

They are right. And no Typeform will change that.

At some point—usually after the internal process has produced nothing useful—an external expert is brought in. Someone with impressive credentials. Campaigns for major brands. A track record in the sector. Perhaps some international experience.

They spend several months interviewing people, running workshops, and synthesizing findings. They produce a document. The brand positioning. The messaging framework. The visual identity guidelines.

It is better written than anything the internal team produced. The pictures are sharper. The statements are bolder. And it describes, with considerably more polish, the same confusion that was there before they arrived.

Two problems, compounding each other. The first: the founder still has not made the identity decision, and no external expert can make it for him. The brief that could not be filled internally cannot be filled externally. It can only be better formatted.

The second concern is subtler and pricier: even if the identity question were resolved, impressive credentials built in the wrong context produce impressive-looking outputs that do not land in the right market. Domain matters—a marketer who spent ten years on food campaigns of international brands within India brings food marketing expertise that does not automatically transfer to infrastructure finance. But cultural context matters more. A marketer who built their entire career within one culture feels what lands and what does not for that audience. That feeling is not acquirable from a brief. It is built through years of logging hours on the right side of the river.

Move that expertise across a cultural boundary, and something more challenging than inefficiency happens. The marketeer has to relearn—and unlearn. Assumptions that were correct in the old environment turn out to be wrong in the new one. Some of what was learned must be actively overwritten before the right patterns can be installed in their place.

There is a piece of received wisdom in the Netherlands that takes most Dutch businesspeople an expensive mistake or two to fully internalize: if you want to expand into the Belgian market, hire a Belgian.

The Netherlands and Belgium share a border, a largely common language, centuries of intertwined history, and enough cultural overlap that many Dutch professionals assume the two markets are essentially the same. They are not. The differences are subtle enough to be invisible from the outside and consequential enough to determine whether a market entry succeeds or fails.

The Dutch genius who has never lived in Belgium does not feel those differences. The mediocre Belgian feels them without thinking. Every hour of her professional life was compiled in a context where those signals mattered. She will outperform him. Every time. Not because she is more talented. Because her expertise was built in the right place.

Now scale that gap to India and Northern Europe.

The cultural river between those two worlds is wider by an order of magnitude. The differences in communication style, in commercial culture, in the unspoken rules of professional relationships, in what signals credibility and what signals confusion—all of it is real, consequential, and largely invisible to anyone who has only ever stood on one bank.

Before you hire for a market, ask three questions. Did they log their hours in the right domain? For the right audience? Inside the right cultural context?

If the answer to any of the three is no, you are not hiring expertise. You are financing a learning curve. Someone will be doing the learning and unlearning simultaneously, in your market, on your budget, and on your timeline.

And that is a choice one could make. Just make it consciously.