One of the things we try to do at ID8 is stay genuinely close to the problems that marketing leaders are actually facing, not the ones that agencies assume they're facing. The gap between those two things is where most agency-client relationships go wrong.
So we ran a poll in our LinkedIn community asking a simple question: if you could fix one creative challenge this quarter, what would it be? Here's what we heard, and what it means.
Four options. Real responses from marketing managers, VPs, CMOs, and founders at tech and B2B companies.
The fact that 'brand looks outdated' was the top response is significant and slightly counterintuitive. In a market where everyone is talking about lead generation and conversion optimisation, the single biggest creative pain point is something more fundamental: the brand itself.
This makes sense when you think about how most tech companies evolve. The brand is built at the start, with limited resources, and then never systematically updated as the company grows and the market changes. The product improves. The team grows. The client base matures. But the brand stays where it was in year two, and the gap between where the company is and how it looks keeps widening.
Almost a third of respondents cited a sales deck that underperforms as their top challenge which aligns with what we see consistently in our client work. The deck is the most-used commercial document in most B2B companies and the one that receives the least structured investment.
Most sales decks are built once, by someone without design training, and then updated piecemeal for years. Slides are added, removed, repurposed, and reformatted until the document has no consistent visual logic. And yet it's the document that sits in front of prospects at the most critical commercial moment.
Sixteen percent cited content inconsistency as their top challenge and while it might seem like the least dramatic option, it's actually the root cause of several of the other problems. Brand inconsistency is what makes a brand look outdated even when it's relatively recent. It's what makes a good product feel less credible than a mediocre competitor with better-aligned creative.
Consistency is not the same as repetition. It's the application of a coherent visual and verbal language across every touchpoint and it requires a system, not just effort.
Whichever challenge resonated most; outdated brand, underperforming deck, non-converting website, or inconsistency, the underlying approach is the same: audit what you have, identify the gap, prioritise the fix that will have the highest commercial impact, and invest in getting it done properly.
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