William Bernbach, the advertising legend who revolutionised the industry in the 1960s, put it bluntly: “A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.” David Ogilvy, another titan of the field, echoed the same truth: “Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.”
These men built empires on persuasion. They understood that advertising is an accelerant, not a miracle worker. Pour fuel on a fire, and it burns brighter. Pour fuel on wet wood, and you’ve wasted your fuel.
Yet here we are, decades later, and the most common request marketing agencies receive is some variation of: “We need better ads. Our sales aren’t where they should be.” The assumption being that marketing is the lever that moves everything. Sometimes it is. More often, it’s the amplifier connected to a broken speaker.
Good Ads Bad Products – Mathematics of Disappointment
Consider what happens when brilliant advertising meets a mediocre product. The campaign works. Click-through rates soar. Foot traffic increases. First-time purchases spike. Your marketing team celebrates. Your CFO smiles at the acquisition numbers.
Then reality arrives. Research consistently shows that 61% of consumers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. Not two. Not three. One. And 91% of unhappy customers will never buy from you again. Your expensive campaign just accelerated your failure by introducing more people to a product that couldn’t deliver on the promise your advertising made.
The numbers get worse. Unhappy customers tell 9 to 15 people about their bad experience. About 13% tell 20 or more. Happy customers? They tell roughly 3 people. And it takes approximately 40 positive customer experiences to undo the damage of one negative review. Your marketing budget didn’t just fail to produce ROI – it actively generated negative word-of-mouth at scale.
This is why 74% of customers cite product quality as the main factor keeping them loyal to a brand. Not advertising creativity. Not brand awareness. Not social media presence. Quality.
Quality Versus Taste: A Critical Distinction
Before we proceed, let’s draw a line that many businesses blur: there’s a difference between a product that doesn’t suit someone’s taste and a product that fails to deliver what it promises.
A customer might not enjoy your coffee’s flavour profile – that’s preference. But if your coffee is stale, that’s quality. Someone might find your consulting style too direct – that’s fit. But if you miss deadlines and deliver incomplete work, that’s performance. A buyer might prefer a competitor’s aesthetic – that’s taste. But if your product breaks within the warranty period, that’s failure.
Quality isn’t about being universally loved. It’s about consistently delivering what you claim to deliver. A Michelin-starred restaurant serving deliberately unusual cuisine isn’t low quality because some diners don’t enjoy it. But a restaurant advertising “fresh seafood” while serving frozen fish? That’s a quality problem disguised as a marketing success – until the reviews arrive.
The distinction matters because businesses often misdiagnose taste rejection as quality failure, and quality failure as market misunderstanding. The former requires better targeting. The latter requires fixing your product before spending another pound on advertising.
The Service Multiplier
Product quality is only half the equation. Service quality often determines whether a good product succeeds or a mediocre one survives.
Research from Salesforce shows that 90% of customers hold experience to be as important as the product itself. Think about that: the experience of buying, receiving, and being supported is valued equally to what you’re actually selling. PwC found that customers will pay 16% more for better experiences. And 82% of companies agree that retention through service is cheaper than acquisition through advertising – yet most marketing budgets tell a different story.
Poor service creates the same acceleration effect as poor products. A brilliant campaign drives traffic to your website, but your checkout process is confusing. Your returns policy is buried in fine print. Your customer service takes three days to respond. Every touchpoint that fails to match the quality your advertising promised creates what psychologists call an expectation gap – the distance between anticipated and actual experience. The wider the gap, the more betrayed the customer feels.
And betrayal, unlike disappointment, is personal. Disappointed customers might give you another chance. Betrayed customers become evangelists for your competition.
What Your Product Says About Your Values
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most marketing conversations avoid: the quality of what you sell is a direct expression of what you believe.
A company that cuts corners on materials to maintain margins is saying something about how it values its customers. A service provider that overpromises and underdelivers is communicating priorities that have nothing to do with client outcomes. A business that invests heavily in advertising while neglecting product development is revealing where it thinks value actually resides.
Customers sense this. Research shows that 31% of consumers have switched brands specifically because a company wasn’t honest about how its product performs. Not because the product failed catastrophically – because the promise didn’t match reality. The gap between advertising and experience reads as dishonesty, even when it’s just optimism or incompetence.
In a market where 88% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know more than any advertising, your product quality is your marketing. Every customer who experiences what you sell becomes either an advocate or a warning to others. No campaign can outspend a thousand disappointed customers telling their networks the truth.
What to Do Before Asking for Better Ads
Before you brief your marketing team or agency on the next campaign, audit what you’re actually selling:
Measure the gap. Survey recent customers about expectations versus reality. Not satisfaction scores – specific comparisons between what they expected based on your marketing and what they actually received. The gap is where your problem lives.
Track the silent departures. Remember: only 1 in 25 unhappy customers complains directly to the brand. The other 24 simply leave and tell their friends. Look at your repeat purchase rates, not just acquisition numbers. If you’re constantly acquiring but rarely retaining, your product or service is the issue, not your advertising.
Audit every touchpoint. The promise your advertising makes must be fulfilled at every interaction – website speed, checkout friction, delivery timing, customer service responsiveness, return process, follow-up communication. One weak link undermines every strong one.
Be honest about your category. Are customers leaving because your product doesn’t suit their taste, or because it doesn’t perform? The former is a targeting problem. The latter is a product problem. Don’t spend marketing budget solving a product problem.
Only Sustainable Marketing Strategy
The most effective marketing strategy is building something worth talking about, then helping people find it. In that order. Good marketers will tell you the truth about your product before they take your money to advertise it.
Because advertising a mediocre product doesn’t just waste your budget. It actively damages your brand by widening the pool of people who’ve been disappointed. It creates negative word-of-mouth at the exact scale of your media spend. It trains the market to distrust your claims.
A good ad for a bad product works exactly once. Then it works against you forever.
If you’re unsure whether your product, service, or customer experience is ready for amplification, a Marketing Audit can identify the gaps between your promise and your delivery before you invest in campaigns that might accelerate the wrong outcomes.
Sometimes the most valuable thing a marketing consultant can do is tell you to wait – to fix what’s broken before advertising what isn’t ready. Book a consultation and get an honest assessment of whether your marketing budget should go toward amplification or improvement.
