Our CMO: Most Marketing Advice Is Wrong, and Here's Why

There’s a lot of marketing advice out there, and most of it contradicts itself. Post more. Post less. Lead with price. Never mention price. Give people every detail. Keep it simple. At some point, the noise stops being useful and starts being the problem.

So we sat down with Chloe, Thrasker’s CMO, and asked her to walk through the marketing myths she hears the most, the ones she spends the first meeting with almost every new client talking them out of.

Does a Good Product Really Sell Itself?

This is the one founders believe the longest, and it costs them the most.

“I get it,” she told us. “If you’ve built something great, it feels almost insulting to have to convince people of that. But being good and being known are two completely different jobs, and only one of them happens by accident.”

Here’s the uncomfortable part: there are better products than the market leader in almost every category you can name. Better software. Better coffee. Better contractors. You’ve probably never heard of most of them, and not because they weren’t good enough. Nobody ever heard about them, period. This isn’t just a hunch. A 2025 replication study of nearly 900 consumers tested exactly this scenario: people choosing between brands with clear differences in awareness, quality, and price. The high-awareness brand won out overwhelmingly, even when it wasn’t the better or cheaper option, and people chose it faster and with less comparison shopping than they did in the low-awareness condition.

“Quality gets you a great product,” she says. “Marketing is what gets someone to actually try it. You need both. Most people only ever build the first one, and then wonder why nobody’s calling.”

Do Customers Really Buy Based on Price?

Price feels like the obvious deciding factor, so it’s usually the first thing businesses lead with. According to Chloe, price matters, but it’s rarely the actual reason someone says yes.

“Take Coca-Cola and a different brand of cola,” she points out. “In blind taste tests, people often actually lean toward the other brand. Reveal which one is Coca-Cola, and preference shifts back toward it. That alone should tell you the product itself isn’t the whole story. People buy based on trust and familiarity, not just what’s technically in the can.”

The research behind this is more specific than the pop-culture version suggests. A 2004 brain-imaging study out of Baylor College of Medicine, published in the journal Neuron, found that in blind taste tests, participants actually leaned toward preferring the competing cola over Coca-Cola. But once the brand was revealed, preference reliably shifted toward Coca-Cola, and activity increased in a brain region tied to emotion. It’s worth being honest, though: when other researchers tried to repeat this study, they didn’t always get the same result. So the finding is real and well-documented, but it’s not quite the sure thing in marketing that people often make it out to be.

That’s also why building brand trust tends to outperform competing purely on cost, she added. A business that races to be the cheapest option is playing a game that’s almost impossible to win long-term, because there’s always someone willing to go lower. Trust is a lot harder to undercut.

Does More Information Actually Help People Decide?

This is the myth she pushes back on the most, especially with clients who know their own business inside and out.

“When you know everything, the instinct is to say everything,” Chloe explains. “More features, more reasons, more proof. But people don’t remember a list. They remember one idea.”

This tracks with one of the oldest and most consistently applied ideas in marketing theory, the concept of “positioning,” first laid out by Al Ries and Jack Trout back in the 1980s and still taught in marketing programs today: a brand needs to own one clear, simple idea in a person’s mind, because human memory doesn’t reliably hold onto a long list of competing claims about the same thing. Think about the brands that actually stick in your head. They usually own one word, or one feeling: fast, safe, cheap, fun. Not a paragraph of bullet points. This is really just brand positioning in plain language, she says: pick the one thing you want to be known for, and let that do the work everywhere else can’t. “The businesses that try to say everything,” she adds, “usually end up remembered for nothing in particular.”

So What Does She Tell Clients Instead?

Pick one thing to be known for before you worry about anything else. Being seen matters as much as being good, and the research on brand awareness backs that up directly. Trust and familiarity beat price, which is exactly what the brain-imaging research on blind taste tests keeps showing. And one clear idea beats ten good ones, a principle marketers have leaned on for over 40 years because it keeps proving true. Everything else we build together, Chloe says, starts from those three things.