Mediocre Thing Consistently

I was on a call last year with a fintech that was stuck. They'd been trying to crack awareness for eighteen months, and nothing seemed to move the needle. They'd hired agencies, tested campaigns, debated whether to go bigger on events or double down on content. The leadership team was exhausted from the conversation.

When I pulled up their brand metrics, they were a 6.5 out of 10 on most of the things we look at. Not bad. Not great. Just... there. Their social feed was full of decent content posted regularly. Nothing viral, nothing award-winning, nothing that would make you stop scrolling. Just steady.

And I told them something that made the room go quiet: "Mediocre consistently is better than amazing occasionally."

They didn't love hearing that word. Mediocre. Nobody does. But here's what I meant: their competitor down the street had just won an industry award for a campaign. Beautiful creative, big splash, lots of congratulations on LinkedIn. And that competitor's awareness metrics? Lower than theirs. Because the award-winning campaign was a one-time thing, and my client's "mediocre" content had been compounding every single day for a year.

The instinct is always to chase the big splash. The viral moment. The campaign that gets the whole company excited and exhausted in equal measure. But the math doesn't work the way people think it does. You pour resources into that one moment, it gets attention for a week, maybe two, and then it fades. Meanwhile, the competitor who posted something decent every single day has been building visibility the entire time. Their "mediocre" content is now outperforming your "amazing" content because they never stopped showing up.

The brands we remember aren't the ones with the best single moment. They're the ones that kept showing up.

This connects to something I talk about in the book as Salt Shaker Theory: the discipline of moving the salt shaker back to center every day is more valuable than reorganizing the whole restaurant once a decade. Danny Meyer trains his managers this way. Clear everything off the table except a salt shaker, put it in the exact center, and walk away. Come back in an hour. Where's the salt shaker? It's moved. That's not a problem to solve. That's human nature to manage. The job isn't preventing drift. The job is consistent, gentle correction back to the standard.

Same principle applies to marketing. A weekly newsletter that always ships builds more trust than a quarterly masterpiece that's always late. A LinkedIn post every Thursday, even a mediocre one, creates more awareness than a viral post once a year. The consistency itself becomes the quality.

When I work with teams on this, I ask three questions. First: what's the mediocre thing you could do every week that would compound? Not the perfect thing. The sustainable thing. The thing your team can actually maintain without burning out. Second: what "amazing thing" are you chasing that's actually preventing consistency? Sometimes the pursuit of the perfect campaign is what's blocking the good-enough campaign from ever shipping. Third: are you optimizing for peaks or baselines? What you deliver on an average week matters more than your best-case performance. The highs feel good, but the average is what builds the brand.

That fintech I mentioned? They stopped chasing the big splash. They committed to a sustainable content rhythm, not exciting, not award-worthy, just consistent. Within six months their awareness metrics were in a different tier entirely. Not because any single piece broke through. Because they never stopped showing up.

If your team is stuck in the cycle of big campaigns followed by exhausted silence, it might be worth asking what the mediocre thing is that you could do every single week. I'm happy to talk through how we approach this with clients if it would help.

Allison