Lisa Story is a senior brand, reputation and communications strategist with over 25 years’ experience at the top of the industry. Here she argues that the marketing industry’s obsession with “bravery” is often a symptom of weak strategic foundations. Truly bold creative work depends less on courage than on rigour, judgement and organisational confidence.
You will hear it a lot. What we need is brave creative work. Which, roughly translated, means: we do not really have a strategy, so let’s compensate with something attention-grabbing, disruptive, or failing that a branded barge on the Thames…
If you have ever sat in a briefing with a CMO or CCO asking you to be brave, you are not alone. The industry has been having a long conversation with itself about creative bravery, courage and confidence. The shared diagnosis is that the industry has lost its nerve or direction.
I have been watching this conversation for many years. The industry is right that the work needs to be bolder, more creative, more distinctive. But the conversation never resolves because bravery is being asked to do the work of strategy.
Bravery is what you ask of people when you haven’t done the strategic work.
It is the exhortation that fills the space where rigour and inspiration should be. But when bravery is doing the heavy lifting at the point of decision, it is usually because the upstream work was never properly done.
A capability problem, not a creative one
This is not a creative problem. It is a capability problem, and it has a structural cause.
The senior strategic layer in communications has been thinning for several years, and the pace has accelerated. Marketing Week’s 2025 Career and Salary Survey found almost one in four of more than 3,500 marketers said their business had cut senior marketing leaders. They have not been replaced, mostly to save on wages.
The same survey found that nearly three quarters of CMOs believe marketing strategy is undervalued in their organisation.
What gets lost in that thinning is not titles. It is judgement: the ability to sit in a room with a brief and a piece of work-in-progress and say, with authority, here is what we can afford to risk, and here is what we cannot. When that person is not in the building, bravery is asked to assess that balance. It usually cannot.
Are You Chris?
In 2017, I was the strategic lead on Are You Chris?, a disease awareness platform for Gilead Sciences working on hepatitis C. The strategy we developed moved beyond the industry’s safety-first traditions.
It treated stigma, not awareness, as the primary barrier. It pointed to a branded campaign the pharma industry had not previously attempted in disease awareness. And it was underpinned by a rigorous measurement framework.
When the creative platform was presented, the client communications leads responded. It’s very bold. But based on that strategy, it couldn’t be anything else, could it.
She was right. The boldness was a consequence of the strategy, not a choice imposed on it.
But the strategy on the page was only ever half the work. The other half was hers: securing buy-in across commercial, digital, clinical and regulatory, and securing the funding for a fully integrated campaign. The measurement framework did that work for her.
What looked like courage from the outside was, in the room, informed confidence drawn from a strategy she could defend. The campaign won Communiqué and SABRE recognition. The courage was possible because rigour, inspiration and accountability were working together rather than separately.
The bravery conversation, in three frames
So why does the bravery conversation keep coming back? Because each of the dominant framings names something real. They just stop short.
1. Be braver. Bravery is a personal trait being asked to do structural work. The weight of bold decisions is put on individuals at the moment of approval, when the upstream conditions that would have made those decisions easier were not built. It is the wrong ask of the wrong person at the wrong moment. Rigour does not remove the courage. It focuses it on the right thing.
2. Take calculated risks. Without clarity on who is calculating risk, and how, the safest option is often dressed up as the considered one.
3. Effectiveness data proves bold creative works. Too often, the data explains what worked in the past. It does not help the CMO deciding whether to approve work-in-progress.
Rigour and inspiration
The honest version of the conversation is simpler than the bravery one. The reason the industry keeps asking for bravery is that it wants work that is creative, distinctive and effective – work that cuts through, lasts, and earns its place. That want is right. The exhortation is the wrong route to it.
Bold creative work is not produced by people who are unusually courageous. It is produced by people who have done the upstream work properly, by cultures that value strategic rigour as much as creative execution, and by clients who have the standing to defend that work inside their own organisations.
Rigour and inspiration belong together. Rigour is the upstream work. Inspiration is what becomes possible because of it. Bravery is what is left to do once both are in the room.