Over the years, I’ve been in plenty of rooms where a leadership team is reviewing campaign results and someone finally says, “This should be working better than it is.” It’s rarely a dramatic failure. The creative looks strong. The plan made sense when it was built. The budget wasn’t insignificant. Everyone did what they said they would do.

And yet, the results feel slightly underwhelming.

When that happens, the instinct is usually to adjust the activity; add a channel, increase frequency, tighten the messaging, move dollars around. Sometimes that’s appropriate. But more often than people realize, the issue sits one layer underneath the tactics. It’s not the effort. It’s the assumptions that shaped the effort in the first place.

Every strategy rests on a handful of beliefs about how people make decisions. We don’t always say them out loud, but they’re there.

• We assume our audience is primarily price-driven.
• We assume urgency will create movement.
• We assume looking bigger signals credibility.
• We assume what’s working nationally should translate here with only minor adjustments.

And sometimes those assumptions are true.

In Maine, they’re often incomplete.

One of the consistent patterns we’ve seen, both in our client work and in the research we’ve conducted, is that Maine audiences tend to evaluate value more deliberately. Trust is granted carefully. Tone matters more than volume. And when something feels oversized or slightly out of proportion, people notice.

That doesn’t mean Maine audiences are resistant. It means they are discerning.

If your strategy is built on assumptions that don’t fully reflect how people here weigh decisions, even strong execution can feel misaligned.

So before you make your next tactical adjustment, it may be worth asking a few questions, even if it’s just in your head as you drive home:

1. What are we assuming about how our audience defines value?
2. What evidence do we have that this assumption is true here?
3. If we’re honest, where might we be borrowing logic from somewhere else?

You don’t necessarily need to overhaul everything. Often, you need to clarify the thinking that came first.

That’s part of the reason we built the Maine Insights Lab. Not as a place to admire data, but as a place to pressure-test assumptions before more money and energy go into execution.

When the underlying thinking is sound, the marketing that follows tends to feel steadier. More grounded. And, over time, more effective.

Better understanding leads to better decisions.

If this conversation feels familiar, you may want to start here.