Marketing frequently uses language like radical candor, transparency, and acceptance as branding rather than genuine practice. Organizations proclaim openness while punishing dissent, curating dashboards to hide failures, and expecting compliance instead of honest feedback. Framing dysfunction as resilience—calling cuts focus, shrinkage efficiency, and failures learnings—creates a gap between declared values and lived reality. That gap produces exhaustion from defending inauthentic stories, erodes engagement metrics, floods channels with unchecked AI content, and ultimately damages trust both within organizations and with customers.
Marketers love bold words. Radical candor. Radical transparency. Radical acceptance. They sound daring, but in practice, they're often hollow - more performance than principle. In organizations where truth is bent to fit the storyline, "radical" language becomes branding, not behavior. This behavior is everywhere in marketing. We talk about candor but punish dissent. We talk about transparency, but curate dashboards that hide the bad news. We talk about acceptance, but mean compliance. It's not the employees who can't handle the truth - it's the leadership. That gap between declared values and lived reality shows up in campaigns, culture and customer trust.
All this frequently happens in organizations that preach radical candor. They tell you to: "Bring your whole self." "Be direct." "Speak truth to power." But the second you do, you're marked as difficult. That contradiction eats away at you. You start to feel like the crazy one for noticing what's plain to see. That's not resilience. That's gaslighting.
Why marketing is prone to this This happens throughout business, but marketing is especially prone because we are in the business of framing. When budgets get cut, we call it focus. When teams shrink, we call it efficiency. When campaigns fail, we call them learnings. The rebrand of dysfunction into virtue isn't resilience - it's gaslighting. And over time, you get burned out and exhausted from propping up stories you know aren't true. Engagement numbers lose meaning. AI-generated content floods channels without credibility checks. Campaigns are optimized for optics, not impact. Trust erodes inside organizations and with customers alike.
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