Campaigns Are Easy, Stakeholder Management Is Hard

Marketing people often like to talk about campaigns. We storyboard them, debate creative routes, argue over channels, and celebrate the big reveal. Campaigns feel tangible. They look good in slides. They produce assets. They start, and then they end.

But ask anyone who has spent time in senior marketing or comms roles where the real work happens, and you’ll get a different answer: the campaign is the output, not the hard part. The hard part is the alignment that comes before it.

Over the past decade, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the biggest differentiator between an average campaign and an effective one is not creativity, budget, or even talent. It’s the ability to manage, influence, and align stakeholders.

And that’s because stakeholders introduce something campaigns never have to deal with: competing priorities.

Campaigns Have a Single Goal. Stakeholders Have Several.

Good campaigns are built around a brief: increase awareness, drive demand, reposition the brand, launch a product. The brief may change or expand, but at any given point the campaign is pointed at a singular intention.

Stakeholders rarely are.

Stakeholder engagement is messy, and a single project can involve product owners, sales leaders, legal teams, brand guardians, finance, regional offices, external partners, and the CEO. Each has their own incentives, pressures, metrics, and risk appetites. Some are optimising for revenue, some for brand equity, some for political capital, and some for job security.

No amount of clever creative execution can resolve fundamentally misaligned priorities. At best, it papers over them. At worst, it collapses under them.

This is why new marketers, who are often trained extensively in campaign execution, can feel blindsided when they first face the complexity of organisational alignment. It’s not that nobody explained campaigns properly, it’s that nobody explained campaigning inside an organisation.

The Invisible Curriculum of Stakeholder Management

There’s an invisible curriculum in marketing and comms that you mostly learn through doing — often painstakingly. It includes skills like:

• understanding different definitions of success

• translating between commercial, creative, and political language

• knowing when to push and when to de-escalate

• recognising risk perception

• shaping expectations before the work starts

• providing clarity without overcommitting

• reading the organisational room.

  
  

None of these skills appear in campaign brief templates, they don’t show up in textbooks and they aren’t taught in most universities. Yet they determine whether work lands, or dies in an endless cycle of approvals.

Campaigns Require Execution. Stakeholders Require Diplomacy.

Diplomacy is an underrated skill in marketing. Not the soft, smiling kind of diplomacy that avoids conflict, but the strategic kind that navigates it.

Stakeholders are often working with partial information, competing roadmaps, and shifting assumptions. As marketers, our job is to sit in the middle of that chaos, acting as a universal translator for the different “languages” (needs, wants, priorities) that different stakeholders bring.

We often talk about “cross-functional collaboration” as if it’s a structural concept. It isn’t. It’s a behavioural one. You can have the most matrixed operating model in the world and still fail to collaborate if the behaviours don’t support it.

Diplomacy shows up in how marketers frame choices, not demands. It shows up in how they sequence conversations, not just how they present slides. And it shows up in how they maintain trust even when the team doesn’t win every argument.

Stakeholders Care About Expensive Questions

One of the reasons stakeholder work sometimes feels like heavy lifting is that the questions stakeholders bring are expensive questions. They involve:

• brand risk

• financial exposure

• customer impact

• regulatory implications

• strategic direction

• organisational politics.

  
  

Campaigns can be wrong. Stakeholders rarely feel they can afford to be because the impact might impact revenue, cause job losses, or mean they personally are held accountable.

Understanding that difference is, I think, one of the milestones in becoming a senior marketer. The work becomes less about producing outputs and more about orchestrating alignment under uncertainty.

The Campaign is the Visible Work. Alignment is the Invisible Work.

You could think of it like this: if a campaign is a stage performance, alignment is the rehearsal process. Nobody applauds rehearsals, but without them the show falls apart.

This is why campaign retrospectives that only evaluate creative performance or channel effectiveness feel incomplete. The real questions often sound more like:

• Did the right people feel heard early enough?

• Were risks surfaced and managed, or ignored and amplified?

• Did we negotiate definitions of success before or after the work?

• Did stakeholders understand trade-offs, or assume magic?

• Did we protect the team from unnecessary churn?

  
  

Teams that get good at these questions tend to find the creative work flows more easily, not because it gets simpler, but because the organisation stops working against itself.

So Why Don’t We Teach This?

I sometimes wonder if marketing doesn’t teach stakeholder management because it feels too messy to codify. Or perhaps because we still imagine marketing as a creative discipline rather than a diplomatic one.

But in practice, senior marketers spend far more time shaping alignment than they do shaping copy.

And I don’t see this changing. If anything, as organisations become more complex, distributed, and risk-sensitive, stakeholder management becomes more central to the work, not less.

The challenge is that many of the skills that early-stage marketers need to develop around diplomacy, building trust, having difficult conversations and managing competing priorities are learned on the job from colleagues. And remote working can reduce the number of opportunities to do that.

The Future Marketer’s Advantage

If I had to place a quiet bet on the most underrated skill in marketing for the next decade, it wouldn’t be AI literacy or creative bravery (though both matter). It would be:

the ability to align humans with different incentives around a shared outcome.

Machines can optimise and scale campaigns. Humans still need to negotiate the conditions under which those campaigns can exist.

Campaigns may be easy. Stakeholders rarely are.

If campaigns are the visible work, what’s the invisible work in your team?