Someone finally offers you a proper campaign.
Scale. Borrowed credibility. A media plan that makes your usual LinkedIn spend look like pocket money.
Then they open the Word doc and start “helping” with the positioning.
This is the reach or relevance trade-off, except it stops being a neat strategic question the moment the board is in the room.
The reach tax is the price you pay for borrowing a bigger route to market: a little less control, a little more committee language, and the risk that someone else drags your brand towards the middle.
You can take distribution and swallow a compromised message, or keep control and carry on talking to the same small group you always reach.
Most teams tell themselves the safe choice is relevance. Precision keeps the brand clean, the logic goes, and they can always go broader later once everything is perfect.
That instinct is understandable.
It also has a cost.
The brand purity trap
The brand purity trap is what happens when message control becomes more important than category coverage.
It feels rational. It protects identity, reduces internal arguments, and gives the team something they can defend.
It can also keep you small.
Long-run memory is built through repeated exposure and recognisable cues, not through increasingly tailored lines for a tiny audience. That is the practical lesson behind Binet and Field’s long/short work: broad, repeated, brand-building activity tends to do a different job from narrow activation.
In B2B, most future revenue sits with buyers who are not buying right now. LinkedIn’s B2B Institute popularised the 95-5 framing: most buyers are out of market most of the time.
That is why the growth direction keeps pointing back to reach, coverage, and recognisable memory structures rather than micro-precision.
This is uncomfortable because your best work can look slightly wrong in the short term and still be strategically right.
Why reach works even when the copy is imperfect
Reach works because you are trying to be retrieved later, in a buying situation you cannot predict, by people who are not paying attention today.
That is the mental availability argument. You link the brand to the moments, problems, triggers, and buying situations where it should come to mind later. Jenni Romaniuk’s work on Category Entry Points in B2B is useful here because it keeps relevance attached to situations, not just segments.
Relevance usually means relevance to the buying situation.
Hyper-personalising by job title is a narrower version of that idea, and often a less useful one.
A lot of relevance work becomes measurement work. It produces tidy segments, tidy journeys, and tidy dashboards, which makes it easier to defend in the room.
This is close to the problem described in The attention bottleneck: when marketing over-optimises for relevance, it can become easier to measure without becoming easier to remember.
Meanwhile, the buyers you need in two years may sit outside your remarketing lists. They will enter the market on their timetable, not yours.
So the long-run job becomes category coverage, recognisability, and enough consistency that people remember you without having to work for it.
The real constraint is recognisability
The main risk with “take the reach” is not slightly imperfect copy.
It is becoming unrecognisable.
That is not a hypothetical risk. Research on distinctive brand assets and brand attribution repeatedly points to how hard basic brand linkage can be.
The non-negotiables are rarely your full positioning architecture, because most humans will not store that anyway.
The non-negotiables are the cues that make the work unmistakably yours and the claims that keep you honest.
Distinctive assets matter here because they help people notice the brand and retrieve it from memory in messy, cluttered environments. Ehrenberg-Bass has a useful summary of this in its work on brands of distinction.
A concrete boardroom example
Imagine you are a mid-stage B2B SaaS brand with decent pipeline efficiency and terrible category coverage.
A large industry partner offers you a joint campaign worth, say, £120k in media value, plus their database, plus their event inventory.
Their condition is that the messaging becomes “safe”, which means generic, committee-written, and allergic to anything that sounds like a point of view.
Your team spends two weeks arguing about whether the headline should be “secure platform” or “trusted solution”, while legal deletes every concrete phrase you liked.
You can walk away and keep running tightly targeted campaigns that look good in-platform and reach a fraction of the buyers you need.
You can also take the distribution and force three guardrails: clear brand attribution, one anchored message linked to a buying situation, and a claim that does not promise what the product cannot deliver.
In the second path, the creative is less elegant, but the category sees you, and they can tell it was you.
That is the difference between imperfect memory and no memory.
Where relevance genuinely beats reach
Reach loses when the distribution is wide but the audience is structurally wrong for your category.
It also loses when the partner’s rewrite attracts the wrong buyers, because you will pay for unqualified demand and then blame sales for “follow-up speed”.
Reach can become actively harmful when compromised positioning creates a false expectation that leads to churn, complaints, or reputational damage.
The risk is sharper in regulated or trust-heavy categories, where unclear or misleading promotional claims can create legal, compliance, and customer-risk problems. The FCA’s rules on financial promotions and adverts are a useful reminder that reach does not excuse loose claims.
So “take the reach” works best as a bias with boundary conditions.
The non-negotiables need to be concrete and minimal: clear brand attribution, one claim that does not over-promise, and the cues that make the work unmistakably yours.
Why this keeps happening
Senior stakeholders often like reach because visibility feels like progress.
Marketers often retreat into relevance because it produces shorter feedback loops and cleaner attribution stories.
The whole system then rewards the work that is easiest to justify in a monthly meeting, even when it is strategically small.
This sits close to the efficiency obsession Les Binet has warned about, where teams narrow targeting, narrow channels, and slowly shrink their ambition because the reporting optics look better. The IPA version is blunt enough: go big or go home.
It persists because compromise is socially painful, and “brand purity” can be defended as professionalism rather than fear.
It also persists because once you have built a positioning doc, people start treating it like scripture instead of a tool.
Decisions that actually help in the moment
The practical decision is not reach or relevance in the abstract.
It is what you are prepared to protect when someone offers you access to a bigger market.
Take the reach when the brand attribution is clear, even if the wording is slightly blander than you would write alone.
Walk away when the partner’s version makes you indistinguishable, because indistinguishable reach is just expensive fog.
Treat relevance as linkage to buying situations and Category Entry Points. Do not confuse it with personalisation theatre.
Make your non-negotiables concrete: brand cues, product truth, and one clear message. Do not defend an entire positioning manifesto if the market will never remember it.
Judge the campaign on the job it was built to do. A campaign that reaches most of the category but generates few attributable conversion events is not necessarily failing. It may simply be doing a different job from a narrow activation campaign.
Committees will flatten meaning. Assume that from the start, then build the guardrails that stop scale from destroying recognisability.
What the trade-off really costs
Many marketers overestimate how much their precise positioning survives contact with reality.
They also underestimate how often growth starts with being noticed, remembered, and retrieved at the right time.
If you have the chance to buy serious distribution, the harder move is usually to take it, lock down recognisability, and accept a bit of mess.
A perfectly protected brand that only a sliver of the category ever sees might be clean.
It is still a secret.