What WWE, Sony, and a Melbourne Dental Group Have in Common

Over the past 20 years, I've worked on marketing for WWE, Sony Pictures, MasterCard, DAZN, and dozens of smaller Australian businesses including, at various times, a dental group in Melbourne.

The brands couldn't be more different. The budgets ranged from tens of millions to tens of thousands. The audiences were global consumers, sports fans, financial professionals, and local patients.

But the underlying marketing problems were almost identical.

The principles don't change with scale. The cost of getting them wrong does.

The three problems that show up everywhere

At every business, at every scale, I've found some version of these three problems:

1. Activity disconnected from commercial outcomes

At WWE, we had campaigns that generated enormous engagement with no clear line to subscription growth. At the dental group, we had a social media presence that everyone liked and no uptick in new patient enquiries. The content was fine. The connection to what the business needed to grow was missing.

The fix is always the same: start from the commercial outcome you need, then work backwards to the marketing activity that drives it. Not the other way around.

2. Budget allocation based on habit, not evidence

Large organisations spend on what they've always spent on, because changing it requires political capital. Small businesses spend on what they can most easily see, which is usually awareness activity, not conversion activity.

In almost every business I've worked with, a proper audit of where the budget was going versus what it was delivering revealed significant reallocation opportunities. Not cuts. Reallocations. The money was there. It just wasn't pointed at the right things.

3. The team structure doesn't match the stage of the business

A global media company and a local dental practice need completely different marketing structures. But both can be wrong in the same way: too much weight in the wrong roles, not enough in the right ones.

The Melbourne dental group didn't need a full-time social media manager. They needed someone who could run campaigns that drove patient enquiries and execute them consistently. That's a generalist with commercial focus, not a content specialist.

What changes with scale

The stakes. The complexity. The number of stakeholders. The speed at which a wrong decision compounds.

But the underlying discipline is the same: connect the activity to the outcome, allocate the budget to what works, and build a team structure that can execute it consistently. At every scale. In every industry.