The Most Expensive Word in Marketing Is...

A column for the Adriatic portal and marketing magazine - Marketing mreža.

Everyone has sat through some version of the same meeting. Someone points at a headline, a joke, a tone, sometimes even something in the background, and says, “guys, this could upset someone.” Everyone nods. The thing goes through the softening machine, iteration after iteration, until what started out with a point of view ends up with none. Everyone leaves relieved. Nothing was risked, and everyone is safe. In the room, it all made perfect sense — but the fact that something makes sense doesn’t mean it’s true, and that exact gap is where marketing most often fools itself.

What nobody in that room admits (maybe nobody even notices) is that the most expensive thing in modern marketing just happened, and almost no one pays for it, because the bill never arrives on the same day the decision was made.

Brand safety has a real purpose. Protecting a brand from actual harm — hate speech, genuine offense, legal exposure, everything no sane person would want — is legitimate and important. But somewhere along the way, brand safety stopped being a shield against catastrophe and became the marketing team’s personal shield against anything that might draw management’s attention with a temperature warmer than room temperature. This isn’t a matter of taste — it’s a matter of misaligned incentive. First you protect yourself, then you call it protecting the brand.

Almost everything gets filed under “risk” and quietly removed, because removal is free and easy to justify in the moment, and the real cost only shows up later, spread out across a hundred campaigns that nobody can quite remember afterward. Brand managers trade a hundred small, survivable frictions for one guaranteed outcome: irrelevance. Nobody gets fired for a safe, bland campaign; nobody even raises an eyebrow. But nobody remembers it either. You reach that equilibrium fast, for one simple reason — the bill eventually lands on somebody else’s desk, never the desk of whoever made the decision.

So now what? Look at what actually earns attention and loyalty in almost every category, and it’s usually a brand that’s consciously willing to be disliked by someone, so that someone else can love it that much more. This is the logic of the peacock’s tail — the tail means something to the hens precisely because it’s expensive, and the whole thing is more than a little reckless; the fact that it drags around something so cumbersome and still survives is exactly what proves its strength. A brand that spends its point of view the way a peacock spends its feathers — visibly, and at a cost — sends a message no focus group could ever send: that it has reputation and character.

Safety, played too well, becomes just a cheap signal. It costs nothing, so it proves nothing. The ex-Yugoslav rock scene of the seventies and eighties certainly didn’t reach its peaks by being harmless. It got there the way most cultural moments do — through a deliberate, well-aimed bet on a point of view, one that was worth more to the right audience than any amount of universal approval.

We’re not talking about the tired LinkedIn version of “courage” here. This isn’t about the absence of filters — it’s about a specific decision, made in advance, about which audience you honestly don’t care that much about. A brand that tries to hold on to absolutely everyone ends up meaning nothing to anyone (read “brand” throughout this piece as a stand-in for anything — a person, a political party, a stance — and it’ll hold up just as true in psychology, in politics, and in ordinary friendship, whatever you like). The uncomfortable question at every creative meeting shouldn’t be “could this offend someone,” but “who exactly would this annoy, and are we genuinely willing to lose them in exchange for the people we’d win over?” If nobody in the room can answer that, the brand has a moodboard, not a point of view.

Of course, you should never gamble the entire brand on one mega move. First, set the threshold — legal and reputational boundaries, non-negotiable, agreed in advance. Above that threshold, let small, deliberate friction through, instead of filtering everything by default. That’s not recklessness disguised as not knowing your own risk. Knowing exactly where the line is, and then deliberately walking right up to it — that’s discipline dressed up as courage.

So: the safest word in the meeting is the most expensive word on the market. But someone has to be the one willing to say it out loud.