Something I hear a lot in early conversations with founders.
“We’ve tried marketing. It didn’t really work.” Or even worse: “We paid someone and it didn’t deliver. Complete waste of money.”
I’m so bothered when I hear that one.
When I dig into it, the problem is almost never the execution. It’s that everyone jumped straight into tactics before the foundations were in place.
They were trying to market their way out of a positioning problem. Which is a bit like turning up the volume when the signal is wrong. More noise, same problem.
In women’s health especially, this matters. The market is growing exponentially, the customer is sceptical, and “we care about women” isn’t a position.
The pattern I keep seeing:
Growth stalls and the instinct is to do more. More content. More ads. More presence. Book a podcast. Launch a newsletter.
These aren’t wrong moves, exactly. But they’re downstream of what can be the real issue.
In most cases I’ve encountered, stalled growth comes back to one of three things:
None of these are marketing problems. They’re strategy problems. And they need to be solved before anyone briefs a marketer, runs an ad, or publishes a post.
Why this is especially true in women’s health
The women’s health market is moving fast. New entrants are coming in constantly. The regulatory and clinical landscape is shifting. And crucially, the customer is more informed and more sceptical than they were even two years ago.
What resonated at launch, whether that was a particular pain point, a tone of voice, a specific promise - can feel stale or generic within 18 months. The category has caught up. Everyone says they care about women’s health now.
This means the positioning work that felt complete at the start needs to be revisited. Not constantly, but at the key inflection points. And growth stalling is one of the clearest signals that an inflection point has arrived.
Three questions to ask before you brief anyone:
1. Who are we actually talking to now versus who we thought we were talking to at launch?
Early customers often look different from the customers who join later. If your positioning was built around your earliest adopters, it may not be speaking to the broader audience you’re now trying to reach.
2. Does our positioning reflect what we’ve learned, or what we assumed?
Customer conversations, reviews, appointments - they all contain positioning intelligence. The question is whether that intelligence has made it back into how you describe what you do and why it matters.
3. Are we adding fuel, or fixing the engine?
Tactics add fuel. Positioning fixes the engine. Both matter, but the order matters more. Getting this wrong is an expensive mistake.
What ‘fixing the signal’ actually looks like
Positioning work doesn’t have to mean a six-month brand overhaul. Often it’s more focused than that: a clear articulation of who you’re for and who you’re not for; a messaging hierarchy that your whole team can use consistently; a sharper answer to “why us, and why now?”
Once that’s in place, marketing becomes significantly easier. The brief to your marketer is clearer. The content has a point of view. The paid spend has something worth amplifying.
The founders I’ve seen navigate growth stalls well aren’t always the ones who moved fastest. They’re the ones who paused long enough to ask the right questions first.
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If this resonates, I work with women’s health founders on exactly this kind of strategic groundwork — positioning, messaging, and the marketing foundations that make everything else land. Email me at hello@melschofield.co.uk
