marketing is a kitchen.

I’ve always thought that one of the easiest ways to understand marketing inside a business is to think about it through the lens of running a restaurant and kitchen.

Hear me out…

First, the business is the restaurant. The owner or leadership team decides what kind of establishment they want to build, who they want to attract, what they want to be known for and what commercial success needs to look like.

Then there’s the kitchen. That’s the creative side of the business: marketing, branding, design, copywriting, content, photography, video and the various disciplines responsible for turning what the company wants to be into something other people can actually see, understand and experience.

And within that kitchen, there are chefs.

For a very long time, there’s been a fairly natural distinction between the people running the restaurant and the people cooking the food. The restaurateur understands the business. The chef understands the kitchen.

Neither is ignorant of the other either. In fact, the best restaurants exist when both understand enough about each other’s world to work together at their best.

But they’re still very different areas of expertise…

And I think somewhere along the way, particularly as technology has changed how businesses produce creative work, we’ve started to blur that distinction. 

Not inherently in a bad way.

But in a way that’s quietly changed the kind of restaurant many businesses are actually running, without them even noticing…

Front vs Back Of House

A good restaurant owner inherently doesn’t need to be the best cook in the building. They just need to understand the business.

They might tell their head chef:

“We want to build a relaxed but high-quality neighbourhood restaurant. These are the people we want to attract. This is roughly what they’ll spend. These are our margins. We want customers to leave feeling they’ve discovered something special.”

That’s an extremely useful brief. It gives the kitchen somewhere to go.

What would be less useful is hiring an experienced chef and then telling them exactly which dishes to make, where to buy every ingredient, how much seasoning to use and how to plate every dish.

Not because the owner has suddenly lost authority over their restaurant. 

(They haven’t, don’t worry!)

It’s because authority and expertise are very different things.

The owner ultimately has every right to decide what gets served. It’s their restaurant, their money and their commercial risk. But the chef is there because they understand what happens to the food when those bigger decisions are made.

The same distinction exists in business.

Leadership might decide that the company needs greater recognition, stronger positioning, more enquiries, a different audience or a more credible reputation. Those are business objectives.

The creative team’s job is to work out what needs to be cooked to help achieve those objectives. And, importantly, to explain to the owner what happens to the meal when you change the ingredients, reduce the preparation time, increase the number of covers or replace one cooking method with another.

That distinction matters more now than it ever has.

Because modern businesses have far more ways to interfere with, accelerate and industrialise the kitchen than restaurant owners of the past ever did.

Knowing The Kitchen

Firstly, the menu is the marketing strategy. It determines what you’re going to serve, what you’re not, how the different dishes work together and whether the overall offering makes sense for the restaurant you’re trying to be.

Individual dishes are the campaigns, adverts, videos, articles, social media posts, websites and creative pieces that eventually leave the kitchen.

The ingredients are everything the creative team has to work with: customer insight, business knowledge, research, data, photography, language, cultural references, product information, ideas and the genuine stories already inside the company.

The recipe is how those ingredients are combined: the creative thinking, messaging, channel decisions, brand rules and processes that turn raw material into something coherent.

Then there’s mise en place: all the preparation customers never see. Research. Briefing. Planning. Drafting. Testing. Rejecting ideas. Understanding the audience. Working through ten bad ideas to find the good one.

A customer only sees the plate that arrives at the table.

In the same way, somebody outside a creative department might see “a social post” that took twenty seconds to read without seeing the hours of judgement behind why those particular words, images and ideas made it onto the plate.

And then there are the knives, pans, ovens and utensils. Those are the tools.

Adobe. Canva. Cameras. Analytics platforms. CRM systems. Advertising platforms. Automation software. AI.

Tools have always changed kitchens.

A better oven means you can cook differently. A sharper knife makes preparation quicker. A food processor can remove twenty minutes of repetitive labour. None of those things are inherently threatening to the chef.

Good chefs like good tools.

But a new tool can do one of two very different things. It can either help the chef make the same kind of food more effectively. Or it can enable the restaurant to start making an entirely different kind of food.

That difference is where things start getting interesting…

Taste Is Valuable

Businesses sometimes think they hire creatives primarily because creatives know how to operate creative tools.

But that isn’t their most valuable skill.

You hire a good chef because they’ve developed a palate. They can taste something and know it needs acidity. They understand which ingredients belong together. They know when something is overdone, when a trend is worth following and when adding one more thing will ruin the plate.

Creative professionals develop something similar. Call it taste, judgement, instinct or experience.

Whatever you call it, It’s the ability to look at an idea and sense whether it feels right for this business, this audience, this moment and this objective.

That doesn’t make their opinion infallible. Good chefs still listen to customers. They work within budgets. They adapt to available ingredients. They experiment. They occasionally create something nobody orders and take it off the menu.

Marketing should work exactly the same way.

But there’s another part of having a developed palate that matters here.

You can taste when the food has changed.

A chef knows when frozen ingredients have replaced fresh ones. They know what happens when preparation time is cut in half. They know what happens when the kitchen that comfortably served fifty covers is suddenly expected to serve five hundred.

That doesn’t mean the food inherently becomes bad. It means the operation has changed.

Different processes become necessary. Different compromises appear. Different skills become valuable. Different things need to be prioritised. And the resulting restaurant begins to become something different.

That’s why listening to the people inside the creative kitchen matters.

When a designer, writer, marketer, photographer or creative director says, “If we do it this way, the quality will change,” they aren’t necessarily resisting efficiency. They’re simply describing the reality.

The business can still decide to serve it.

But it should understand what it’s asking…

Introducing… The Microwave

This is where AI makes the analogy particularly interesting.

A microwave is an extraordinary piece of technology. It can do certain jobs dramatically faster. It can remove tedious work. Used intelligently, it can make a kitchen more efficient and give a chef more time to concentrate on the things where their attention is better off.

AI can do exactly that for creative people. It can help organise information, explore starting points, handle repetitive production and remove friction from parts of the process.

There’s nothing inherently anti-creative about any of that.

But the microwave also made another kind of kitchen possible.

Suddenly, the question wasn’t only:

How can this technology help us cook?

It could also become:

How much food could we produce if we designed the entire kitchen around reheating?

That’s a completely different question.

And it leads to a completely different business.

Restaurants like McDonald’s, Wetherspoons and countless other high-volume hospitality businesses didn’t become successful by attempting to recreate the operating model of a tiny chef-led restaurant thousands of times over.

They redesigned the system.

Food could be standardised. Processes could be documented. Preparation could happen elsewhere. Variation could be reduced. Technology could make outcomes predictable. The kitchen could be optimised for speed, consistency, accessibility, cost and scale.

And that’s an extraordinary business achievement. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it.

But nobody walks through the doors of McDonald’s believing they’re entering a small independent restaurant where a chef is improvising that evening’s menu around whatever looked best at the market that morning.

The two businesses have made different promises. Their kitchens have been designed accordingly. Their customers expect different things. And, crucially, the people who choose to work in those kitchens often want different things too.

The problem begins when businesses refuse to recognise that distinction in creativity.

When the main measure of a creative department becomes how many posts can we produce, how many videos can we make, how quickly can we turn campaigns around and how cheaply can we create them, it’s inevitable that the kitchen begins reorganising itself around those objectives.

Templates increase. Processes tighten. Variation decreases. Preparation gets shortened. Automation grows.

More meals leave the kitchen.

And that may be exactly the right commercial decision.

But we need to stop ignoring the true cost…

Bigger Than Just Marketing

Imagine walking into a beautiful independent restaurant. The branding suggests craftsmanship. The menu talks about care and quality. The photography is immaculate. The prices imply something considered. The story on the website tells you how passionate the restaurant is about food.

Then you look through the kitchen doors and discover that the entire operation has been designed around reheating pre-prepared meals at speed and scale.

The problem isn’t simply the microwave. And it isn’t necessarily that the food is mid.

The problem is the gap between the restaurant you’re selling and the restaurant experience you’re actually giving.

Unfortunately, many modern businesses are creating exactly the same gap.

A company can talk publicly about originality, quality, humanity, craftsmanship and innovative thinking while internally optimising its creative operation almost entirely around volume, automation, speed and cost reduction.

Those things aren’t impossible to balance. But they aren’t magically consequence-free either.

Every kitchen has constraints.

If you ask for considerably more output without adding considerably more people, time or resources, something inside the system has to change.

Maybe the recipes become simpler. Maybe more ingredients arrive pre-prepared. Maybe the menu becomes more repetitive. Maybe the chef spends less time developing dishes. Maybe technology handles more of the cooking.

Again, none of those decisions automatically make the restaurant bad. They simply move it along a spectrum towards a different type of restaurant.

The important thing is being honest and aware about that movement.

Because the people working inside the kitchen will usually notice it before anybody else. And when they point it out, businesses should listen.

Not because the creative department gets to dictate the commercial model.

But because those are the people you hired to understand the food.

If your chef tells you that changing the process will change the meal, you’re perfectly entitled to change the process anyway.

You just shouldn’t be surprised when the business you started begins to change completely…

It’s Not About ‘Good vs Bad’ or ‘Right vs Wrong’

This is the distinction I think gets lost most often.

This isn’t an argument saying that every business should become a Michelin-starred restaurant. It isn’t an argument that every campaign needs months of creative development, every social post needs to be a masterpiece or every company needs an enormous team of highly paid creatives agonising over kerning.

And it certainly isn’t an argument against technology.

It’s about understanding what kind of restaurant (business) you’re actually trying to build.

If your business model depends on enormous quantities of creative work produced quickly, consistently and cheaply, build the kitchen for that. And sell it as such.

Automate aggressively. Create systems. Standardise recipes. Use templates. Use AI.

Hire people who’re brilliant at designing and operating that kind of machine. There are extremely talented people who thrive in that environment.

That is a perfectly legitimate decision.

But if your ambition depends on originality, distinctive thinking, cultural relevance, innovative ideas, craft and a recognisable creative point of view, you need to build for that instead.

You need time for experimentation. You need experienced people with judgement. You need some inefficiency. You need room for things that don’t work. You need conversations that aren’t immediately productive. You need somebody to spend an hour wondering whether the thing everyone else thinks is “good enough” actually needs more.

That’s part of the cooking.

And you can’t endlessly remove those things in pursuit of volume and then be confused when the work begins to taste different.

There’s a genuine choice here…

And businesses should be allowed to make it.

The restaurant owner should ultimately decide whether they want to run the neighbourhood bistro, the Michelin-starred dining room, the pub chain or the drive-through.

What they shouldn’t do is make that decision unconsciously. Or worse, build the operating model of one while continuing to demand the characteristics of another.

Because there’s another human consequence to all of this too…

Chefs know what sort of kitchens they want to work in.

Some love scale, systems, efficiency and the challenge of serving thousands of people consistently. Others are deeply motivated by experimentation, individuality and craft.

Neither is inherently more professional.

They’re simply suited to, and looking for, different restaurants.

So if you employ a chef who cares deeply about ingredients, experimentation and making every plate a little better, then gradually transform their kitchen into a production line, you shouldn’t be surprised when they stop enjoying the work. 

They haven’t necessarily become difficult. And the business hasn’t necessarily become wrong.

The kitchen and the chef may simply no longer be suited to one another.

And nobody wants a chef who isn’t cooking with love, right?

Which is why the most important conversation between businesses and their creatives probably isn’t about AI, content volume, tools, workflows or how many posts can be produced each week.

It’s a much simpler question.

What kind of restaurant are we actually trying to run?

Once you know that, almost everything else becomes easier.

Hire the right chefs for that kitchen. Give them the right ingredients. Give them the right tools. Give them commercial constraints. Challenge their thinking. Listen to what comes back from the tables.

And, importantly, listen when they tell you what your decisions are doing to the food.

You don’t always have to agree with them. You don’t always have to choose quality over quantity. You don’t always have to choose craft over scale.

But you do have to recognise that those choices exist.

Because ultimately, the restaurant belongs to the owner. They have every right to decide what kind of establishment they want it to become.

They just need to make that decision consciously.

You can build the neighbourhood restaurant, the Michelin-starred dining room, the pub chain or the drive-through. All of them can work.

Just don’t build a fast-food kitchen, hire a team of chefs, put “gourmet food” above the door and then wonder why, eventually, the chefs and customers stop believing in the menu.