The Committee Killed Your Copy

You've seen it. The marketing email that sounds like it was drafted by a risk assessment team. The landing page where every sentence has been sanded down to offend absolutely no one. The tagline that went through six rounds of feedback and emerged as something nobody would ever say out loud.

This is what consensus does to language. It removes everything that makes it work.

How it happens

Good copy usually starts from a place of conviction. A writer — sometimes a good one — sits down with a real point of view and writes something with edge. Something that commits to a position. Something that sounds like a person.

Then it enters the review process.

Round one: someone from legal softens the claim. "We can't say 'best' without substantiation." The writer changes it.

Round two: someone from brand asks if it's "on voice." They don't know exactly what the voice is, but this doesn't feel quite right. The writer adds a word. Removes a word. Adjusts the tone.

Round three: the CMO hasn't signed off yet. She has notes. She also forwarded it to a VP who had notes. The notes conflict with each other. The writer resolves the conflict by making the copy say nothing clearly.

What goes live is not what anyone intended. It is the residue of a process designed to manage risk, not communicate.

Why committees produce bad copy

The problem isn't that committees are full of bad people with bad instincts. The problem is structural.

Copy works through specificity, conviction, and voice. It works when it takes a clear position and holds it. A reader can sense — viscerally, almost subconsciously — when a piece of writing is trying to please everyone simultaneously. It has a particular texture: smooth, inoffensive, empty. It slides right through the mind without catching on anything.

Every round of review pulls in the direction of that reviewer's preference, risk tolerance, personal taste. These vectors don't add up to something better. They cancel each other out.

Good copy is not democratic. It shouldn't be. Democracy produces compromise. Compromise produces average. Average is invisible.

The "what if someone doesn't like it" problem

The single most destructive question in any copy review: "What if someone doesn't like this?"

The answer is: some people won't. That's not a problem. That's the point.

Copy that resonates deeply with the right people will not resonate with everyone. Copy that tries to resonate with everyone resonates with no one. You have to choose.

The fear underneath this question is the downside — the complaint, the person who takes it wrong. What gets ignored is the upside: the reader who reads that line and feels genuinely seen, who forwards it, who converts not just this time but every time because they feel like this brand actually understands them.

That reader only exists if the copy was specific enough to reach them. Specificity requires courage. Committees are structurally designed to remove it.

What to do instead

This isn't an argument against editing or feedback. Editing makes copy better. Skilled feedback makes it sharper.

The distinction is between feedback that sharpens a point of view and feedback that diffuses it. These feel completely different in practice.

The first kind says: "This sentence is doing the wrong thing — here's what I think it's actually trying to say." It works with the voice, understands the intent, makes it more precise.

The second kind says: "I'm not sure about this." No alternative. No clear preference. It just wants the discomfort removed.

Most corporate feedback is the second kind. And because it comes from people with authority, the writer accommodates it — not because the feedback is right, but because the relationship requires it.

The fix, if you actually want your copy to work, is deciding in advance who has creative authority over language. Not who reviews it. Not who approves it. Who owns it. And then protecting that person from feedback that doesn't improve the work — it just makes the reviewer more comfortable.

The uncomfortable truth

Most marketing sounds like nobody's home because, in the most meaningful sense, nobody is. The human with a point of view went through the process and came out the other side.

The copy that actually works — the line that sticks, the email that gets forwarded, the page that makes someone feel understood enough to buy — almost always came from someone who was allowed to mean something.

Allow your writers to mean something.

Or get very comfortable with copy that sounds like it was approved by a committee.

Because it was.

— M