Too Many Consultants at the Bedside: Why Your Brand Needs One Doctor in Charge of the Chart
Picture a hospital ward at visiting hour. One doctor wants surgery. The registrar disagrees. A junior medic suggests bed rest, and the porter reckons a cup of tea will sort it out. Meanwhile, the patient — your brand — lies there getting steadily worse while everyone argues over the chart.
That's what social media looks like inside most UK businesses we audit. Not a strategy problem. Not a content problem. A chain of command problem.
The Conflicting Prescriptions Problem
In medicine, there's a reason one consultant is ultimately responsible for a patient's care. It's not ego — it's because contradictory prescriptions kill people. In brand terms, contradictory prescriptions just make you look unhinged.
We recently sat in on a content planning session for a mid-sized Manchester retailer (details changed, lessons intact). The founder wanted LinkedIn posts with a bit of gravitas. Sales wanted product pushes because 'that's what gets us leads'. The intern, bless her, wanted to try the trend audio her mates were using. Each idea was reasonable in isolation. Released into the wild together, the feed looked like three different brands sharing one account on a rota.
The audience notices. They might not articulate it, but a brand that swings between corporate, salesy and chaotic week to week reads as a brand that doesn't know itself. And audiences don't buy from brands that don't know themselves.
Everyone's a Doctor Now
Here's the uncomfortable truth behind the chaos: social media is the one department where every employee feels qualified. Nobody wanders into the finance meeting to suggest a different way of doing the VAT return. But because everyone uses Instagram, everyone believes they have clinical expertise in it.
The result is approval chains that would make a hospital trust blush. A simple post about a new product line might pass through the founder, a sales manager, two people in marketing, and someone's partner who 'does a bit of design'. By the time it's signed off, it's been lobotomised. All the personality has been excised in favour of the lowest common denominator: safe, bland, and completely forgettable.
We call this death by committee — and it's one of the most common diagnoses we make during brand health checks.
Appointing Your Consultant in Charge
The fix isn't to ban input. Good ideas genuinely do come from the sales floor and, occasionally, from the intern. The fix is to establish a single accountable voice — a consultant in charge — who owns tone, strategy and the final call.
That person doesn't need to write everything. They need to decide what gets published, what gets binned, and what the brand sounds like on a Tuesday morning. One person, one voice, one chart.
What this looks like in practice:
- A named owner. Not 'the marketing team'. A human with a name who is accountable for the feed's health.
- A tone of voice document that bites. Not a dusty PDF — a one-page brief the consultant actually enforces.
- A contribution route that isn't the comments section. If the sales team has an idea, there's a proper channel for it. Otherwise they'll just hijack the group chat at 11pm.
A Decision Tree for Your Approval Chain
Want to test whether your current setup is healthy? Run your next content idea through this framework:
- Does this idea serve the strategy? If the answer is 'it'll be fun', it needs a second opinion before it goes anywhere near the feed.
- Who is the final sign-off? If you need more than two names to answer that question, you don't have a sign-off. You have a committee.
- Can the consultant say no? If the founder's idea always gets published regardless of quality, your consultant is decorative — a consultant in name only.
- Does input happen before drafting, or after? Ideas should be argued over early. Edits should be limited to accuracy and legal. Rewriting tone at the approval stage is malpractice.
- Is there a discharge plan? Every post should have a purpose and a measure. If nobody can say what success looks like, it's a sugar pill — it feels good going down but cures nothing.
Bedside Manner Still Matters
A word of caution: appointing a consultant in charge doesn't grant a licence to become a tin-pot dictator. The best medical teams are hierarchical in accountability but open in conversation. The junior doctor who spots something the consultant missed can save a life — but the consultant decides the treatment.
Build a culture where anyone can flag a concern or pitch an idea, and where the consultant takes those contributions seriously. Then trust them to make the call. If your intern's trend audio idea gets rejected, tell her why. That's how you grow the next generation of strategists instead of breeding resentment in the break room.
The Follow-Up Appointment
If your feed currently sounds like three brands in a trench coat, don't panic. This is one of the most treatable conditions we see. It usually takes a month of honest conversation and one slightly awkward meeting where someone is formally given the keys.
That awkwardness is worth it. Because a brand with one clear voice — informed by the whole business but authored by one accountable consultant — isn't just more coherent. It's more trustworthy. And trust, as any patient will tell you, is the whole reason you choose one doctor over another.
Book yourself in. Your chart is a mess, and everybody can see it but you.
