Five Brands Asked for a Second Opinion. Here's What the Consultant Found.
Photo: Infrogmation of New Orleans, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In healthcare, nobody blinks when you ask for a second opinion. Bring up the same idea in a marketing meeting, though, and you can feel the temperature drop. The agency that's been managing your social for two years takes it personally. Your own board starts whispering about loyalty and relationships. And so the questionable strategy limps on, unchallenged, because nobody wanted an awkward conversation.
We think that's daft. If your GP suggested a course of strong medication for two years with no improvement, you'd want another pair of eyes. So when five UK brands approached us recently asking for exactly that — an independent read of their existing agency strategy — we said yes, on one condition: we could write about what we found, anonymised. They agreed. Here's what the case notes revealed.
Case One: The Confirmed Diagnosis
First up, a B2B software firm from Reading whose agency had built a genuinely sensible strategy: LinkedIn thought leadership, a weekly newsletter repurposing, and paid amplification on top-performing organic posts. Their in-house team had doubts because growth felt slow.
Our verdict? The diagnosis was sound. The problem wasn't the strategy — it was the expectations. B2B social operates on a longer timeline than most boards are willing to sit through, and the agency simply hadn't sold that reality hard enough internally. Sometimes a second opinion exists to tell you the treatment is working; you just need to stay the course. We told them as much, and it cost them a lot less than ripping the plan up would have.
Case Two: The Overprescription Problem
A hospitality group in Manchester was on six platforms. Six. Every channel, every day, a content calendar so packed the social manager described it as "feeding a machine that never says thank you."
Our second opinion found what we'd call textbook overprescribing. The agency had prescribed a full-spectrum strategy because that's what their retainer priced in, not because the patient needed it. Engagement data showed 78% of meaningful interactions came from two channels: Instagram and TikTok. The other four were ghost towns with staff rota photos on them.
The prescription? Wean off four platforms over eight weeks, redeploy that budget into proper video production for the two that mattered. Not rocket science — but it took an outsider to say it.
Case Three: The Metric That Was Lying
A Scottish e-commerce brand came to us glowing. Their agency reported record engagement every month. The dashboards were beautiful. The sales were not.
Digging into the numbers, we found engagement concentrated in a small, highly active community of existing customers — lovely people, presumably, but not new business. The agency's strategy of chasing comment-bait posts was inflating the pulse while the patient quietly weakened. A second opinion isn't always about the strategy being wrong; sometimes it's about the reporting being curated. We rebuilt their KPIs around revenue attribution and new-follower quality. The agency, to their credit, adapted.
Case Four: The Strategy That Never Got Filled
Here's the awkward one. A Birmingham-based financial services firm had a genuinely excellent strategy document from their agency — well-researched, properly segmented, smart channel choices. There was just one problem: it was eleven months old and barely anything in it had been executed.
The second opinion revealed a delivery problem, not a diagnosis problem. The agency had sold a brilliant treatment plan and then left the patient to self-administer. If you're paying a retainer and receiving documents rather than outcomes, that's worth interrogating — politely, but firmly.
Case Five: The One We Got Wrong
We'd be poor doctors if we didn't include this. A London fashion label asked us to review their agency's influencer-led strategy, which their new CFO hated. We read it and initially agreed — the spend looked heavy. But on closer inspection, the agency's approach was actually ahead of the curve, with proper usage rights, performance clauses, and creator relationships that would compound over time.
We told the client the original plan was right. The second opinion confirmed the first. Not every audit finds a villain, and a good consultant should be willing to say so.
How to Read a Second Opinion Without Burning the House Down
A few things we learned from running these five audits:
Frame it as due diligence, not an ambush. The two clients who got the best outcomes told their agencies upfront that a review was happening. Defensiveness dropped, cooperation rose.
Ask for evidence, not vibes. A second opinion is only useful if it's built on your actual data — platform analytics, CRM figures, sales attribution — rather than a consultant's gut and a nice slide deck.
Expect a mix of verdicts. In our five cases: two confirmed, two required significant changes, one revealed an execution failure. Real audits are rarely a clean bill of health or a horror story.
Don't shop for the answer you want. The CFO in Case Five wanted us to condemn the influencer spend. We didn't, and that was the most valuable thing we could have done. If you see three consultants until one tells you what you want to hear, you're not getting a diagnosis — you're getting a mirror.
The Takeaway
Second opinions shouldn't be radical. They should be routine — a scheduled health check that keeps everyone honest, agencies included. The best agencies we know aren't threatened by them; they welcome the scrutiny because confident practitioners have nothing to hide.
If your social strategy has been on the same prescription for over a year and nobody's asked whether it's still working, that's not loyalty. That's neglect. Book the appointment.
