Hey, Your Marketing Is Probably Shit

A polished website, busy social feed and full campaign calendar can coexist with weak marketing. The uncomfortable question is not whether marketing activity is happening, but whether it is changing anything that matters.

Activity is not effectiveness

Marketing has become unusually good at producing visible proof of work. Campaigns launch, emails go out, videos are published, events happen and dashboards fill with reassuring numbers. None of those things is inherently bad, but activity is only useful when it is connected to a customer or commercial problem that deserves solving.

Imagine sales have slowed and the response is to post more often, refresh the website and run a lead generation campaign. All three tactics could be competent, but the business still has not answered why sales slowed. Lower demand, weaker distribution, poor follow-up, pricing, competition, product issues and falling repeat purchase would all require different responses, so choosing the tactic before understanding the cause is mostly guesswork with a budget attached.

Marketing is bigger than communications

The problem becomes worse when marketing is reduced to promotion. Advertising, social media, email, events and design matter, but marketing also has to care about the product, price, access, customer experience, competition and the economics of the exchange. A campaign can generate demand perfectly and still fail commercially because the product is unavailable, delivery is too slow or the sales process loses the people marketing worked hard to attract.

That broader view makes marketing more awkward because it crosses departmental boundaries. It asks questions about decisions the marketing team may not own, but that customers still experience. If the proposition is confusing, the answer may not be better copy. If the buying journey is painful, the answer may not be more traffic.

Start with the problem

Richard Rumelt's work on strategy is useful here because he insists on diagnosis before action. The same discipline applies to marketing: understand what is happening, decide what matters most, then act coherently. Good marketing is not anti-tactic; it simply refuses to treat tactics as a substitute for thinking.

A useful habit is to ask one question before approving the next piece of work: what problem is this supposed to solve? If the answer is vague, keep digging. Marketing becomes considerably more valuable when it can explain not only what it is doing, but why this activity deserves to exist at all.