Most Marketing Departments Aren’t Doing Marketing

That headline is deliberately provocative, but the more I learn about marketing, the more I think there is something in it. Look inside a typical marketing department and you will find people working incredibly hard. Social media posts are being scheduled, videos are being edited, emails are being written, websites are being updated, events are being organised, agencies are being briefed and dashboards are being filled with numbers. There is certainly no shortage of marketing activity, but I have started to question whether being busy doing marketing activity is necessarily the same thing as actually doing marketing.

That distinction has become much clearer to me as I have gone deeper into the work of people such as Mark Ritson, Les Binet, Peter Field, Sarah Carter, Byron Sharp, A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin. They do not agree about everything, nor should they, but there is a common thread running through much of their thinking. Marketing activity should be the consequence of understanding a problem and making strategic choices about how to solve it. Too often, organisations do exactly the opposite and begin with an activity before working backwards to invent the strategy that supposedly justifies it.

We have all heard the conversations. “We need to do more TikTok.” “We should start a podcast.” “We need an influencer campaign.” “We need more video.” “We should send more emails.” None of those things is necessarily a bad idea, but none of them is inherently a good idea either. The missing question is the most important one: why?

The great marketing inversion

One of the things I like most about the structure Mark Ritson uses in the Mini MBA is that it is almost painfully logical. Diagnosis comes first, strategy comes second and execution comes third. Before deciding what marketing activity to undertake, the marketer should understand the market, research customers, examine competitors and identify meaningful differences within the market. Only then do we begin making choices about which customers to prioritise, what position we want to establish, what objectives need to be achieved and how product, price, distribution and communications will work together to deliver them.

It sounds obvious when it is written down, but in practice organisations constantly reverse the order. Someone decides that the business needs a campaign and the marketing team is asked to produce one. A competitor starts getting attention on Instagram and suddenly Instagram becomes a strategic priority. A new platform appears and within weeks organisations are discussing their “TikTok strategy”, “AI strategy” or “influencer strategy”, when what they usually mean is that they have selected a tool before deciding what problem the tool is expected to solve.

A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin make a similar distinction in Playing to Win. Their argument is that strategy is fundamentally about choices: where will we play, how will we win, what capabilities will we need and what systems must support those choices? A plan containing everything the organisation would quite like to do is not really a strategy because strategy requires concentration of resources. The uncomfortable but essential question therefore becomes not only what are we going to do, but what are we deliberately choosing not to do?

If the answer is “nothing”, the organisation probably has a collection of ambitions rather than a strategy. That difference matters because marketing resources are always finite. Every pound, hour and person committed to one activity is unavailable somewhere else, so prioritisation is not an academic exercise. It is the heart of strategy.

“More content” is not an objective

Another distinction I increasingly think marketers need to become stricter about is the difference between objectives and activity. Imagine a marketing plan containing the objective “produce more video content”. It sounds credible because it describes something tangible, but it is not actually an objective. It is an activity, and the more important question is what producing those videos is supposed to change.

Les Binet and Sarah Carter make this point particularly well in How Not to Plan. Effective communication begins by agreeing what it is supposed to achieve. Without that clarity, organisations cannot sensibly decide what to create, how much to spend or whether the activity worked afterwards. The marketing process becomes far stronger when we separate business objectives, marketing objectives and communications objectives rather than allowing them to blur into a list of deliverables.

The business objective should describe the commercial or organisational result required, whether that is greater profit, revenue, market share, participation or another meaningful outcome. The marketing objective should describe the customer or market behaviour that needs to change in order to create that result, perhaps increasing the number of buyers, improving purchase frequency, increasing penetration or addressing an unusual retention problem. Communications objectives then sit underneath those decisions and establish what needs to change in awareness, memory, perception or response.

Only after those questions have been answered does it make sense to start talking about Instagram, television, email, PR, search, events or any other channel. This sounds like semantics until you see what happens when the hierarchy is absent. Organisations begin measuring the production of marketing rather than the effect of marketing, so twenty videos, three million impressions, a 14 per cent engagement rate and hundreds of posts become evidence of success despite telling us very little about whether the underlying business problem has changed.

We have become extremely good at measuring what marketing departments did. We are considerably less comfortable proving what marketing changed.

Marketing became communications

Part of the problem is that marketing itself has gradually been reduced to communications in many organisations. The classic four Ps remain surprisingly useful because they expose how narrow modern marketing can become. Product, price, place and promotion were never intended to suggest that marketing is mainly the department responsible for advertising, yet many marketing teams spend almost their entire working lives operating inside the final quarter.

If customers struggle to understand the product, the response is often more communications. If the price architecture is confusing, the response is to promote an offer. If the booking process is painful, the temptation is to send more traffic towards it. If availability is poor, the organisation may still ask marketing to increase awareness. These responses can create the strange situation in which communications are being asked to compensate for problems elsewhere in the marketing mix.

Byron Sharp's concept of physical availability is particularly useful here. A brand does not merely need to be noticed or remembered; it needs to be easy to find and easy to buy. In a service business that might mean opening hours, booking systems, payment options, search visibility or locations. In retail it might mean distribution, stock, formats and shelf presence. A brilliant advertising campaign cannot indefinitely compensate for a product customers cannot access, understand or purchase conveniently.

Marketing therefore cannot simply be the function responsible for telling people how wonderful an organisation is. It should have something to say about what the organisation actually sells, how it is priced and how the customer accesses it. Sometimes the best marketing decision will involve changing the product, simplifying a service, altering a price, improving the route to purchase or opening another distribution channel rather than publishing anything at all.

Marketing strategy isn't the PowerPoint before the campaign

There is another uncomfortable truth about strategy. A great deal of what gets described as strategy is actually justification created after somebody has already decided what they want to do. The organisation wants a television advert, so a strategy is produced explaining the need for television. The CEO wants a rebrand, so strategic language appears around why the brand must change. The social team wants to work with influencers, and suddenly the marketing strategy contains an influencer pillar.

That is not strategy directing execution. It is execution looking for an alibi.

Proper diagnosis should be capable of producing an answer nobody expected at the beginning. Research might reveal that awareness is already high and therefore another awareness campaign is unlikely to solve the problem. The real issue might be price, distribution, product experience or the fact that customers rarely think of the brand during relevant buying situations. A supposed target audience might turn out to be barely different from the rest of the category, or the organisation might discover that what it thought was a communications problem is actually an operational one.

This is precisely why good diagnosis can occasionally be uncomfortable. Research has the annoying habit of contradicting the thing everybody entered the room wanting to do. Strong marketing should be able to survive that contradiction because the role of marketing is not to validate internal preferences; it is to improve decisions about markets and customers.

Evidence does not kill creativity

There is a legitimate concern that taking this approach too far could turn marketing into a spreadsheet-driven science in which creativity disappears beneath research, frameworks and measurement. That would be an equally serious mistake. Marketing is a creative profession, and great products, advertising, pricing models, distribution ideas and strategies all require imagination. The point of diagnosis and strategy is not to eliminate creativity but to give creativity a worthwhile problem to solve.

A completely open creative brief sounds liberating until you actually have to respond to one. “Come up with something amazing” provides very little direction. Compare that with a brief stating that the brand needs to become more mentally available among occasional category buyers, needs stronger associations with a particular buying situation and must retain recognisable brand assets while doing it. The second brief contains constraints, but those constraints make the creative challenge more interesting because there is a genuine problem to solve.

Strategy should therefore narrow the battlefield without dictating every shot. The strategist decides where the organisation needs to compete and what has to change; the creative task is to find the most powerful and memorable way of making that change happen.

The danger of the marketing factory

Technology is making this debate even more important. We can now produce more marketing material, more cheaply and more quickly than at any previous point in history, and artificial intelligence will accelerate that further. A single marketer can potentially create the volume of content that would once have required an entire team, which is extraordinary from a productivity point of view.

It is also potentially dangerous. If organisations already confuse the volume of activity with marketing effectiveness, giving them the ability to create almost infinite content does not solve the problem; it amplifies it. The market will soon be full of organisations capable of producing articles, videos, graphics, emails and adverts at extraordinary speed, so simply being able to create content will cease to be much of a competitive advantage.

The advantage will increasingly belong to organisations that know what is worth producing in the first place. Diagnosis becomes more important, research becomes more important and judgement becomes more important because execution becomes easier. Ironically, the cheaper it becomes to make marketing material, the more valuable the thinking before the material may become.

Perhaps we need fewer marketers doing marketing activity

I am not arguing that organisations should stop creating content, running advertising, using social media or experimenting with new technology. I use and value all of those tools myself. The argument is simply that these activities belong at the end of a marketing process rather than at the beginning.

Perhaps the goal should not be to maximise the quantity of marketing we produce but to maximise the quality of marketing decisions we make. That could mean fewer pointless campaigns, fewer meaningless objectives, fewer platforms joined because somebody read that brands “need to be there”, fewer personas invented because a planning template contained three empty boxes and fewer dashboards celebrating metrics that have no connection to commercial outcomes. In return, it would mean considerably more time understanding customers, markets, competitors, behaviour and genuine sources of growth.

The uncomfortable possibility is that many organisations do not actually have a marketing strategy at all. They have a very busy marketing department.

Those are not the same thing.

Sources and further reading

This article draws on my interpretation of Mark Ritson's Mini MBA in Marketing, A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin's Playing to Win, Les Binet and Sarah Carter's How Not to Plan, Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow and Les Binet and Peter Field's The Long and the Short of It. These authors do not agree on every aspect of marketing theory, but together they reinforce the importance of starting with diagnosis and objectives rather than tactics.