Marketing has a credibility problem.
And marketers need to fix it.

Over the past four years, I’ve had the privilege of working with a number of marketing industry bodies, which has given me a pretty unusual window into the challenges facing marketers across different organisations, sectors and levels of seniority. One concern keeps coming up: marketing is losing influence in the business. (Okay, technically AI keeps coming up more, but I think it might be nice to talk about something else for a change!)

The influence question is the one I keep coming back to. Why isn’t Marketing involved earlier in business strategy? Why does Finance sometimes see marketing as a cost rather than an investment? Why are marketing budgets so difficult to defend? Why do marketers feel they need to continually prove the value of what they do? They’re fair questions and I think we’ve been asking them from the wrong end. Instead of asking why the business doesn’t understand the value of marketing, perhaps we should be asking how good we are at explaining the commercial value marketing creates. Because those are two very different things.

We have more evidence than ever. So why don’t we have more influence?

It’s an extraordinary time to be a marketer.

We can understand our customers in ways that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. We can see what people search for, what they respond to, what they buy, when they leave and when they come back. We can segment customers by their needs, behaviours and value. We can understand which customers are likely to be worth more to the business over time and where our next increment of growth might come from. We can test communications quantitatively to all the different segments, and within 24 hours have a pretty good read on what’s likely to land and what isn’t. 

We also have more proven marketing theory than ever before. We know far more about how brands grow, how people buy and how advertising works. Decades of empirical research have established the importance of mental and physical availability, distinctive brand assets and broad reach, alongside a better understanding of the different roles of brand building and activation. Marketing will never be a perfect science, but we have a growing body of evidence about what tends to work, what doesn’t, and why.

And, crucially, marketers can often see things happening in the market before they show up in the financial results: a spike in social response, changing search patterns, movement in awareness or consideration, falling conversion rates, slowing acquisition or declining repeat purchase. We can see the signals of tomorrow’s commercial performance today.

Those are incredibly valuable signals but the challenge is what we do with them. Having the data isn’t the same as having influence, because influence comes from being able to interpret what we’re seeing, understand why it matters commercially, and make the business care about it. And shouldn’t marketers be particularly good at that?

Perhaps we need to market Marketing better

We spend our careers thinking about audiences. We try to understand what matters to them, what motivates them, what language will resonate and what we need them to think, feel or do differently. Then we walk into the boardroom and sometimes forget all of it.

We talk about awareness, engagement, brand health, impressions, conversion rates and campaign performance, which are all perfectly legitimate marketing measures. But the CEO may be thinking about growth; the CFO about revenue, margin and return; Sales about customers and pipeline; the Board about risk, competitive advantage and whether the business is on track to deliver its commitments. Our job is to translate marketing language into something our target understands and can action.

The irony is that we obsess about being customer-centric externally, but we aren’t always audience-centric internally.

Five questions worth asking yourself

Perhaps a useful test of our own commercial credibility is whether we can confidently answer five questions:

They’re very simple questions, but being able to answer them changes the role Marketing can play.

We don’t want to turn marketers into accountants, but we want to turn the extraordinary amount marketers know about customers, markets, brands, behaviour and demand into commercial advantage.