Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.
Yet, it remains widely misunderstood within an organization.
We've all heard people say, "What does marketing even do?".
Shouldn't marketing be easy when:
You have a superior product
You have money to spend
You have an established brand
Not really. Why? Is it because users and buyers are harder to reach? Or could it be due to organizational silos and disconnected teams? What if we could start fresh and approach marketing with a blank slate?
The new world
The world of marketing and enterprise buying is uniquely complex. Marketing has a unique nature, unlike any other function in the company, impacting many stakeholders — users, buyers, sellers, partners, makers, and leadership — and a wide variety of business functions — from sales and product to customer success, finance, technology, and HR.
Marketing has a multifaceted role:
🤝 Serving as the Unifier
While the goal is to create deeper customer connections, and hence, personalization, this requires extraordinary levels of collaboration and coordination with a wide range of functional partners. Yet, achieving this is so difficult for many reasons—including the understanding of marketing across the company and the unique skills needed to unify and bring everyone along on the journey.
💵 Driving Efficient Growth
Marketing budgets are often the hardest to justify. CMOs use advanced analytics—metrics, dashboards, and tools—to demonstrate that marketing drives clear, predictable, and significant value. Sometimes, this makes things too complex and teams become defensive, constantly justifying overspends or underspends, and diverting focus from what's truly important—making trade-offs and prioritizing initiatives that deliver the most impact.
💵 Navigating Complex Buying Cycles
Marketing is working a complex buying cycle in the enterprise:
Long sales cycles, spanning months or even a year with 100 or more buyer touch points, make implementation complex and costly with possible detours in buying journeys.
Large buying groups, with close to 10 active decision-makers and seven occasional participants (source: Gartner), who complicate the decision-making process and require alignment of priorities and consensus.
People skills and understanding specific pain points of each stakeholder are challenging, posing hurdles in building meaningful relationships.
Audiences are digital natives with low attention spans, making capturing and retaining engagement harder.
Sales and Marketing functions are as broad as they are deep, requiring a wide range of specialized skills—from content, product marketing, SEO, paid advertising, events, field marketing, revenue operations, sales executives, sales development representatives, and more.
Operational complexity involves managing technology platforms, data management systems, and cross-functional teams, tools, and workflows.
Infinite ways to market your business, with marketers acting on multiple strategies and techniques at a time when they haven't mastered the basics.
More noise, more data, more channels, more technology.
Are we making marketing too complicated?
Starting from a blank slate
At its core, the fundamental goal of marketing is to create value for the customer and the organization by building strong, lasting relationships.
Between Humans.
Humans are the common thread that weaves through both sides of marketing - the producer and the consumer. They are the buyers, users, influencers, builders, and distributors. While machines play an increasingly important role in creating a repeatable and scalable marketing motion and improving the quality of life for marketers, it is the human element that remains at the heart of it all.
Let's go back to the basics, to the core of what drives us as humans.
Humans cherish magical moments, holding onto those memories with fondness and nostalgia.
Humans are social creatures, placing their trust in the opinions of friends and family above other forms of marketing. They are more likely to share magical moments when they experience them firsthand.
Humans trust in consistency, so it is essential for marketers to commit to fanatical consistency, striving for excellence in every interaction, every single day.
In the upcoming pieces, my goal is to delve deeper into these fundamentals and explore where we could place our bets for the future of marketing:
The role of human connections as the foundation of marketing, focusing on building magical, memorable, and shareable experiences that resonate with people profoundly.
The role of AI in generating ideas, fostering creativity, and building a consistent and efficient marketing engine that enhances the human touch rather than replacing it.
The fundamentals of working with and building high-performance, globally distributed teams that can collaborate effectively to deliver exceptional experiences in an increasingly crowded world.
Magical moments. Genuine connections. Consistency. It’s our responsibility to harness these fundamentals, and with the help of AI, we have the power to create experiences that are truly unforgettable. Join me on this journey as we explore the fundamentals of marketing together, and refine its craft.
