The causes of
ineffective marketing
The heroic mindset
The heroic mindset places marketing as the saviour of the business, and believes that the wider business needs to accept and acknowledge this vision. It has created a “better than you” philosophy, where marketing sees itself and its contribution as superior to the other business functions. This mindset is a more recent development than the others, and it is still evolving at the time of writing in Summer 2025. It has really come to the fore over the last two or so years, and it will be interesting to see if it continues its momentum.
Marketing overstating its place and overestimating its power is nothing new.
The origins can be traced back into the 2010s, when marketers stopped wanting to do marketing. Building a strong brand was dull and tedious; providing a good product or service was pedestrian and unexciting; making revenue and profit for a business was low-brow and crass. Being complicit in capitalism was vulgar, and the work was demeaning.
Little Miss Marketing Muffet was sat on her tuffet bemoaning her miserable place; then along came purpose to sit down beside her and give her a way out of the malaise.
Marketers were no longer corporate lackies shilling mere products; they were saving the world by curing all its ills and fixing all its problems. Ending racism? Relieving poverty? Reversing global warming? Curing cancer? World peace? If only we had known that marketing was the answer all along! All that time wasted on research, laws, regulation, policy, negotiation, when it would have all been fixed by the voice of hair conditioner or spoons. Marketers were no longer empty souls in seats; they were activists, liberators, emancipators.
They were no longer a pedestrian business function: they were the superhero department.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. The purpose bandwagon rolled out of town, and purpose fell out of fashion. Marketers didn't want to be seen in last season's clothes, and the recent pomposity had stopped marketing being seen as serious professionals, and more like the corporate equivalent of small children running around with towels tied around their necks like capes, pretending to fly. Marketing needed a new way to be more than marketing; except they needed to dial it down and look more like adults in the office than kids in preschool.
So they shifted from being the saviours of society to the saviours of the spreadsheet.
They brought the megalomania inside the walls of the business and framed it in a way that was bit more palatable and grounded. The catalyst they needed was the distortion of Peter Drucker’s comment that marketing and innovation are the only two things that businesses need, and everything else is supplementary: influencers took this subjective, anecdotal opinion and treated it as an objective, empirical fact about businesses, turning it into the idea that marketing is the business.
This view has heavily distorted marketing’s own perception of its position in the business, the status it feels it should have, and the reverence it feels it should be shown. As a discipline it has developed delusions of grandeur, thinking that marketing is the most important part of the business; within it, marketers have developed a hefty main character syndrome, thinking that they should be the centre of attention. More and more we’re seeing an inflated sense of self-designated importance, self-declared brilliance, and self-allocated prestige, all stemming from the belief that marketing has a unique and special ability to carry businesses to success and can do it to a greater extent than everyone else. All taken together, it has given marketing a sense of entitlement.
While marketing certainly believes they occupy rarefied air, the rest of the business hasn’t got the memo; in response, marketing attempts several shortcuts to credibility to fast-track agreement.
There has been an increase in pseudo-specialisms using buzzword prefixes, all attempting to manufacture and imply causality between marketing and business performance. A prime example is ‘growth marketing’, which takes a natural outcome of properly done marketing and positions it as a special skill. There are rebrands of roles that have gone out of fashion: ‘performance marketing’ is essentially digital marketing by another name, albeit it with a more aggressive association with revenue generation. There are trendy buzzwords paired with traditionally higher status aspects of business: a ‘creative strategist’ guarantees success on the false assumption that ‘thinking outside the box’ and being ‘unpredictable’ is a failsafe way to win every single time. These jobs tend to do more damage than good. Growth marketing creates dangerous input-output dependencies in cycles of increasing spend on diminishing returns. Performance marketing focuses myopically on revenue, often at the expense of profit. Creative strategists will send the business down ‘unconventional’ or ‘left field’ or ‘unpredictable’ roads to justify including a word in their LinkedIn headline, regardless of whether it is beneficial for the business.
There is a belief in a complexity myth: overcomplication will fast track the perception of competence. If there is lots of terminology and jargon, marketers must be very knowledgeable; if what is being done is very dense and esoteric, marketers must be highly skilled to do it; if lots of things are being done, marketing must be very productive. It follows that, if marketing are highly skilled, knowledgeable, and very busy, by definition they must be generating lots of very effective things, which must mean they are extremely valuable and important.
Or so the logic goes. I call it a myth for a reason: it is untrue. Unlikely bedfellows as they may be, Dave Trott and Albert Einstein explain why. To paraphrase Dave Trott: stupid people think complex is clever; clever people can go beyond complex and make things simple. This sits alongside the quote most often attributed to Einstein, that if you can’t explain something in a way a child can understand, then you don’t truly understand it yourself. Complexity is not a sign of competence, it is an attempted sleight of hand that uses an excess of language and action to distract from a lack of genuine understanding and ability, and the absence of a proper strategy or plan. Much like the pseudo-specialisms, it does more damage than good. It floods plans and practices with unnecessary elements that don’t add anything to the final product. At best it spreads resources too thinly, using them irresponsibly; at worst it outright wastes them. The more things that are added, the more places there are for things to go wrong, and the harder it is to identify where the problems are and fix them. It lets marketing look busy at the cost of making it a leaking bucket.
The most popular obsession at the time of writing is “speaking the language of the boardroom”, which promises a fast-track to admiration and respect by drawing cum hoc ergo propter hoc lines between marketing actions and commercial returns. The lines are questionable as most of them are drawn from “evidence”. They are based on cherry-picked variables selected and paired up to deliver desired conclusions, and they are presented without the context and isolated from other actions taken around the business. These are curated into a highly selective and exclusionary narrative, a one-dimensional view of business performance that actively diminishes or dismisses the contributions of other functions. It attempts to make marketing look like it single-handedly carries business success by suggesting through omission that no-one else and nothing else does anything meaningful or impactful. As usual, this has been fuelled and monetised by influencers, agencies, and publishers offering proof of the causality, selling the curations of charts to copy-and-paste into slide decks and the conclusions and learnings to regurgitate with them.
What marketers think happens after they leave the room: the board are left in awe and immediately prepare to hand marketing the keys to the castle and guide them to the throne. Promotions, pay rises, and adulation as far as the eye can see. What actually happens: the board nod politely until the speech is finished and roll their eyes once marketing leave the room. Promotions, pay rises, and adulation as far away as the eye can see. The leadership are not naïve or stupid, which is unfortunate as the shortcut relies on them being both for it to work. Every function can arrange, select, and present combinations of data points in a way that demonstrates they are the 'best'. The board have sat through it a thousand times before, and they see through marketing’s attempts at it. Marketing think they are blowing the board’s minds when they are just insulting their intelligence.
The reason the shortcut ultimately fails is latent in the phrase: “speaking the language of the boardroom”. Anyone can learn some words, memorise a script, and recite it. That’s the issue: it’s reciting a script. Speaking theory at the board has no value unless it can be translated into practice and applied in a way that gets the results. The script doesn’t tell marketers where, when, and how to do it; the theory practice-gap can’t be bridged, and the attempt at manufacturing credibility gets exposed by the underwhelming performance.
It is important to say that not all data and conclusions are manipulated and led by agendas; some of it is robust, well done, and methodologically sound. Studies curated by reputable sources are going to be more reliable than a creative agency’s water-is-wet 'creativity is the biggest contributor' sales pitch dressed up as an 'empirically' led whitepaper or training course. The problem is that marketers are not being discerning, they are not thinking critically and doing due diligence on what they are buying. They are accepting anything that promises them a speedrun to glory, making them overconfident and overzealous.
It is a shame, because marketing does drive commercial performance when it is done well; but it isn’t as a solo venture. Its contribution is one among many, and business success comes from the cumulative contributions across the functions. Contributions across the board are made stronger by taking advantage of cross-functional synergies, each part of the business working with the others to amplify strengths and shrink weaknesses to make something greater than the sum of its parts. The heroic mindset sees business as hierarchical rather than flat, with marketing at the top and everything else working under it, isolating itself and missing the synergies and mutual benefits of collaboration and integration.
The heroic mindset warps priorities by placing politics over performance: manufacturing respect is more important than earning it. The “better than you” philosophy leads to promises that can’t be delivered, as marketing gets overconfident with objectives, targets, and projections while lacking the understanding and skills to deliver them. The delusions of grandeur lead to over-reaching and the main character syndrome leads to over-confidence, creating marketers that fail to realise the limitations of their expertise. They overestimate their knowledge and ability, falling into the theory-practice gap and providing returns that fall short of expectations, leaving the business behind the commercial position it expected to be in.
Effectiveness is ultimately diminished by self-promotion becoming the central concern of marketing, not doing what is best for business. In the attempt to look and sound busy, it implements an excess of irrelevant and inappropriate action that diverts resource away from things far better equipped to deliver stronger results.