I’m ambivalent to a lot of Jeff Bezos soundbites, but I do think there is something in his summary of a brand being what people say about you when you’re not in the room: there is a big gap between the brand marketing thinks it is building for itself, and the brand it is building from the perspective of the wider business.

 

While marketing thinks it is building confidence and trust it is really building scepticism and cynicism. It thinks it is commanding respect and admiration, but its fuelling concern and anxiety. Why?

 

The wider business thinks marketing is trying to fake it until it makes it. Marketing thinks it is projecting itself as highly skilled, technical, and productive. The business sees through the attempts at manufactured complexity, the attempts to address its insecurities around its own practice and its value to the business, a department trying to convince itself of its legitimacy while trying to convince everyone else. They can see all the shortcuts it takes to try and build authority: appropriating theory and terminology from other disciplines, presenting basic expectations as special features or skills, the overworked solutions that look meticulous in slide decks but come with little relevant proof of their efficacy. They can see through the wall of verbiage that attempts to mask a lack of understanding. They see through the controlled narratives and “evidence” used to create them.

 

It thinks marketing is making it up as it goes along. Marketing thinks it is projecting itself as agile, dynamic, and contemporary. The business sees it as inconsistent, chaotic, changeable; a function that doesn’t really know what it is doing and doesn’t really know where it is going. When ten marketers give ten different explanations of concept, when the same concept has several different names, when A is constantly replaced with B, the wider business sees it as erratic. When it is subjected to the endless waves of new portmanteaus, acronyms, and buzzphrases, it becomes clear that a “phygital UGC growth-hack” is just throwing today’s special at a wall and hoping it sticks. When they see marketing changing plans every time something new catches on, or jumping on the latest tool or technique as soon as they see someone else doing it, they know it is because marketing doesn’t have many ideas of its own, and little faith in the ones it does have. When marketing tries to legitimise it by applying business terms, by calling it ‘agility’ for ‘competitive advantage’, the wider business can see there is no genuine strategy or planning behind it. They can see it is aimless reactivity, a cost centre playing the numbers game with company resources.

 

It thinks marketing is disconnected from business. Marketing thinks it is projecting awareness and cognizance: the wider business sees marketing as a navel-gazing department, more concerned with its own internal workings than its relationship with the overall business. They sit through presentations and meetings with marketers talking about the theory behind their work, not showing any understanding of how it relates to or helps anybody else’s. It sees an inward-looking department more concerned with its own localised debates, only paying lip service to the bigger picture. It sees a function that doesn’t care to learn how other functions work, where it can provide extra benefit to them, or work in a way that avoids knock-on effects that hinder them. It sees a department focused on justifying its wants over the business’ needs, and marketers who are more concerned with their LinkedIn profiles and looking vogue to other marketers than learning about other functions and finding the places their expertise can help the greater good. It sees a department chasing vague and ill-defined measures and metrics that have little causal effect on business performance. It sees marketers offer abstract, theoretical attempts at drawing correlative lines because it has little to no knowledge of the concrete business mechanics they are meant to be influencing.

 

It thinks that marketing has its head in the clouds. Marketing thinks it is projecting itself as deep and meaningful, but the business sees marketing as shallow and inconsequential. It sees a department framing success as qualitative intangibles like “winning hearts and minds”, building “loyal communities” through “deep connections” built on “brand love”. I’ve never known what marketing thinks it is achieving by using this language, and every passing year it becomes more of a mystery to me. It sees a function that prides itself on demonstrating buzzwords and catchphrases, putting numbers against stepping-stone metrics rather than concrete, meaningful objectives. Rather than commercial returns, it congratulates itself on how much 'engagement' their 'disruptive' social campaign got, all because it 'zigged rather than zagged' with its 'irrational' 'left field' creative and 'Gen Z' channel mix. The wider business asks if all that generated any leads or got any sales? You know, did it bring in anything of practical use or consequence for the business? The silence is deafening.

 

It thinks that marketing is full of itself. Marketing thinks it is projecting itself as effective and eminent, while the wider business sees a function that overestimates its position and influence. It sees a function that thinks knowledge of a part counts as knowledge of the whole, and it gets subjected to marketers who think they are business experts while demonstrating they barely know their own discipline. It sees marketers who think that they are multidisciplinary because they have had minimal exposure to other professions and knowledge bases; they read a blog summary of Thinking Fast and Slow and think they are equivalent to clinical psychologists who spent years in medical school. It sees marketers more concerned with play-acting other professions than being any good at their own. It sees a function that thinks it is the centre of the world, with grandiose claims that it “shapes culture” and “opens dialogues”, ignoring the data suggesting that most of its work doesn’t even get noticed by the general public.

 

It thinks that marketing has ideas above its station. Marketing thinks it is projecting itself as valuable and erudite, while the business sees a function that thinks it knows more than it does. It has to sit though presentations curating biased and selective data, charts, and graphs that “prove” it, feeding their own hype while patting their own back, telling themselves they are more important than everything and everyone else; only to see the sub-par contributions that come in at the end. It thinks that integration and collaboration happen in a hierarchy, one where marketing sits at the top and everyone else feeds into it. Instead of marketing working with other functions to amplify strengths and compensate for weaknesses, instead of aligning with functions to make sure everyone understands each other’s roles and therefore maximize everyone’s efficiency and efficacy, marketing talks about itself as if it is a king of the castle lording over the peasants and serfs.

 

It thinks that marketing is a jack of all trades, master of none. Marketing thinks that simply doing more projects greater skill and ability: more tools, more metrics, more frameworks, more campaigns. The business sees a function spreading resources thinly and nothing getting done properly, and a function creating more opportunities for things to go wrong. It also sees a function that doesn’t really know what to do when things do go wrong, how to adjust the plan when it isn’t working, or how to course-correct when it doesn’t do what the tin said it should.

 

It thinks that marketing has lost touch with reality. Marketing thinks it is projecting gravitas, but the business sees a group of attention-seekers with a worrying lack of perspective, who are as self-aggrandizing as they are arrogant. They see marketers turning every news story or business decision into a marketing event or insight, and talking about every marketing event as if it is the biggest news story imaginable. It sees the absence of humility: to take one example, they hear marketers talking about the “bravery” of marketing campaigns: it is delusional to the point that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Bravery is firefighters running into a burning building to save someone’s life; bravery is paramedics treating wounds in warzones while soldiers are still fighting around them; bravery is someone jumping into rough seas to rescue a drowning child. Bravery is not putting some pink on a TikTok ad, it is not showing a picture of a burger with some mould on it, it is not changing the typeface on a crisp packet. When marketers try to equate the importance of their work with genuine heroism or sacrifice, it is as embarrassing as it is pathetic.