Why Marketing Sucks… But Doesn’t Have To
I hate being in marketing.
I mean, not all the time, but there are days, my friends. Too many days. It’s not the work, the hours, the clients, the never ending landscape of challenges or everyone’s persistent belief that your job is easy and they could probably do it if they tried. Those are all irritants, but not necessarily life-threatening attacks on the work I do every day. All professions come with their irritations and those of us who do this work are free to throw stones from within the clear view of our glass houses.
The disgust I feel for this profession is not it’s truth, but ironically (given what people think we do for a living) it’s perception. For many in the public, and in our own ranks, we are seen as master illusionists. Tricksters of color, click, and copy who can turn trash into treasure by manipulating the public into falling in love with something they should hate. Of course, no one will say this outright. The magicians cannot shame their audience for wanting a show.
And that’s what we’re here for, right? The show?
Just Make Us Look Good
If we were to charge our fees based on the number of times we hear this phrase, I could have retired by now. Of course our long-standing clients know that this instruction will not go far. Because they know that I, or one of our team of strategists, will follow with a form of the obvious question:
But is it good?
Is the service good?
Is the culture of your company good?
Is this product actually ready to serve the public or are you asking us, with all the tools in our toolbelt, to hide the fact that you are an answer in search of a question? Are we your costume designers, your snake oil manufacturers, your masters of grift?
I can say definitively, we are not. If marketing is anything, it’s the truth. Because when the brand is a lie, then everything is. People are too often shocked when I talk about the brand needing to be the truth. I have for years, going back to my CMO days talked about the brand being the source of accountability for every strategic move a company makes. It is the fourth chair at the executive table, holding Ops, Finance, and Sales accountable to the highest possible standard of customer experience, reputation, and value. The brand—if it is to be worth anything at all—can only reveal the better angels of a company and its products.
We are not your fixers. We are your prophets.
A Brand Apocalypse
In the original language, an apocalypse is a great revealing. It is a tearing of the curtain that obfuscates the better and more beautiful world that hides behind the shroud of troubled days. In the old mythologies, that apocalypse burned down the illusions, destroyed the abusers of power, and was brought to fulfillment by prophets. Those who could see beyond our troubles and the veil of disillusion, revealing better days. They were here for the revelation.
In the real work of brand building, it can feel like an apocalypse. False idols and sacred cows, shortcuts and self-delusions have to get refined through fire to get down to that diamond of truth that each and every person and organization contains. Marketers, if they are worth their salt, are caretakers of that refining process, removing the impulse to coerce and distract, hacksawing sacred cows, and distilling truth.
What is a brand? It is actionable reputation. And the closer that reputation is to the truth, the more the action from employees, customers, and prospects is repeatable, validated by results, and self-generating. The farther a brand is from the truth, the more money, time, and distraction has to get poured into the temples of interruption: Facebook, Google, and endless marketing automation. There is nothing wrong with an ad, an SEO tactic, an email sequence. But they are false gods when we believe they can do anything substantial to improve the one thing that matters: reputation.
A brand should move you. And the place you find yourself when moved should be a revelation. A revelation of a better world. A better service. A better team. A better company. When marketing is doing its truest job, it sits in that fourth chair of the executive suite and calls out, “There is more than this.”
In the old religions, the prophets spoke for the people, stood in the gap for those that the powerful had forgotten. In too many companies the powerful have forgotten the people they are here to serve. The customers whose lives they should improve. The employees whose days they should enliven. The brand, when it is true, reminds all of us that we have more to offer these people. The magic of marketing can help us reveal what that “more” can be.
Marketers Create Their Own Crisis
Of course, the majority who read the above paragraph will not recognize this as their experience of marketing. They have delt with dozens if not hundreds of marketers who are happy to “make it look good” whether it is, in fact, good or not. You have lived experience with marketers who are happy to traffic in lies as long as those lies produce clicks and qualified leads, and customers.
We have all seen the professional class of celebrity marketers turn their platforms into money-making machines with $10k/head masterclass groups where the same material is regurgitated over and over, but from someone who's learned how to make it look good. We have seen the LinkedIn posts of people taking photos of themselves making videos of themselves to sell classes where you too can learn to take photos of yourself taking videos of yourself to sell classes.
It’s become more subtle, but in broad swaths of my industry, all marketing is pyramid marketing. And it is a tragedy. The rise of the creative class to white-collar status (a good thing) has produced a hustle culture (a bad thing) where instead of using all of that talent to reveal the truth and inspire vision, the slightest impulse at creativity is being monetized. Making strategists into “gurus”, writers into “thought leaders”, designers into “influencers”. Too many marketers have succumbed to the belief that you cannot do the most meaningful work in your 9-5 so you’ve got to outsource it to a side hustle. Turn your hobbies into grifts. And gather subscriptions on Patreon.
In this process, marketing becomes a web of transactions implemented by a sea of individual “experts”. Most with incredible talents, but feeding a culture of marketing where nothing is connected, everything is tactics, and C-suites are trained year after year that the role of marketing is to string together a series of successful gimmicks and then bully somebody into defending their ROI.
The irony is that every marketer I know hates this reality. They don’t want to have to defend the ROI of every email, every quiz, every social media graphic. But the battle for substance and truth is too much for most. So they stay on the sidelines, grumbling to their peers about having to do the 9th review of the website based on feedback from the HR Manager whose husband used to work in marketing.
To the Customers Go the Spoils
The result of this scorched earth war between business leaders and marketers? A barren landscape of value and truth with an ever more distrusting population of buyers. Trust in brands is at its lowest point in decades (deservedly). Marketing tactics have been overrun by digital techniques which depend on weak data privacy and make prospects feel stalked rather than helped. The cost of customer acquisition across channels is rising at a frightening rate for businesses that have lived and died by the marketing interruption. Digital ads are stalling, data is increasingly sparse, and reputation—that actionable thing that creates value and loyalty—has been so undernourished it’s in the ICU.
Remember that scene from the end of The Lion King where the decimated land of Pride Rock burns? This is the “Apocalypse” of the film. The great revealing that beneath all the emptiness and shortsightedness of Scar, is a beautiful world waiting to be revealed. After the fire, a fall of rain resets the ecosystem, creating the landscape for new life to flourish again.
That is where we are.
The rains are falling.
For those brands who wish to tell the truth, create value, instill trust, and build loyalty, the timeless strategy of brand equity is there for the taking. We are, every day, working side by side with leaders and creators who see the open field of scorched earth that marketing has created, and are setting up their oasis. Places to serve and thrive.
We can either give customers the spoils of war or we can give them the fruit of our labor. A labor of cultivation, of truth, of burning away the distraction, interruption, and deception.
Brands who wish to do such work have only upsides waiting for them. Actionable reputation. Trust and community. It will feel wrong at first because transactional marketing has been so omnipresent for so long. But herein lies the prophetic magic: the distraction, the clicks, the quick-fix tactics, they have been the illusion all along.
And as they burn away, the truth is revealed.
