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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how many businesses don’t actually have a marketing problem…
They have a leadership problem disguised as marketing.
And honestly? Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Most founder brands, charities, NFPs and growing businesses can’t afford a proper CMO, Head of Marketing or senior commercial marketing leader. So what happens instead is marketing becomes a shared hallucination. A group project. A democratic free-for-all where everybody has opinions about “the brand” despite nobody actually steering the fucking thing properly.
// The founder has opinions.
// Sales has opinions.
// Finance has opinions.
// The board has opinions.
// The agency has opinions.
// Hell… The intern who watched three TikToks about “growth hacking” suddenly has opinions.
And slowly, over time, the business turns into a Frankenstein stitched together from random advice, reactive decision-making and panic disguised as productivity.
Which is where things get really interesting. Because most organisations think they’re doing marketing.
But what they’re actually doing is communications.
There’s a huge difference.
Marketing was originally supposed to influence:
product, pricing, distribution, experience, customer behaviour, commercial growth, market positioning, competitive advantage, fame, memory, culture++++++
Now?
Fuck. Me: Most internal “marketing teams” are basically exhausted content engines trying to justify their own existence through dashboards, engagement metrics and acronyms nobody outside the industry gives a shit about.
“Look at the CTR.”
“Look at the CAC.”
“Look at the impressions.”
“Look at the engagement.”
Cool.
But is the business actually becoming more valuable?
Is it becoming more memorable?
More trusted?
More culturally relevant?
More commercially effective?
More distinctive?
More chosen?
Or are we all just feeding a machine because activity feels safer than strategic clarity?
// Mark Ritson would probably argue most businesses haven’t practiced proper brand management in years.
// Byron Sharp would likely point out that nobody can buy your brand if nobody fucking remembers it.
// Porter would quietly remind everyone that operational effectiveness is not strategy.
// Kahneman would whisper: “Humans are irrational, you spreadsheet goblins.”
// And Godin would probably ask the most important question of all:
“Why would anyone choose to talk about you in the first place?”
But somewhere along the way, marketing became obsessed with proving short-term value rather than creating long-term value.
And I get why.
Because performance marketing gives businesses the illusion of certainty. Numbers. Attribution. Graphs. Dashboards. Immediate feedback loops. It feels measurable. Defensible. Safe.
Until six years later when the company realises nobody actually gives a shit about the brand anymore.
Les Binet and Peter Field have been screaming this for years. Short-term optimisation slowly cannibalises long-term growth. But businesses continue doing it because “performance” is easier to explain in boardrooms than emotional salience, memory structures and cultural meaning.
And honestly? I don’t entirely blame internal marketing teams either.
Inside agencies you have a platoon of head hours and skills:
strategists, researchers, media specialists, behavioural scientists, developers, SEO experts, UX designers, copywriters, creative directors, producers, analysts, account leads & office support animals…
Entire ecosystems of expertise.
Then client-side you often have one exhausted Senior Marketing Manager expected to:
manage agencies, approve creative, write copy, analyse performance, brief designers, update websites, handle PR, manage events, report to leadership,
run socials, justify budget, justify existence and somehow still “drive growth”.
Half the time they’re drowning.
The other half they’re trying to prove they deserve to exist.
And this is exactly why so many businesses end up running marketing departments without actual marketing leadership.
Not communications leadership.
Not channel management.
Not content production.
Marketing leadership. Someone capable of zooming out and asking:
What are we actually trying to become?
// What’s fragmented?
// What’s duplicated?
// What’s reactive?
What’s wasting energy?
// What’s performative?
// What should we stop doing?
// What should we protect at all costs?
Because the irony is most organisations don’t need:
more content, more campaigns, more automation, more dashboards, more AI-generated slop, or another fucking workshop about workshops.
They need clarity.
A clear position.
A clear strategy.
A clear understanding of what should never be optimised away in the first place.
Anyway….
DM or Comment “WORLD PEACE” and I’ll send you a complimentary dashboard proving your brand is culturally irrelevant at scale.
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Cheers,
DANIEL JACOBS
http://bjornfox.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia
THE CREATIVE STRATEGIST 