The problem with marketing

There is a question I keep circling back to when I think about why marketing is so often undervalued inside organizations.

What, exactly, do people think marketing is?

Most companies will tell you it matters. They know they need it. They know they are supposed to invest in it. They want better visibility, more leads, a stronger brand, more growth, more engagement, more relevance, more revenue. They want the website to perform better. They want campaigns that convert. They want messaging that lands. They want stronger sales enablement, better nurture, sharper positioning, cleaner creative, more social media presence, more PR traction, more demand, more loyalty.

They want marketing.

But ask a room full of leaders to define what marketing actually is, and the answers are all over the place.

The definition problem

In one organization, marketing is mostly brand and communications. In another, it is lead generation. In another, it functions more like an internal service desk, producing whatever the rest of the business asks for. In another, it carries major responsibility for pipeline and revenue. In smaller companies, it is often all of those things at once, managed by a very small number of people under expectations that are wildly out of proportion to the team.

That is part of the problem. Marketing is one of the few major functions in a company whose scope, status, and success metrics can shift dramatically from one organization to the next. Not slightly. Fundamentally.

Most other functions vary by company, too, of course. Sales in one business is not identical to sales in another. Finance, engineering, operations, product, all of them change based on industry, maturity, complexity, and business model. But even with those differences, there is usually a more stable center. There is a clearer shared understanding of what those functions are there to do and how success is generally measured.

Sales is expected to generate revenue. Finance is expected to provide financial discipline, visibility, planning, and control. Engineering is expected to build, maintain, and improve products or systems. Operations is expected to make the business run better, faster, more reliably.

Marketing does not get that same clarity.

The measurement problem

Instead, marketing is often measured by a shifting mix of output, service, aesthetics, and performance, depending on the company and the preferences of those in power. I have seen it judged by how many campaigns were launched, how many leads were delivered, whether internal stakeholders got what they asked for on time, whether leadership liked the creative, whether the CEO’s searches showed up properly in Google, whether the website represented every department the way they wanted, and whether marketing could somehow prove contribution to revenue even when the infrastructure and data were nowhere near mature enough to support that claim with confidence.

None of those things is wrong on its own. The problem is the mix. The problem is that they are often piled together without any real agreement on what marketing is actually there to do.

So the function becomes a strange hybrid. Part service team. Part production team. Part revenue engine. Part communications hub. Part clean-up crew for everyone else’s requests. And then everyone wonders why marketers are burned out, defensive, and constantly trying to explain themselves.

I say this to my teams all the time: we are not the “do you want fries with that” team. Because that is what this turns into. A counter. Orders coming in. Everyone expecting theirs first.

I do not think this is just a marketing problem. I think it is a leadership problem.

When leaders do not define a function clearly, they do not just create confusion. They create instability. They make it harder to resource the work appropriately. They make accountability uneven. They make success difficult to measure consistently and failure easy to assign after the fact.

Marketing is especially vulnerable to this because so much of its work happens in areas that are both visible and misunderstood. Everyone sees campaigns. Everyone sees the website. Everyone sees email, social media, design, ads, messaging, events, and content. That visibility gives people a false sense of familiarity. They think that because they can see the outputs, they understand the function.

But seeing marketing is not the same as understanding it.

What often gets lost is that marketing is one of the few functions in the business that, by necessity, lives outside the company. It operates at the level of the prospective customer, in the minds of people who have not yet chosen you, but you believe should. Its job is to understand those people, anticipate their concerns, interpret their needs, recognize barriers to trust, and translate all of that back into decisions the business can act on.

That perspective is uniquely valuable. It is also easy to diminish if leadership sees marketing primarily as a delivery team rather than as a business function with a serious strategic role.

The status problem

I think that status problem matters more than many companies realize. In too many organizations, marketers are not treated as business people in the same way finance or sales leaders are. They are brought in after the important decisions have already been made. They are asked to package, promote, or execute rather than challenge assumptions, shape strategy, or represent the customer perspective upstream. They are expected to prove value in the language of the business without always being invited into the conversations where that language is formed.

Many marketers also come up through the function without being included in financial discussions or broader operating conversations, which means they do not always develop the finance-level vocabulary that helps translate marketing’s value at the highest levels of the organization. Then that gap gets used against the function itself. Marketing is treated as vague, soft, or difficult to pin down, when part of the problem is that the organization never fully allowed it to operate as a peer business function in the first place.

This is one reason I care so much about clarity in marketing roles and marketing teams. It is also one reason my own value proposition has become sharper over time.

I have spent a lot of my career walking into environments where marketing was underdefined, overburdened, underpowered, or all three. The work was never just about producing better campaigns or driving more output. The real work was figuring out what the organization believed marketing was there to do, identifying where those expectations were inconsistent or unrealistic, and helping create a function that could actually connect strategy, customer understanding, execution, and business outcomes in a more disciplined way.

What marketing can do at its best

That, to me, is where marketing becomes powerful. Not when it is treated as a collection of channels, but when it is understood as one of the few functions that can connect the whole company to the customer.

At its best, marketing links market insight to business strategy. It connects positioning to product understanding, messaging to trust, content to demand, experience to loyalty, and customer behavior to growth decisions. It does not just make things visible. It helps the business understand what matters to the people it is trying to reach and why those people may or may not choose it.

That is far bigger than campaigns. It is far bigger than social media. It is certainly bigger than being the team that makes the deck look better or gets the email out.

And yet, in many organizations, that broader value never gets unlocked because the function is never properly defined or properly respected.

That is why I keep coming back to the original question.

What is marketing, really?

If the answer changes completely every time a marketer changes companies, then the problem is not simply that marketers need to explain themselves better. The problem is that the profession itself is still filtered through organizational bias, executive preference, and structural ambiguity in ways that other major business functions are not.

That makes careers harder to build. It makes roles harder to fill well. It makes performance harder to assess fairly. And it leaves many companies with a function they depend on, but do not fully understand.

This starts with leadership being honest about what marketing is actually there to do, what it owns, how it creates value, how success will be measured, and whether the company is willing to staff and fund it accordingly. It means bringing marketing into the room early enough to shape decisions, not just communicate them after they have already been made. And it means treating marketers as business people whose job is not just to execute, but to interpret, connect, and guide.

Until then, many companies will continue to ask marketing to do everything, prove everything, absorb everything, and explain everything.

And then wonder why the function never quite delivers what they hoped it would.