“Our brand is strong and consistent.”
Brand guidelines are in place. Messaging is unified. Every channel tells the same story. We invest in brand trust.
The brand promises what the organization can’t consistently deliver.
The campaign says “seamless experience.” Support has a 12-minute hold time. The website says “personalized.” The product serves the same default to everyone. The story you tell is aspirational. The experience the customer has is operational. The wider that gap grows, the more your best marketing becomes the setup for your worst customer moment.
When brand promise and customer experience diverge, marketing becomes the source of the disappointment it was trying to prevent.
“Our campaigns are data-driven.”
Every campaign is measured. Impressions, clicks, conversions — the funnel is instrumented. We know what works and we optimize relentlessly.
You optimized the funnel. The customer it produces doesn’t stay.
Click-through is up. Cost per lead is down. The dashboard is green. But the leads that convert at the highest rate churn at the highest rate — because the messaging that gets them in the door sets expectations the product can’t meet. You’re measuring the entrance. Nobody’s measuring the exit. The funnel is performing. The business behind it is leaking.
When acquisition metrics are strong and retention metrics are someone else’s problem, marketing is filling a leaking bucket faster.
“Marketing and sales are aligned.”
Shared pipeline metrics. Joint planning sessions. Marketing generates leads, sales closes them. The machine runs.
Marketing generates leads sales won’t call. Sales blames marketing for lead quality.
You’ve had the same argument for three years. Marketing says the leads are qualified. Sales says they’re not. The real problem: the definition of “qualified” was agreed on eighteen months ago for a product that’s changed twice since then. Nobody updated the criteria. Both teams are optimizing for a contract that expired. The alignment meeting is where you discuss the misalignment you never resolve.
When alignment meetings discuss the same misalignment every quarter, coordination has decayed into ritual.
“We’re strategic about our market positioning.”
Positioning changes go through proper review. Brand decisions are deliberate. We don’t chase trends. We think long-term.
The market moved. You’re still in the review cycle.
A competitor launched a repositioning that changed the conversation in your category. Your team had a response ready in two weeks. Approval took eight. By the time the campaign launched, the news cycle had moved, the analyst reports were published, and the narrative was set. You weren’t slow. Your approval process was. The market doesn’t wait for your governance to catch up.
When the approval cycle is longer than the market cycle, deliberateness becomes irrelevance.
“Marketing supports the whole business.”
We serve every function. Product launches, sales enablement, recruiting, investor relations, events — marketing is embedded everywhere.
You support everyone. Nobody supports you.
Every team needs a deck, a one-pager, a campaign, a social push. Every request is urgent. None of them came with budget. Your team of twelve serves a company of two thousand and every leader believes their request is the priority. You’re not a function anymore. You’re a service desk with a brand attached. The strategy you were hired to build lives in a doc nobody has time to open.
When marketing serves everyone and no one funds the capacity, the function collapses into reactive service.
Every lens sees the same system. Shared language is how the system starts to learn.
These aren’t failures of people. They’re the physics of organizations operating at scale and speed.