More tools, more data, more ways to win a customer than ever before. And most marketing teams are allowed to do less with it than ever. There is a name for that trap now, and a way out. That is the work I do.
It usually happens quietly, over years. The parts of marketing that make money or win attention get pulled into more ambitious departments. Demand generation moves under sales, because sales wants to own the leads. Product marketing sits with product. Brand and the website drift into communications. The data and the tools end up with IT.
Each move looks sensible on its own. Together they hollow the function out. What is left holding the name marketing is the work nobody competed for, and that work cannot point at a number. So marketing starts to look like a cost rather than an engine, and when budgets tighten it is the first place the business looks to cut. It shrinks, it can prove even less, and round it goes.
This is not a hunch or a hard-luck story. It is a measured pattern, and the numbers are uncomfortable.
MX, the marketer experience, is a simple idea most businesses have never applied to their own team.
Companies pour real effort into how it feels to be their customer.
And into how it feels to use their product, right down to the last click.
Almost nobody designs how it feels to be the marketer expected to deliver all of it.
Design the marketer's experience as deliberately as you design the customer's, and the output looks after itself.
In practice that comes down to two honest halves. A team has to be good enough to deserve the seat at the table, and the business has to understand enough to give it. Most efforts fix one and ignore the other, and nothing changes.
Get marketing genuinely good enough to earn its place. Sharpen the strategy, the operations and the measurement so the work stands up to scrutiny, and so the value is finally visible in numbers a finance director respects.
Get the business to back it. Most marketing leaders get one real shot a year at their leadership's attention. I help you make that case land, in the board's language, so marketing is understood, invested in, and finally allowed to do its job.
Close one, you have wasted your time. Close both, and marketing finally delivers what everyone always hoped it would.
Ten honest questions about how your marketing function is really treated. No sign-up, no email, just your score and what it means.
Takes about two minutes
Recognising the problem is the easy part. Being ready to make the case is what separates the leaders who break the loop from the ones who keep blaming the market.
If your score made you wince, that is exactly the work I do. Send me your score and let's talk. No pitch.
Message me your scoreYou do not have to buy a big programme to find out whether any of this applies to you. It starts with a free, honest look, and grows only if it earns the right to.
A short, honest read on where your marketing really sits, what is holding it back, and whether the loop has hold of you. No cost, no obligation, and you keep the findings whatever you decide to do next.
Practical work on strategy, operations and measurement, so your team gets genuinely good enough to earn its seat, and the value shows up in numbers the business respects.
Building the case for your function and helping you land it with leadership. The right argument, in their language, ready for the one shot a year you actually get.
Workshops, keynotes and a steady hand alongside you through the change itself. Not another framework left on a shelf, but someone in it with you until it sticks.
I stay hands-on and next to your team, not parked in a strategy deck. The real problems live in the day to day, so that is where I work.
No vanity metrics and no marketing spin. If something is not working, you will hear it from me first, plainly, so you can do something about it.
The job is to make your marketing able to stand on its own, not to make you depend on me. Success is you not needing me anymore.
Twenty-five years in marketing and marketing operations, and the person who put a name to the marketer experience. I have built and rebuilt marketing functions from the inside, sat in the rooms where budgets get cut, and made the case that keeps them.
I write, speak and host conversations about why marketing got so hard, and what to do about it. Now I do this work independently, fractional and advisory, for leaders who know their marketing could be so much more than it is being allowed to be.
No pitch and no jargon. Just a straight conversation about where your marketing is, and whether there is a smarter way out of the loop. Bring your Doom Loop score if you have it.
Start a conversation