What Happened to Marketing?
- Madelyn Clarke
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
The fragmentation of marketing services has disconnected the industry from the marketing process itself, leaving most agencies execution-driven rather than strategy-led.
Without research-backed strategy, the foundational step of marketing, execution is not marketing at all. When marketing no longer follows the process, insights into emerging trends disappear, positioning becomes generic, and accountability erodes — leaving brands reactive instead of strategic.
This is not a branding problem. It’s not a tooling problem. And it’s not a “small businesses don’t get it” problem.
It’s an industry-created problem, and business owners are paying the price.
The Data — Trust in Marketing Is Collapsing
Business owners don’t just feel uncertain about marketing — they increasingly don’t trust it.
Only 18% of small business owners say they are very confident their marketing is effective — down sharply year over year.
Despite rising spend, confidence continues to fall, signaling obligation rather than belief.
Research and industry surveys show that a majority of experienced buyers report feeling misled or disappointed after working with marketing agencies.
From a broader public perspective, advertising and marketing consistently rank near the bottom for perceived honesty and ethics.
Nearly 59% of CMOs say they don’t have enough budget to execute their strategy, highlighting the disconnect between expectation and resourcing.
Marketing budgets have flatlined at about 7.7% of total company revenue, with many leaders reporting that existing budgets are still insufficient to execute strategy.
CMO tenure continues to shrink, with average time in the top marketing role now under 4 years — shorter than many other C-suite positions — and well over 20% of large companies changing their marketing leadership in a single year
This distrust didn’t appear overnight. It’s the result of repeated experiences where marketing activity was delivered — but business outcomes were not.
And when results don’t materialize, the conclusion is predictable:
“Marketing doesn’t work.”
But that’s not the truth.
The truth is that what’s being sold as marketing often isn’t marketing at all.
Marketing Became a List of Tactics — Not a Discipline
Marketing is a broad discipline. It always has been.
At its core, marketing is the process of:
Understanding a market
Understanding people
Creating value
Communicating that value in a way that drives action
Yet somewhere along the way, the industry collapsed the marketing process into outputs, fragmenting it into “specialized” functions that severed execution from strategy.
Marketing became:
A website
Social media posts
Ads
SEO
Email campaigns
All execution. No system. No, “what is your marketing strategy?” conversations with clients.
As a result, many business owners now believe marketing is execution — because that’s what they’ve been sold.
Agencies reinforced this misunderstanding by packaging specialized deliverables instead of designing strategies. Over time, tactics replaced thinking, and the definition of marketing quietly eroded.
Fragmentation Broke the Marketing Process
The modern marketing industry is deeply fragmented.
Today, we see:
SEO agencies focused on rankings
Paid media agencies focused on clicks
Social teams focused on engagement
Content teams focused on volume
Fragmentation removed the connective tissue:
Research
Insight
Strategy
Positioning
Measurement
Without those, execution becomes disconnected from outcomes.
And disconnected execution produces exactly what business owners experience:
Websites that don’t convert
Social content that doesn’t resonate
Ads that drive traffic but not customers
Reports full of metrics with no meaning
This is not a failure of effort. It’s a failure of process.
Marketing Is a Process — and It Starts Before Execution
Real marketing follows a sequence. Skipping steps breaks the system.
Marketing must begin with:
Industry & Market Research Understanding the environment the business operates in — trends, saturation, pricing pressures, regulation, and competitive dynamics.
Competitive Landscape Analysis Knowing where competitors cluster, where differentiation is possible, and where the market is already numb to messaging.
Ideal Client Profile Definition Identifying who the business should actually be speaking to — and who it should ignore.
Consumer Psychology & Behavior Understanding how decisions are made, where trust is built or lost, and what motivates (and de-motivates) action.
Only then can strategy be developed — and only then does execution make sense.
When businesses skip directly to execution, the outcome is inevitable:
A website built without understanding why buyers hesitate
Social media that speaks but doesn’t listen
Campaigns that generate activity but no insight
Execution without research is guesswork. Execution without strategy is noise.
And noise is what most people now recognize as “marketing.”
This Isn’t the Customer’s Fault — It’s the Industry’s
Business owners didn’t misunderstand marketing on their own.
They were taught to misunderstand it.
For years, agencies sold execution as marketing, tactics as strategy, and activity as value. Many agencies lack clear positioning for themselves — no defined niche, no articulated differentiation — yet are tasked with creating those things for clients.
That contradiction is impossible to hide.
Marketing is now one of the most saturated professional services markets in existence, yet much of the industry looks indistinguishable. When agencies don’t know what they uniquely bring to the table, clients can’t either.
The result is a race to the bottom:
More tools
More content
More spend
Less trust
This isn’t Theory — it’s how winners operate.
The Dirty Secret is that the Most Powerful Brands Already Know this.
They don’t cut marketing during economic downturns — they increase it. Not because they spend recklessly, but because they understand and value the full marketing process: research, strategy, positioning, and disciplined execution.
Those brands don’t guess their way through recessions; they navigate them. And time and time again, they’re the ones that emerge stronger on the other side.
This Is Why We Founded Represent Media Studios
Represent Media Studios was founded to solve the exact problem this industry created.
Marketing cannot exist without strategy — and strategy cannot exist without research. Yet most agencies sell execution while skipping the very steps that make marketing work.
That’s the gap we built RMS to fill.
Think strategy consulting meets marketing execution — a mini-McKinsey mindset applied to marketing and creative production. We start with research, analysis, insight, and positioning, then design execution that is accountable to real business outcomes.
We’re explicit about what we do well, partner where needed to deliver a complete marketing process, and measure success in unsiloed performances — not activity.
That’s our promise to clients: no execution without strategy, and no strategy without research.
Marketing only works when it follows the process — and the process starts with research.
Anything else is just execution.
Comments