Marketing Has Never Been Harder and It's Not Your Fault

Everything is marketing: adjusting your team to hybrid work, deciding what benefits to include in a new product, running an M&A strategy. Everything in business requires the magic that is marketing.?

And yet, like no other time in modern business history, we live in a world where marketing is set up to fail. I had inklings of this when I started CultureCraft after finishing a successful run as mid-market CMO. After hiring marketers, engaging consultants, contracting agencies, I saw how the system was predesigned to make businesses spend heavily on solutions they don’t need, chase tactics, and hire poorly.

I learned hard lessons in the trenches and saw how strategy could unlock the marketing milieu. I created CultureCraft to merge those in-house lessons with the agency services I knew businesses needed. Leading with strategy was the goal, delivering with design the differentiator.?

And yet, the clients came to us with a demand for tactics. Solutions for martech SAAS they’d already purchased, social media accounts they wanted covered, reactive messaging to short-term sales dilemmas.

I don’t blame any of them for it. I now see clearly—after spending time with over 100 CEOs and executives in the last two years—that middle market leadership teams are systematically trained by the marketing industry to buy tactics, chase the short-term, and subsidizing Silicon Valley, keeping Google and Meta ever-knocking at their door.

Sea of Sameness

I believed, naively, that businesses only needed the option to differentiate themselves and they would jump at the chance. I believed that they didn’t want to be entrapped by legacy industries flighting over already-eaten slices of pie.?

What I experienced instead was that digital marketing was a WandaVision-style coma where everyone involved had been bewitched into serving the demands of a few big actors. And that coma depended on the middle market to fund the status quo.

The marketplace told mid-market CEOs that you needed “better marketing” but gave you almost no tools as to how to decide what that would be. Most in-house marketers, even at the Director level, were trained tacticians—experts in design, email marketing, ads, marcomms, websites. Again, no one’s fault, 20 years of digital marketing had been warped around the power of data to solve all the problems. And data requires conformity.?

It requires you to play by a very narrow set of rules in how you engage, who you engage, the tools you use, and the questions you ask. The essential marketing work to be connected and engaged with a first-party community of buyers has been undermined again and again by behemoth intermediaries (Meta, Google, Salesforce, Amazon, Wordpress, etc.) who were setting the table for their own dominance, extracting a creative and financial tax on every business to subsist as tenants in their empire.?

Never About the Tools

Today, as digital marketing faces its required Reckoning, businesses like yours are paying the price. The slow demise of third-party data, the resurgence of privacy, the cynicism of customers, the pollution of the SEO and social media algorithms—all of them were unavoidable, and all are coming to a head just as the larger economy faces global headwinds.

Pay-per-click, paid social, SEO, email automation, etc. are not bad tools. I use them with our clients all the time. But you’ve gotta be careful. These tools are designed to be weaponized against the middle market. Strategy is required to make tactics work, otherwise businesses experience an endless stream of sunk costs. Nearly every leader I’ve talked to in the last two years has a litany of marketing solutions that never solved anything.?

And yet, screaming “Strategy” (as I have often done in the past) is not the solution either. Businesses need maps from aspiration to strategy to culture shift to implementation to creative. In the absence of those maps, costs will continue to rise while results continue to falter.

Beyond Strategy

If you asked me five years ago, I would have sworn to you that all businesses needed to unlock marketing’s power was a strategy. I don’t believe that anymore. I’ve delivered too many hard-won and powerful strategies to the doorsteps of businesses that then got devoured by cultural resistance, rigid tech stacks built for 2010’s problems, a fundamental misunderstanding of how the creative arts work in the middle market.

Our clients, our community of marketing leaders and C-suites that engage CultureCraft, need more from us than just great strategy or ideation. We must help you address your internal culture, bloated technological systems, and the emerging economy breaking through the Reckoning of Late-Stage Digital to make marketing work for you. Tantalized by VC money and Unicorn Growth, too many businesses have been entrapped in a path to growth that will never work for them.

It has never been harder to decide what marketing is and what it should do for a business. Starting in August you will begin to see new small- and large-scale programs from CultureCraft that allow you to begin to unravel the Growth Trap set for founder-led and middle-market companies.?

Along the way, I’m upping my commitment with all of you. CultureCraft will continue to deliver MADE every Thursday with targeted frameworks, case studies, and commentary on how to do better marketing inside your business every day. Starting today, I will be adding “Only the Few: My Field Notes” to start the week.? Two connections per week, each designed to unlock the trap that traditional marketing has set for businesses like yours.

For 20 years the marketing industry has been sliding toward benefitting only a few global tech companies. I intend to shift that. Social change starts with a willing 3%. If we can activate 3% of businesses in each major industry, we can change who marketing benefits and how. We can redefine who “Only the Few” are.?

I hope you’ll open your email each Monday to come with me on this journey to redefining The Few and putting marketing back in the hands of enterprises like yours to make the emerging economy.

_________________________________________

Upcoming Opportunities

This Week's MADE: Make sure to check your inbox Thursday morning as open a two-week discussion on the age-old battle between marketing and sales and how such dividing lines no longer apply.

Escape the Growth Trap: “Better Marketing” is the portal through which waste, distraction, and bad advice enter most founder-led and middle-market businesses. On Aug 10 I'll be taking a limited group of marketing and executive leaders through practical steps on how to recognize the Growth Trap in your business and how to break free of it. Register now, seating is limited. <<< FIND OUT MORE >>>

Ready to Assess? You can now engage our team to do a fixed-cost direct assessment of your business for as low as $7500. We'll give you a clear map of not just your next strategy, but how to position yourself externally and internally to make sure your not in the 87% of companies whose growth strategies fail. Schedule with Ian, our Growth Strategist, to get on our calendar for the fall. <<< BOOK A 20-MIN CONSULT >>>