Marketing Has a Problem: Everyone Thinks They Know How to Do It

There’s something wonderfully democratic about marketing.

Everyone has an opinion.

The headline is too long. The logo should be bigger. We need to be on TikTok. Nobody uses Facebook anymore. We absolutely have to sponsor that conference. That video should be shorter. Why are we spending money on awareness when we need leads?

And occasionally, my personal favorite: “I just don’t like it.”

Fair enough.

Marketing is one of the few business disciplines everyone experiences personally, so perhaps it makes sense that everyone feels qualified to weigh in.

We all see advertising. We receive emails. We search Google. We scroll social media. We have favorite brands and websites we hate.

But somewhere along the way, having a perspective on marketing became interchangeable with knowing how marketing should be done.

And those are very different things.

I don’t see quite the same phenomenon with other departments. People generally aren’t wandering into Finance suggesting a new approach to revenue recognition because it “feels better.” Nobody casually stops by IT with some thoughts on network architecture.

Marketing?

Pull up a chair. Everyone has notes.

And I’m actually fine with that.

Some of the best marketing insights I’ve received have come from salespeople, product leaders, customer experience teams and executives.

The opportunity is making sure all those perspectives lead us back to the same place: **The customer. **The customer is our North Star, and when opinions, instincts and data pull us in different directions, they’re the one who should ultimately guide us home.

And increasingly, I think there’s another piece to this.

A lot of the debates we blame on “too many opinions” are probably symptoms of something that happened much earlier.

We never agreed on what we were trying to accomplish in the first place.

“I Think One Video Would Have Been Enough”

Years ago, my team built a fairly substantial brand-affiliation campaign.

There was a dedicated landing page, a four-part video series, social advertising, email and supporting content. Different pieces were designed to reach people at different moments and give us multiple opportunities to tell the story.

After reviewing everything, a leader offered one piece of feedback:

“I think one video would have been enough.”

Maybe.

But the more interesting question was:

Why four?

There was a strategy behind it. People weren’t necessarily going to see every piece of content. Attention spans were short. Different messages could resonate with different audiences. Multiple assets also gave us opportunities to test, learn and optimize.

Then something happened that I loved.

Two existing customers emailed us specifically to say how much they enjoyed the video series and how much they appreciated the time and effort we had put into it.

Now, two emails aren’t exactly a statistically significant research study. I wasn’t about to add “two people loved it” to the quarterly KPI dashboard.

But they were a signal.

More importantly, they were a signal from the people we were actually trying to reach.

If the data eventually showed that one video did all the heavy lifting, fantastic. Kill the other three next time.

That’s the difference between an opinion and an insight.

One starts with what I would do.

The other starts with what we’re learning about the customer.

“We Have to Be at That Conference”

I once worked with a sales leader who, year after year, insisted we needed to attend a particular industry conference.

Why?

“We just have to be there.”

Maybe we did.

Were our buyers there?

“We just have to be there.”

Did it generate pipeline last year?

“We need to show up.”

Was there competitive intelligence suggesting we were losing business because we weren’t there?

You get the idea.

The funny thing is, events can be incredibly effective. Research reported by Event Marketer found that 78% of organizers considered in-person conferences, summits and conventions their organization’s most impactful marketing channel. I’ve seen it firsthand. By our third year at Future Proof Festival, we had learned, refined and transformed our approach. That year, the event generated a closed-won deal in less than two months and a 133% increase in qualified opportunities. The lesson wasn’t simply events work. It was that knowing exactly why you’re there, learning from each year and building the experience around clear business objectives can turn an event from a line item into a growth engine.

The same research found 70% struggle to demonstrate event ROI.

Those two statistics belong in the same conversation.

The answer isn’t automatically go to the conference.

It also isn’t automatically don’t go.

The better questions are: Who are we trying to reach? How many of them will be there? What happened last year? What opportunities did the event influence? What are customers telling us? What does success look like this year?

Maybe after looking at all of that, the answer is:

Absolutely. Book the booth.

Great.

Now we’re making a business decision rather than expressing a preference.

“Why Don’t We Just Run the Lead Gen Ads?”

Another conversation came when a customer experience leader looked at a full-funnel advertising program we were running.

We had awareness creative, consideration messaging, retargeting and lead-generation ads.

The question was straightforward:

“Why are we running all these other ads? We need leads. Why don’t we just run the lead-gen play?”

It’s actually a logical question.

We did need leads.

Unfortunately, customers have this terribly inconvenient habit of having a journey before becoming one.

Most people don’t discover a company they’ve never heard of and immediately think:

Wonderful. Where can I give these strangers my name, email address and phone number?

They might see the brand first. Encounter it again. Read something useful. Watch a video. Search for the company later. Compare it with a competitor. Recognize the name when it appears again.

Trust accumulates. And so does mental availability.

This is something Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have written about extensively. Brand building isn’t simply about making people “aware” of you. It’s about increasing the likelihood that your brand is noticed, recognized or thought of when a buying situation eventually arrives.

That’s the part we sometimes forget when we’re staring at this month’s lead goal. Not everyone seeing your advertising today is ready to buy today. But when they are ready, being one of the brands that comes to mind is enormously valuable.

Then, eventually, some of them raise their hand.

That’s why brand and demand generation aren’t competing ideas. One helps make the other work.

So the more useful question isn’t whether awareness or lead generation is “right.”

It’s:

What does our customer’s journey actually look like?

How many interactions happen before conversion? Which channels assist conversions? Do people exposed to upper-funnel campaigns convert differently later? Where are prospects dropping out? What happens to acquisition costs when we change the media mix?

Maybe the answer really is to put more money into lead generation.

Fantastic.

Now the customer and the data helped us make the decision.

Sales Is Incredibly Important. It’s Just Not the Target Audience.

Sales should be one of marketing’s closest partners.

They hear things we don’t. They hear objections. They know which questions prospects repeatedly ask. They know what causes deals to stall. They often hear about competitors before marketing does.

That information is gold.

But there’s an important distinction.

Sales is not usually the target audience.

Neither is the CEO.

Neither is the CMO.

Neither is the person sitting three seats down from you in the conference room.

The customer is.

It sounds painfully obvious until you’re sitting in a meeting reviewing creative and someone says:

“I don’t think customers care about that.”

Maybe they don’t.

But there’s a much more useful question:

Do we know that?

Because if sales has heard the same objection in 30 customer conversations, I want to hear it.

If customer research shows buyers don’t understand our positioning, I want to know.

If conversion data says our favorite campaign isn’t working, change it.

And if customers are behaving completely differently than our beautiful PowerPoint predicted they would, congratulations.

The customer wins.

That’s marketing’s North Star.

What do they need? What do they want? What are they trying to accomplish? What frustrates them? What motivates them? What are they worried about? What keeps them up at night?

We aren’t marketing to ourselves.

Maybe the Real Problem Starts Before the Marketing Does

The more I think about it, a lot of these debates probably shouldn’t happen in the first place.

Because many marketing disagreements aren’t really disagreements about marketing.

They’re disagreements about an objective nobody clearly aligned on at the beginning.

Take the conference example.

Before anyone signs a contract, the leadership team should know why we’re going.

Are we there to generate net-new pipeline?

Meet existing customers?

Enter a new market?

Build relationships with strategic partners?

Increase awareness among a specific audience?

Support sales conversations already underway?

Those are very different objectives.

And they require very different marketing plans.

If everyone agrees upfront that the goal is generating qualified opportunities, great. Build the event strategy around that and determine how you’re going to measure it.

If the objective is strengthening relationships with your 20 largest customers, also great.

But don’t come back afterward and declare the event unsuccessful because we didn’t scan 700 badges.

You can’t change the definition of success after you’ve seen the results.

The same applies to almost everything marketing does.

Why are we running the campaign?

Why are we creating four videos?

Why are we investing in awareness?

Why are we redesigning the website?

Why are we sponsoring the event?

What are we trying to accomplish, for whom, and how will we know if it worked?

Get the CEO, sales, marketing, finance and whoever else matters aligned on those answers before the work begins.

I suspect a remarkable number of marketing “problems” would disappear right there.

Because once the objective is clear, opinions become much easier to evaluate.

Instead of “I don’t think we need four videos,” we can ask whether four videos help accomplish the objective.

Instead of “we have to attend this conference,” we can ask whether the conference gives us the best opportunity to reach the audience we’ve agreed matters.

Instead of “just run lead-gen ads,” we can look at whether doing so actually produces the pipeline and economics the business agreed it needs.

Suddenly the conversation isn’t about who has the strongest opinion.

It’s about the objective.

So Why Does Marketing Invite So Many Opinions?

I think there’s a simple explanation. Marketing is unusually accessible.

Most executives don’t personally experience the company’s cybersecurity architecture or accounting controls.

They absolutely experience its marketing.

And unlike many business functions, marketing contains things specifically designed to create reactions: words, colors, photographs, videos, events, websites and stories.

People are supposed to have opinions about those things.

That’s literally why we make them.

The trick is remembering that an internal reaction and a customer reaction aren’t necessarily the same thing.

“I don’t like this headline” is a reaction.

“Customers consistently respond better to this message” is an insight.

Both are useful.

They’re simply different kinds of information.

Ironically, We Have More Data Than Ever

This is what makes the whole thing interesting.

Marketing has never had more information available to it.

We can measure customer behavior, conversion, acquisition cost, pipeline contribution, retention, lifetime value, brand lift, search demand, engagement and dozens of other signals.

Yet MMA Global research found only 30% of marketers trust their KPIs enough to use them to drive strategy, while only 29% can trace decisions back to a data-supported rationale.

Meanwhile, Supermetrics found marketers are working with 230% more data than they were in 2020, while 56% say they don’t have enough time to analyze it thoroughly.

That’s quite a contradiction.

We have dashboards for our dashboards, yet organizations are still perfectly capable of making major marketing decisions because someone said:

“I just think we should.”

Maybe marketing doesn’t need more data.

Maybe we need more discipline about turning data into insight and insight into decisions.

Because a dashboard isn’t a strategy.

Neither is an opinion.

But Data Doesn’t Get the Only Vote

There’s another trap here.

“Data-driven marketing” can become a religion of its own.

Some of the best marketing decisions start with instinct.

Great marketers notice something before there’s enough data to prove it. They understand human behavior. They spot cultural shifts. They make creative leaps. They form hypotheses and test them.

If every new idea required three years of historical data before anyone could try it, we’d never do anything new.

The goal isn’t to eliminate judgment.

It’s to understand what kind of information we’re dealing with.

“I prefer this creative” is a preference.

“Customers repeatedly describe this problem using these words” is an insight.

“This message increased conversion 22%” is evidence.

“I think this positioning could resonate better with CFOs, and here’s how we could test it” is a hypothesis.

All four can be valuable.

They just shouldn’t automatically carry the same weight.

Marketing Has to Earn It, Too

Marketers have a responsibility in this conversation.

If we want the organization to move beyond opinions, we have to give people something better to work with.

We need to be able to explain why we’re doing something.

What’s the business objective?

Who is the audience?

What customer insight led us here?

What behavior are we trying to influence?

What are we testing?

How will we know whether it worked?

What will make us change course?

Nielsen research found stakeholder alignment around key metrics is marketers’ biggest ROI measurement challenge.

That makes a lot of sense.

If sales walks into the room looking for leads, finance is looking for revenue, marketing is looking at pipeline, the CEO is thinking about brand growth and nobody agreed on the objective beforehand, the campaign review is going to get interesting very quickly.

Agree on the objective first.

Then have the debate.

And Leaders Can Make Marketing Better

This may be the biggest opportunity of all.

CEOs and business leaders should challenge marketing.

Some of the best leaders I’ve worked with asked incredibly hard questions.

But the best ones were curious before they were prescriptive.

Instead of “I don’t like this,” they asked:

“What led you here?”

Instead of “We should be doing more video,” they asked:

“What are we seeing from customers?”

Instead of “Sales says we need to be at this conference,” they asked:

“What do we know about who’s attending, and what are we trying to accomplish by being there?”

That subtle difference matters.

Because if the most senior person in the room consistently provides the answer, eventually everyone else gets very good at bringing them the answer they already wanted.

Congratulations. We have achieved alignment.

Just perhaps not the useful kind.

The best leaders I’ve worked with did something different. They aligned everyone around the objective, challenged the assumptions, asked for evidence and then gave the people they hired room to do their jobs.

A strong CEO doesn’t need to become the CMO. And a strong CMO shouldn’t expect the CEO to simply nod approvingly at the marketing plan.

What you want is productive tension.

Challenge the thinking. Ask hard questions. Bring information marketing may not have. Push on the economics. Ask what success looks like. Ask what we’ll learn if something fails.

Then give the team enough room to test the hypothesis.

Marketing owes leadership the same thing in return.

If the CEO asks why we’re spending $500,000 on something, “trust us, we’re marketers” is not an acceptable strategy.

We should be able to explain the investment in business terms.

What problem are we solving? For whom? Why do we believe this will work? What are we measuring? What are we learning? What would cause us to change course?

That’s simply good leadership on both sides.

Maybe Marketing Doesn’t Need Less Scrutiny

It needs better scrutiny.

Ask why we created four videos.

Ask why we’re going to the conference.

Ask why we’re spending money at the top of the funnel.

Ask what customer research says.

Ask what sales is hearing.

Ask what we’re testing.

Ask what happened last time.

Ask how we’re measuring it.

Ask what we’ll change if it doesn’t work.

And marketing should be prepared to answer.

Because healthy debate makes the work better. Sales knows things marketing doesn’t. Product knows things marketing doesn’t. Customer experience certainly does. Finance can challenge assumptions everyone else missed.

That’s exactly what you want around the table.

But there’s an important difference between bringing a perspective into the conversation and allowing that perspective to replace the customer or an objective the business already agreed upon.

The customer is still our North Star.

What do they need? What do they want? What are they trying to solve? What frustrates them? What keeps them up at night?

And what evidence do we have to support what we think we know about them?

That’s the conversation I want to have.

Marketing isn’t a department that should be protected from opinions. Healthy debate makes the work better.

Bring the opinion. Bring the experience. Bring the challenge.

Just bring some curiosity with it.

Ask what the customer is telling us. Ask what the data says. Ask what we’re trying to accomplish. Ask how we’ll know if it worked.

And perhaps most importantly, agree on what winning looks like before marketing starts trying to win.

Because “I think” can start a really good marketing conversation.

It just shouldn’t be where the conversation ends.