B2BFYI #5: The slow death of the marketing department

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B2BFYI is written by industry veterans Chris Bennett (Strategy), Geoff Bretherick (Creative) and Philip Bennison (Tech), and published bi-weekly. You can sign up here to get issues straight to your inbox.

This is an interesting issue. I had originally titled it “The rise and rise of the marketing department”, but I figured this wasn’t dramatic enough for a catchy hook. Just kidding, although I’m not (at all) - it’s just accurate.

Marketing teams across the world have faced a slow and agonising transformation from revenue driver to cost centre. In the eyes of Leadership, that is. And the capital ‘L’ is there to remind you that it’s a club that YOU AIN’T IN.

Let’s get to it, then. Warts and all.

Let’s time travel back to 1984. The CMO walks into Monday's board meeting. Sets the agenda. Owns the P&L. Extends their own budget by 20% to deliver that fancy new campaign the team came up with last week. Then slams a cassette in their Walkman and moonwalks out for a smoke break. Ah, the dream.

Fast forward to 2025. The "Head of Marketing" (because CMO? what CMO?) gets an email at 4:47pm on Friday. "Can you make this look pretty by Monday? Oh, and we've cut your budget. Again."

From boardroom regular to basement dweller in 40 years. Impressive, really 😖

And now we arrive at the uncomfortable truth most marketers don’t want to admit. Marketing departments are dying, and most of us are already ghosts. We just haven't realised we're haunting the building yet.

At the start of this month I spoke to a marketing director at a £20M tech firm. Someone I’ve known for a number of years now. Razor sharp. Great ideas. Zero authority. Their biggest achievement this quarter? Getting budget sign-off for a trade show. A bloody exhibition stand. After three attempts. And the approval? In the end it came from finance.

Since when did we become a cost centre? A colouring in deparment?

The 80’s and 90’s weren't just about questionable fashion choices and Duran Duran (listening age of 55 in Spotify Wrapped anyone?). Marketing owned the customer relationship. Full stop.

CMO’s were revenue architects. They didn't just influence buying decisions—*they created markets. They set budgets based on growth targets, not whatever crumbs fell from the CFO's table.

Marketing spoke and the boardroom listened. Why? Because marketing drove the business.

I worked with a guy who was a marketing director in '92. His stories make me simultaneously jealous and depressed. Budget meetings where marketing presented first. Strategy sessions where sales waited for marketing's lead. Product launches delayed until marketing said go.

Different times.

*leave my em dash alone. I’m a hobby novelist, alright…

Then digital happened. And we fumbled it. Spectacularly.

While sales got Salesforce and turned data into cashmoney, marketing got... Canva. And then argued about fonts.

The rise of "growth hacking" 🤮 convinced everyone that strategy was dead. Just A/B test your way to success! Except we tested our way straight into irrelevance.

But what really killed us? I think it’s because we stopped speaking business and started speaking tactics.

CFO’s started seeing marketing as a controllable cost, not an investment. Can't blame them really. When your biggest win is "increased engagement by 7%", you sound like a cost centre. You sound expendable. And you sound kinda lame.

Let me paint you a picture of marketing in 2025:

That strategy deck from consultants? Marketing's job is to add the logos and pick nice colours. The business strategy? Decided three levels above you.

"Here's what's left after we've funded everything important. Make it work." Sound familiar?

Can't change the product. Can’t tweak the services. Can't influence fees. Can't touch the customer experience. But when leads drop? Guess whose fault it is.

Your calendar is 87% "urgent" requests that could have been prevented with five minutes of strategic thinking. But who has time for strategy when there's a corporate newsletter read by 17 people to make pretty?

The result? Marketing teams get less strategic and more tactical every year. We're not marketers anymore. We're highly educated order-takers with Adobe licenses. We’re being sytematically killed off by BAU.

We've got 47 tools that don't talk to each other, each promising to revolutionise marketing. What they've actually done is turned marketers into IT support for badly integrated systems.

I watched a marketing manager last month try to pull a simple GA4 report across three platforms. Six. Hours. That's not marketing. That's masochism with a dashboard.

The opposite issue. There’s no web tracking. No ads attribution. You’ve not got a CRM (or you have and it’s shit and not connected to anything). If you’re crafting LinkedIn posts on a clay tablet, you might want to, ya know…modernise a little.

You can’t be innovative if you’re working with the equivalent of 18th century heritage equipment that belongs in a museum.

We're drowning in data (those of us lucky enough to have it) but dying of thirst for insights. Every metric tracked, nothing understood. We've confused measurement with meaning.

"We had 12,000 impressions!" Cool. How many deals did that influence? *crickets

Thanks to social media, everyone thinks they understand marketing. The CEO's nephew has 1,000 Instagram followers? He's basically a marketing guru. Let's definitely listen to his thoughts on our B2B strategy for enterprise heat pump technology installations.

The barrier to entry to marketing as a career these days is having a functioning circulatory system. There’s no rigour to it any more. Because it’s completely disconnected from actually driving revenue, anyone can sit in the pilot seat because the plane isn’t going anywhere.

This one stings because it's true. We've accepted our fate. Order comes in, we execute. No questions. No pushback. No wonder they treat us like the help.

Had a virtual coffee with a marketing manager recently who was genuinely excited about being included in a strategy meeting. Not leading it. Not influencing it. Just... being in the room. We've lowered the bar so far it's underground. We have a concept of involvement.

You: "We increased social engagement by 14%!"
CEO: "So?"
You: "We... increased it?"

If you can't draw a straight line from your activity to revenue, you're speaking a language leadership doesn't understand. Or care about.

When did we stop saying no? When did every poorly-thought-out request become our problem to solve?

Sales wants a 97-slide deck by tomorrow? "Yes!"

CEO wants to rebrand because they're bored? "Yes!"

Finance wants marketing to also handle reception? "Yes!"

We've yes'd ourselves into irrelevance. When we’re all things to all people, we’re nothing to anybody.

It's easier to be busy than effective. Busy looks like work. Busy feels safe. Busy means you don't have to confront the fact that what you're doing doesn't actually matter.

I see marketing teams celebrating 16-hour days like it's a badge of honour. It's not. It's a sign your function has no strategic value. If everything's urgent, nothing's important.

Simple: we gave it away 🤷 Piece by piece. Compromise by compromise.

First, we let sales own revenue. Then we let product/services own customer experience. Then we let finance own budgets. What's left? Brand theory and copywriting. Woop.

We speak totally different languages and wonder why they don't understand us.

Marketing: "We need to build brand equity through consistent touchpoint optimisation."
CEO: "What?"
Marketing: "We need to make things look nice?"
CEO: "Approved. But cheaper."

Try mentioning brand strategy in a board meeting. Watch eyes glaze over faster than you can say "brand architecture."

Brand became synonymous with "expensive thing marketing wants that doesn't make money." Because we never learned to connect brand to business outcomes.

At a networking event in summer, a CFO told me brand was "marketing's hobby." And to be super honest? Based on how most marketers talk about brand, I can't really blame the guy.

Right. Enough wallowing. Time to fix this mess.

Your next report? Bin the vanity metrics. Nobody cares about your 3% reduction in bounce rates if it didn't make a difference to the pipeline.

Start here: Pick three activities from last month. Draw a line to revenue. Can't do it? Stop doing those activities. Simple as.

I helped a marketing team do this last quarter. Turns out a good 60% of their work had zero connection to revenue. ZERO. They killed it all. Leadership suddenly very interested in marketing meetings.

Find one person in Leadership who gets it. Just one. Make them your translator.

They speak CEO. Their dialect is Managing Director. You speak marketing. Together, you build a bridge.

My translator at a previous gig was the COO. Ex-marketer turned ops guru. She'd translate my "we need brand consistency" into "we're leaving money on the table with confused messaging." Guess which version got budget approval?

Stop trying to do everything at once. Pick one thing that matters to the business. Own it like your job depends on it (because it probably does).

Not "improve social media." Something like "reduce customer acquisition cost by 20% through better targeting." Specific. Measurable. Connected to money 💰

Don't wait for finance to give you numbers. Build your own view of marketing's impact on revenue.

Spreadsheet. Dashboard. Whatever works. Just start tracking what you influence and what it's worth. Sometimes what you track might have to be vibes. I’m serious. If a sales rep or prospect-facing consultant mentions they had decent results from a slide deck, or a whitepaper then record it. THAT’S THE GOOD STUFF.

Every request needs a business case. Every. Single. One.

"We need a new website" becomes "Our conversion rate is 40% below industry standard. £150K investment pays back in 4 months and puts us on track to take 4% market share from [insert competitor the CEO hates here]."

Practice this until it's second nature. Your CFO will start to love you. Or at least tolerate you.

Make a show of stopping things. Send an email: "We're stopping the weekly newsletter nobody reads to focus on activities that drive pipeline."

People notice when you kill things. It shows you're serious about value, not just busy work.

I know. Sales. Those people who take credit for everything and blame marketing for everything else.

But you can’t escape from the fact that sales has power. Sales has the CEO's ear. Sales gets budget.

Make friends. Share wins. Give them credit (even when it kills you). A united commercial front is unstoppable.

Start a wins file. Every lead that converts. Every campaign that delivers. Every piece of content that influences a deal.

Screenshot it. Save it. Build your evidence base. 10x more useful than a GA4 dashboard showing a list of countries your web visitors are from.

Three months of this and you've got ammunition for budget conversations.

Stop talking about marketing transformation. Talk about business transformation with marketing as the catalyst.

"We need to modernise our marketing" = yawn. "We need to transform how we acquire and retain customers" = CEO's listening.

Own customer insights. Be the person who knows what customers actually think, want, and will pay for. Know what they’re thinking before THEY do.

Run the surveys. Do the interviews. Present the findings. Make yourself indispensable as the customer expert. Your entire team needs to spend 20% of their time doing nothing but this. The other 80% of their time is now totally dialled in to your ICPs.

Find out what keeps your CEO up at night. Pipeline? Churn? Market share? Booked calls? New business wins? Number of proposals sent out?

Own that number. Report on it weekly. Make it your north star. Sometimes the number is a bit weird, or doesn’t make a lot of sense - that’s just CEO’s doing CEO things. Work with it. Persuade them to look at something more relevant when you’ve built a stronger relationship and visibly driven a bunch of revenue.

When marketing owns a CEO-level metric, marketing gets a seat at the table.

Either build capabilities nobody else has, or bring in tech that makes you irreplaceable.

I've seen marketing teams save themselves by becoming the de facto data team. Or the customer insights team. Or the digital transformation team.

Find your angle. Become essential.

Here's where I might lose some of you. Ready?

Maybe marketing departments deserve to die.

😬

Hear me out.

The best marketing I've seen recently didn't come from marketing departments. It came from integrated teams where marketing thinking was embedded everywhere.

Service teams with marketers embedded. Sales teams with brand thinkers. Client success with content creators.

I worked with a technology company last year that dissolved their marketing department entirely. Ended up scattering the team across the business. Marketing headcount went from 7 to 0.

Results? Revenue up 44%. Because suddenly everyone was thinking about the customer, the message, the experience.

The forward-thinking companies are killing the marketing/sales divide altogether. One team. One target. One P&L.

No more finger-pointing. No more "marketing qualified" vs "sales qualified" nonsense. Just revenue.

Some companies are organising around the customer journey instead of functional silos.

Acquisition team. Activation team. Retention team. Straight from the tech playbook, but it works for complex B2B + services just as well. Each team has a mix of marketing, sales, product, and service people.

Makes sense when you think about it. Customers don't care about your org chart.

Small, autonomous teams with mixed skills. Designer, writer, developer, analyst. Move fast. Learn faster.

No marketing director reviewing everything. No seventeen rounds of approvals. Just teams close to the customer making decisions.

Spotify does this. So does ING. It works.

The generalist marketer is dead. Or, at least, the idea of what a generalist marketer used to be. The old "I do a bit of everything" person has no place in the future. Instead, it will be the person who can connect the dots between multiple marketing functions, AI and human expertise. Emily Kramer’s Gen Marketer concept is spot on. Check it out.

Learn to be flexible, to ride the tides of changing buying behaviours, changing platforms and volatile algorithms. Become a tamer of chaos. Stitch it all together with AI. Then learn the language of business.

Generalist knowledge base + AI + business insight + customer research.

Transferable: Customer insights, data analysis, storytelling, commercial thinking, technology fluency.

Traps: Platform expertise (Facebook ads manager), tool mastery (I'm a HubSpot expert!), channel ownership (I run social media).

Build skills that matter everywhere, not just in marketing.

Your value isn't your job title. It's your authority stack:

Build your stack. Your department might die, but your value doesn't have to.

So here we are. Marketing departments dying slowly while we argue about fonts and funnels.

You've got two choices:

Accept the slow death. Keep your head down. Follow orders. Celebrate your tactical wins while the ship sinks. There's no shame in it. Plenty of marketers are riding it out to retirement.

Or...

Fight for resurrection. Not of the old marketing department. That's pretty much gone at this point. But something new. Something valuable. Something that matters.

Start Monday morning. Walk into the office (or login from your kitchen table) and do one thing differently:

Small moves. But moves nonetheless.

The future of marketing isn't about saving marketing departments. It's about embedding marketing thinking so deeply into businesses that it becomes invisible. Indispensable. Inevitable. Like Thanos.

The marketers who survive won't be the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest titles. They'll be the ones who stopped waiting for permission to matter.

Your move.

So what's your resurrection story going to be? What are you doing to fight the slow death? Or have you already given up?

Hit reply. Tell me your horror stories. Your small wins. Your resurrection plans.

Because if we're going to fix this mess, we need to stop pretending everything's fine and start admitting we've got a problem.

In an upcoming issue, we’ll talk about what happens when marketing wins. When you get the budget, the authority, the seat at the table. Spoiler: It's not what you think.

If you want to have your say, let me know.

Until then, stop accepting the slow death. Start planning your resurrection.

-Chris

P.S. If this hit close to home, forward it to another marketer who needs to hear it. Misery loves company, but transformation needs a community.

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This month we have the following resource for you:

30-day marketing quick wins checklist: Covering 33 checkpoints to help you steer toward revenue ownership and renewed authority in just 30 days.

For Marketing teams fighting for survival. When you have no budget, no authority, and need to prove value FAST. Get back on track in just 30 days. Battle-tested with 50+ clients.