Marketing Isn't Broken. It's Often Underutilized.

I've done consulting work for what seems like all industries. There’s a pattern I see between so many.

Companies want growth. They want visibility. They want stronger recruiting, better retention, investor confidence, brand recognition, and customer trust.

Often, the person who can help solve all of those challenges already works there. But they’ve been boxed into a role that’s more reactive than strategic. That person is usually in marketing.

The issue usually isn’t bad marketing.

It’s disconnected marketing. (If you don't believe it, you haven't seen how LinkedIn has become a place for Marketers to vent through memes.)

Marketing is often the only department that understands every part of the business. We sit in meetings with sales, operations, HR, finance, leadership, customer service, and sometimes even IT. We absorb the goals, the friction, the changes, and the gaps. Then we try to translate that into something the outside world can understand and act on.

That kind of role requires more than making things look good. It requires clarity, context, and authority.

The good news? This is fixable.

I’ve worked with companies that didn’t have a CRM, didn’t have formal branding, and didn’t have a clear customer journey. But they had smart people and good products. They just weren’t aligned.

The solution wasn’t more headcount or trendy tools. It was cross-functional clarity and permission for marketing to do its job the right way.

That started with questions.

What do we promise? What do we deliver? Where is there friction, confusion, or contradiction?

When you start answering those questions honestly, marketing becomes a strategic engine, not just a service department.

If you're asking, “Why isn’t our marketing working?”

Start here:

• Is marketing involved in conversations early enough to influence strategy?

• Do they have visibility into the challenges and wins across departments? 

• Are they seen as translators, or just task owners? Are they used as admins to churn out deliverables and not visionaries and changemakers?

• Is your external message matching your internal reality? Are avoiding that answer?

• Are you removing barriers so they can do their job? Did you add barriers?

• Do you think your sales department is more important or can replace marketing because a closed sale seems more tangible?

• Are you hiring outsiders instead of coordinating with your marketing team members who study both the upstream and downstream factors in branding?

• Are you connecting the dots between closed sales and the tools that the marketing department provided to close them? Did your sales team use those tools? Did you only give credit to the sales team for closing the sales even though the marketing department worked for months or years to build your brand credibility? All of these questions matter if you are dividing the departments without valuing the need for both to be successful.

• Are you hiding information from them that could give them the tools to shape your brand, even when you are in trouble?

Marketing is one of the few roles that connects the entire organization. We speak multiple languages...sales, recruiting, operations, compliance, leadership, and customer service. We spot disconnects before they show up on customer reviews or exit interviews. We carry insight most people don’t realize we have, because we’re constantly interpreting and aligning information across departments.

When that function is underutilized, the entire organization feels it.

Marketing is not broken. It’s just often buried under requests, overlooked in strategy meetings, and undercut by a lack of internal clarity. It's buried often by people who don't understand that marketing is not sales and sales is not marketing. They work together...or at least they should.

Fix that, and you’ll stop asking why it’s not working. You’ll start seeing what’s possible.