Has Marketing Become Too Complicated?

As we speak, leadership teams around the globe are trying to resolve a major marketing issue - it all of a sudden seems too complex for one person or one department to orchestrate. The worrying thing is, many seem to have decided that the answer is to get rid of the CMO. In the past couple of years alone, UPS, Etsy and Walgreens have abolished the role outright, sharing the pieces around operations, finance, and beyond. Fewer than half the marketing leaders at the world's biggest companies still carry the title CMO. The logic sounds reasonable: marketing has sprawled into everything, so stop pretending one person can own it and parcel it out to executives you can actually measure. It is half right, and the conviction that gives is what makes it dangerous.

The half that is right is that marketing really has outgrown the department. It used to be a team with a budget and a remit. It is now a horizontal function running across the whole organisation, which is a polite way of saying it sits nowhere in particular.

What is Marketing?

Let’s be clear about what we mean by marketing. Philip Kotler defined it as "the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit." More plainly: if brand is how a company is perceived in its markets, marketing is the levers that management pull, the decisions they make and the resources they deploy to shift that perception. Seen this way, it’s clear these decisions don’t all live in one department. Pricing often sits in finance; distribution can be with retail, digital, operations, perhaps sales; the product itself with product or service teams. According to McKinsey, more than two-thirds of marketing chiefs say two or more executives now share control of it.

Because the function is horizontal but the structure is vertical, the same work gets done in several places at once, under different names, so nobody notices the duplication. The customer that marketing calls an ideal customer profile is the person product calls a user persona, sales calls a target account and retail calls a shopper. Each silo solves its slice in good faith, and the effort multiplies while the coherence does not. The technology follows the same logic: a martech landscape of roughly 150 products in 2011 now runs past 15,000, because every team buys its own tool for its own version of the same job.

Taking a company-wide approach.

So boards and management are not wrong in thinking that something is broken. They are wrong about what. The problem is not the people; it is the labels. Peter Drucker saw it half a century ago, insisting marketing "cannot be considered a separate function" and must permeate the whole enterprise. Call one department marketing and one person head of marketing, and you have told everyone what they are. You have also quietly told everyone else what they are not. The result is companies full of people called marketers who do not control all of marketing, and people shaping marketing every day who would never describe  themselves as marketers.

Seen that way, the title is a fair thing to question; the person is not. Companies that simply delete the role and scatter the tasks tend to regret it: McDonald's scrapped its global CMO in 2019 and reinstated it within a year. The ones that get more from the change tend to relabel rather than amputate. When Airbnb merged its product and product marketing functions and made designing and describing the product part of everyone's job, Brian Chesky replicated the Apple-esque product marketing function. The move was framed as a matter of semantics more than substance, which is precisely the point. Get the language right and the work starts to reorganise itself.

What is missing, then, is not people, tools or another reorganisation. It is a common language: a shared way of seeing and managing this horizontal landscape as one system, not a dozen overlapping projects under different names. A map for marketing, if you like. It is also, quietly, why so many customer-first strategies stall. The customer does not care about the org chart, but the language of business keeps putting the org chart in their way. With a shared map, the duplication eases, discussions get more efficient and more objective, and capital flows to where it does the most good, regardless of which department that happens to be in. The customer meets one coherent company instead of the seams between its silos.

So...has it become too complicated?

So, has marketing become too complicated? Yes, but only too complicated for the management system we insist on confining it to. The companies deleting the role to tidy the org chart will get a tidier chart and a more confused customer. The ones that win will do the opposite: let marketing transcend departmental Silos, give it a shared language, and a map to diagnose, plan, and execute collaboratively.

This isn't a repositioning problem on its own, but if reading this made you wonder whether your business has drifted from what it actually does, that's worth checking properly. Start with What is Repositioning? or take the Repositioning Diagnostic to get a straight answer in four minutes.