Marketing's Methodology Crisis

Marketing is broken. Not because it’s ineffective, but because it’s incoherent.

For all the noise about data, digital, and “customer-centricity,” marketing remains one of the least methodologically mature functions in the modern enterprise. It lacks the unifying logic of an operating system, and it shows in misfiring campaigns, tactical myopia, performance theatre, and a persistent inability to prove, let alone maximise, commercial impact.

The harsh truth? Marketing doesn’t have a method problem; it has a methodology vacuum.

Despite decades of books, frameworks, tools, and technologies, there is no accepted standard for how marketing should function as a commercial discipline. Not as a department, not as a function. Not as a collection of channels. But as a dynamic system for creating, managing, and extracting customer and commercial value. And that absence is costing businesses real money, real credibility, and real opportunity.

The Mirage of Method

Ask a marketer how their function works, and you’ll often get a string of tactics: “We do content marketing. We’ve got an ABM strategy. We’re ramping up paid media.” Probe further, and you'll hear about segmentation, personas, IDC’s, positioning, funnels, campaign calendars, KPIs. But dig beneath the surface, and you’ll find something alarming: a lack of underlying structure. No operating system. No end-to-end logic.

Compare this to finance or supply chain, domains underpinned by rigorous frameworks, clear processes, and continuous improvement cycles. In marketing, by contrast, structure is often mistaken for bureaucracy, and frameworks are seen as antithetical to creativity.

That mindset is not just wrong, it’s dangerous.

Creativity Is Not the Enemy of Process, It’s the Output of It

Let’s dispel a myth: process does not kill creativity. In fact, process makes creativity possible at scale. A rigorous methodology can liberate teams from tactical firefighting, free up bandwidth for strategic thinking, and expose what works so it can be amplified.

Yet marketing continues to conflate spontaneity with innovation. As a result, we get randomness disguised as agility, and activity mistaken for impact. Under pressure from boards and CFOs, marketers scramble to prove performance using metrics that often measure correlation, not causation, all while operating without a clear theory of value creation.

The Real Issue: Marketing Is Trapped in Functional Thinking

Here lies the root of the problem. Marketing is still seen, and sees itself, as a function, not part of a commercial and customer value management system.

This legacy view reduces marketing to communications, campaigns, and collateral. It separates it from product, sales, customer success, and commercial strategy. And it leaves marketing fighting for scraps at the strategic table, even as customer value becomes the currency of competitive advantage.

But imagine a different paradigm, one where marketing is reimagined as the orchestrator of customer and commercial value. Not in a silo, but as the connective tissue across the enterprise. In this model, marketing is less about departments and more about dynamic capability, a configuration of disciplines, processes, and data flows designed to understand, shape, and monetise demand.

A New Operating System for Marketing

What marketing needs now is not another campaign framework or Martech stack. It needs a coherent commercial operating system, one that integrates strategy, planning, execution, measurement, and optimisation into a unified model.

Such a system must:

• Anchor marketing in business value, not just brand visibility.

• Integrate disciplines across silos, from insight to innovation to revenue realisation.

• Balance adaptability with discipline, enabling agility without chaos.

• Support strategic choices, not just tactical actions.

• Create space for creativity, by eliminating operational waste and confusion.

  
  

Frameworks like AdaptomyDNA (Sense, Re-think, Propagate, Fulfil, Renew), point in this direction, modular, scalable systems that bring method to the madness, by building marketing capability as a system of systems through over 70 integrated disciplines. Not a process for its own sake, but a means to drive coherence, performance, and credibility. A way to understand and build differential advantage through a customer and commercial value management system.

Frameworks like AdaptomyDNA bring essential structure to the chaos of modern marketing by systematically organising tools, techniques, tactical approaches, metrics, and measures within a coherent set of disciplines. AdaptomyDNA assigns planning and execution approaches like SOSTAC, OGSM, RACE, or JTBD to the appropriate context, sequencing and applying them where they can genuinely drive strategic and commercial value. It’s the same with other analysis tools, techniques and approaches like Stacey Framework, Cynefin, BCG Matrix, The 4 P’s and COM-B. This ensures that executional approaches are not used in isolation but as part of an integrated system that supports traceable outcomes.

Similarly, performance metrics, including structured models like Gartner’s hierarchy, Free Cash Flow, Time to Benefit, Time to Market, EVA and Churn gain real meaning only when anchored to defined processes, aligned disciplines, and specific value management objectives. In this way, AdaptomyDNA transforms fragmented marketing practice into an orchestrated commercial capability and value management system. It facilitates development of adaptive multi-metric and measurement dashboards aligned with value management outcomes, not myopic departmental or functional performance metrics and measures that have little or no association with delivery of commercial and customer value.

Breaking the Straightjacket Before It's Too Late

Marketing is under siege. Budget pressures are tightening. Accountability demands are escalating. AI is commoditising execution. Without a clear, credible, and commercial framework for action, marketing risks becoming irrelevant, a cost centre, not a growth engine.

The way out is not more tools, more tactics, or more trend-chasing. It is a reconstitution of marketing as a strategic capability built on method, orchestrated across disciplines, and anchored in customer and commercial outcomes.

It’s time to stop asking whether marketing is “creative enough” and start asking whether it’s coherent enough to compete.

Because in the end, without method, marketing can’t scale. It can’t lead. And it certainly can’t deliver what the business and the customer actually need.

A Call to Action

Business leaders: demand more from your marketing teams than PowerPoint, personas and random collection of half-baked approaches, tools, techniques, and isolated technology. Insist on integrated frameworks, disciplined execution, and commercial acumen. Ask marketing to ‘step up’ and orchestrate customer and commercial value, not simply market research and campaigns.

CMOs: abandon departmental functionalism and rewire marketing around customer and commercial value creation and delivery, not campaign throughput but how to orchestrate strategic and tactical value through a value management system. Adopt, adapt, or develop a methodology that elevates marketing to its rightful strategic role.

Marketers: this is your moment to lead, but only if you’re willing to break the tactical addiction and embrace a broader commercial mandate. Develop intimate understanding of customer and commercial value creation and delivery, value management systems and the tools, technologies and approaches that support them.

The age of marketing as departmental functionalism is over. It’s time to get strategic, it’s time to expand, to orchestrate, it’s time to get methodological.

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For more on commercial strategy, innovation and operations, AdaptomyDNA and The Market Leaders Toolkit have a look at The Market Leaders Toolkit on Substack. You'll find many more articles like this, playbooks, snapshots, metrics and measures, tools and techniques that challenge orthodoxy and functional departmentalism.