Marketing was never meant to be a department

Why Functionalisation Broke the Discipline and What Comes Next

In the race to scale, streamline, and specialise, the corporate world made a critical mistake: it functionalised marketing. What began as the voice of the market within the business, strategically embedded in how companies conceive, create, and deliver value was fragmented into a patchwork of departments: brand, content, digital, performance, PR, CRM, ABM and more. In doing so, organisations neutered marketing’s strategic potential, reducing it from a driving force of commercial innovation to a service provider at the tail end of the value chain.

This dismemberment hasn’t just diluted marketing’s impact; it has fractured the connective tissue between strategy and execution. It’s time to reimagine marketing, not as a function, but as a set of foundational disciplines of commercial leadership, a group of dispclines embedded within a commercial strategy, innovation and operations framework, a commercial and customer value management system.

From Driving Strategy to Delivering Assets

Historically, marketing was the custodian of value creation. It didn’t just ‘sell’ what the business made; it helped determine what the business should make. The best marketers shaped propositions, influenced pricing strategy, informed product development, and curated customer experiences. They didn’t just interpret commercial strategy, they authored it.

But as organisations grew, marketing was carved into sub-functions, each with its own language, metrics, and P&L responsibilities. This specialisation may have boosted operational efficiency, but it obliterated cohesion. Brand became divorced from performance. Content divorced from commerce. Insight divorced from innovation. The result, strategy gets defined in boardrooms, while execution is delegated to siloed teams scrambling to reverse-engineer relevance.

This misalignment has created a systemic risk. Brands lose coherence. Value propositions lack clarity. Campaigns become episodic rather than cumulative. Marketing becomes a cost centre rather than a generator of enterprise value.

The Separation of Brand and Marketing: A Strategic Error

Perhaps the most destructive schism is the split between brand and marketing. Somewhere along the way, "brand" was assigned to a separate team, often nestled in corporate affairs or design, while "marketing" was pushed toward channels, pipeline filling and campaigns.

This binary is false. Brand is not a logo or a tone of voice, it is the cumulative perception of value across every commercial and operational touchpoint. It cannot be decoupled from marketing because marketing is how that perception is continuously shaped, tested, and evolved in the market. Treating brand as static and marketing as reactive only ensures both fail.

The False Comfort of Channel-Centric Thinking

The rise of digital platforms promised data-driven accountability. But it also invited a reductive mindset: if it’s measurable, it must be meaningful. Performance marketing surged, content proliferated, dashboards multiplied. And yet, many organisations now spend more time optimising click-through rates than designing customer-centric offers with enduring value.

Marketing became more about distribution than discovery. And that’s a problem. Because commercial advantage stems not just from reaching people, but from understanding them deeply enough to create things they didn’t yet know they wanted.

Marketing as Commercial Architecture

To correct this, we must reframe marketing not as a department, but as part of a commercial architecture, a set of disciplines amongst many that spans:

• Commercial Innovation – identifying new needs, segments, and whitespace for growth

• Offer Design – shaping products, services, and pricing models that fit those needs

• Customer Development – orchestrating end-to-end experiences that build engagement, acquisition and retention

• Intellectual Capital Growth – enhancing the intangible assets that create margin: brand equity, data, community, content ecosystems, reputation

This is not about collapsing all teams into one giant marketing monolith. It’s about rejecting the notion that marketing is merely executional. Instead, it is a meta-discipline that unifies product, strategy, sales, service, and brand into a coherent system of value creation and delivery.

Marketing as Legacy, Not Just Tactics

Too often, marketing is judged by the last campaignl, clicks, conversions and impressions. But the true power of marketing lies in its ability to build legacy. Great marketing creates platforms for growth that compound over time: distinctive positioning, customer insight capabilities, enduring brand preference, market legitimacy.

These are strategic assets. They elevate margin. They reduce customer acquisition costs. They build optionality into the business model. And they become ever more important in markets where commoditisation is one algorithm away.

Marketing as Orchestrator and Conduit

In its highest form, marketing is orchestration, the conductor of how value is perceived, experienced, and expanded across every commercial motion. It is the interface between internal intention and external impact. It is the translator of business models into customer meaning. It is not downstream of strategy, it is the mechanism through which strategy becomes real.

From Function to Faculty: A New Mental Model

We must stop treating marketing as a function and start cultivating it as a faculty, a cross-disciplinary capability embedded into every facet of commercial decision-making, part of an eco-syste of commercial discipline that orchestrates customer and commercial value. Just as finance is not confined to the CFO’s office, marketing must permeate product teams, innovation labs, C-suites, and frontline sales.

From Fragmentation to Fusion

Marketing never belonged in a silo. It belongs at the centre, of insight, of innovation, of impact. The functionalisation of marketing may have brought short-term efficiency, but it has come at the cost of long-term coherence, creativity, and commercial impact.

To reclaim its rightful role, marketing must expand its remit and deepen its integration. Not as a service provider, but as a strategic co-pilot. Not as a campaign machine, but as a creator of intellectual capital and intengible assets. Not as a department, but asa sert of disciplines in a living value management system through which businesses perceive, respond to, and shape the world.

It’s time to stop asking what marketing does, and start asking what marketing is. And in that answer lies the future of strategy itself.

This means re-skilling leaders, re-structuring teams, and re-defining success. It means designing operating models where brand, product, sales, and service don’t just coordinate, but co-create.

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Useful references

Marketing as Strategy – Nirmalya Kumar - repositions marketing as a boardroom-level strategic discipline, not a downstream function. Kumar argues for marketing’s centrality in shaping corporate strategy, especially in commoditised markets.

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works – A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin - how strategy choices should inform and integrate with go-to-market approaches. It reinforces the role of customer value creation as central to strategic thinking.

How Brands Grow – Byron Sharp - challenges conventional wisdom and emphasizes scientific, evidence-based marketing - underlines the long-term, cumulative nature of brand-building.

The Long and the Short of It – Les Binet & Peter Field (IPA) - analysis proving the need for balance between long-term brand building and short-term performance marketing.

The Marketing Playbook – John Zagula & Rich Tong - strategic approach to understanding how marketing decisions shape competitive advantage, product-market fit, and growth models.

Managing the Professional Service Firm – David Maister - insights into marketing as a system of trust-building, intellectual capital creation, and value-based positioning, parallels for redefining marketing’s strategic role.