Rethinking Marketing

When marketing limits itself to advertising and neglects the other three Ps — Price, Product, and Place — it shrinks its own relevance. The CMO becomes a “sales pitch guy,” when in fact they should be the central driver of value in the company.
In marketing-driven organizations, they are — and sometimes they even hold another title: CEO.

The reasons for marketing’s loss of significance are manifold. Companies have organized themselves in silos, separating product development and sales from marketing. Alongside these structural and organizational shifts came digitization as a key driver. A whole generation of marketing leaders — now gradually leaving the stage — lacked a real understanding of the digital revolution in marketing. As a result, digital capabilities were initially built elsewhere and only slowly migrated into marketing departments.

In a later phase, digitization also eroded brand competence. The rise of performance marketing did bring marketing closer to sales again — but often at the expense of the brand. This is where the measurability trap snapped shut. Performance can be measured more easily in the lower funnel than in the upper funnel, and digital channels are naturally advantaged here. In earlier crises, cuts often hit marketing budgets as a whole — now it’s the brand that takes the hit.

What can be directly tied to revenue is less likely to be cut.
This left the CMO as the operator of a complex, expensive digital sales engine with questionable contribution to value creation. Maintaining this system with the help of agencies and IT service providers absorbs enormous capacity — but does little to differentiate brands in the market. The CMO — or what’s left of the role — is caught in a double trap: little influence on the product, and weakened brand competence. After all, brands and brand experiences today are shaped less by advertising than they once were.

To escape this trap, marketing must cross boundaries. It’s not enough to break down silos and restructure the organization. Marketing needs a new strategy.
And that brings us to the second boundary to cross.

In its purest form, strategy means letting go — stripping away the unnecessary and taking the painful path to what truly matters. To regain its ability to act, marketing must shed ballast, reduce complexity, and eliminate costs that don’t contribute to value creation. That’s easier said than done. Marketing doesn’t lack crazy ideas, channels, touchpoints, or communication opportunities. What’s scarce are independent directional decisions and strategic commitment.

Many companies can’t do this on their own — and agencies aren’t necessarily equipped to do it either. Agencies have people with specific skills who need to stay billable. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. On the client side, budgets and internal marketing capacities are limited. Out of an unprecedented abundance of possibilities — combined with ambitious goals and finite resources — a need for strategic guidance emerges.

This gap has attracted new players in recent years. The technologization of marketing has brought IT firms into the game that had previously shown little interest in marketing. Consulting firms, viewing marketing through the lens of organizational development, have also entered the field. And agencies are fighting for their share of the pie by expanding their consulting capabilities. It’s nothing less than the reinvention of strategy and consulting.

Armed with seniority and a mandate to cross boundaries, these new strategists and advisors are developing a holistic view of marketing. Strategy means defining missions that involve risk, uncertainty, and critical business decisions. A clear focus can be a radical liberation. But the road there is painful because it exposes everything marketing can no longer do — and shouldn’t do anymore. Ego, emotion, fear of loss, and nostalgia are attached to those things.

But if marketing doesn’t shed its old skin, it becomes interchangeable. And that’s exactly what has happened — on the client side and the agency side alike. Just like marketing, agencies are caught in their own strategic trap. And just like marketing, they too must (once again) cross boundaries.

It does marketing little good to treat agency services as interchangeable commodities and buy them primarily on price.
Marketing exists to differentiate brands and products — and to do that, it typically needs agencies that are radical and strategic, not interchangeable.

There was a time — or perhaps it’s just a myth — when agencies attracted rebels. People with conviction, who crossed boundaries, stood their ground, and didn’t play by the rules. Very little of that remains today. Agencies have become small corporates, presenting themselves in pitches with polished processes and methods. They’ve grown too similar to their clients — and fallen straight into the commodity trap.

From a marketing perspective, however, an agency’s true value lies in its deep understanding of culture, zeitgeist, and societal shifts. In seeing what resonates — and translating it into brands. Or the other way around: embedding brands into cultural movements and moments in time. Instead, many now manage stakeholders, administer processes, and fill out spreadsheets. It seems as if control has become their answer to overwhelming complexity.

This runs counter to the very creative core of their role.
The trap agencies are stuck in is their outdated, decades-old business model. When you bill based on day rates, you have a fundamental problem: you’re forced to make your actual efforts fully transparent, regardless of the real value you create. The majority of that value lands with the client, who is constantly trying to push down the rates. If an agency can’t enforce high — or at least sustainable — rates, it will lose this game.

Marketing needs agencies to solve creative problems it cannot solve itself. But hours worked are a poor indicator of value created. The business model should reflect value creation, not incentivize maximizing time spent or day rates. This shift is also in the best interest of advertisers. They want to buy solutions — not hours.

Agencies can sell growth and value creation, and in doing so, escape the commodity trap.
This gives everyone involved the chance to work far more efficiently.
The path there, however, is painful — as noted above.

Marketing must (once again) cross the boundary into pop culture.
Since the rise of the internet, the number, size, and influence of subcultures has continuously grown. As a counterbalance to the much-lamented fragmentation of marketing channels, pop-cultural phenomena emerge — often from niche communities — and ripple out into the mainstream. Pop comes from “popular,” and a certain degree of popularity, at least within the target audience, is — if not the most important goal of advertising — certainly one of them.

The task for advertisers is to blur the lines between advertising, pop culture, and genres. Advertising should once again be something people actually enjoy — something they want to watch, share, and make their own because it’s part of pop culture. To do that, brands need a cultural fit with the (sub)culture they engage with. It’s a give-and-take: brands must ask themselves and the culture they want to tap into what it needs — and what they can contribute. What might resonate? What won’t?

Only through this dialogue can campaign ideas emerge — together with representatives of the subculture — that truly create cultural resonance. Ideally, these campaigns are realized with artists, photographers, and directors from the scene itself. This approach is rooted in authenticity — or, as it’s often called in this context, credibility.

It’s a departure from the old logic that started with the brand and the product and worked outward toward the target group.
Cultural marketing begins with finding cultural fit and engaging in dialogue with subcultures. It reshapes marketing’s self-image (think humility) — and it benefits agencies, even those that don’t position themselves as cultural marketing specialists.

Consumers and their desires are full of contradictions — because people are more than just buyers of industrial products.
They are part of cultures and communities. Consumers today are more digitally connected than ever, yet at the same time they crave meaningful experiences in the physical world. A paradox — or two sides of the same coin? The more products and services become interchangeable, the more experience comes to the forefront. Only a premium experience justifies a premium price.

Today, experiences almost always combine both digital and physical components. Consumers expect the same quality of brand experience online and offline. The art lies in weaving these two together to give the paradoxical consumer a seamless customer journey. Culture — or rather, cultures — always exist before a brand enters the stage. Cultures and subcultures manifest through communities, and the best a brand can do is contribute something meaningful: enrich an existing culture or community.

This flips a common assumption on its head: that brands own their communities. That may be true in some cases, but even a premium brand like Porsche doesn’t run most Porsche clubs itself. It’s people who are fascinated by the brand and its products. Communities organize themselves.

Marketing, on the other hand, has overused the term community to the point of emptiness. Today, even Facebook fans, newsletter subscribers, or loyalty card holders are labeled as “communities.” “Community” has become one of marketing’s most overused buzzwords in recent years. Very few brands will ever become the core of their own community. Instead, the real task is community matching: finding existing, strong communities where a brand can meaningfully contribute.

The customer journey today is inevitably a hybrid of digital and physical — in almost every case. Yet few brands have their touchpoints orchestrated well enough to create a truly consistent brand experience. A common weakness shared by online and offline players alike is an excessive focus on the transaction. Performance marketing is often over-optimized to the last percentage point — at the expense of brand and experience. In physical retail, storytelling and staging frequently take a back seat to immediate sales.

Brick-and-mortar retail must move beyond its fixation on the transaction and embrace the paradigm of the experience economy. People still come to city centers — not necessarily to shop, but to experience something. Paradoxical, hyper-digital consumers still need physical spaces to experience brands, products, and — crucially — other people.

Crossing this boundary means creating an ecosystem in which the digital and physical not only coexist but enrich and amplify one another. This kind of marketing leverages the power of experience to build enduring connections between brand and consumer — weaving them into a constantly evolving shared story.

The physical act of purchase thus becomes just one stop along a longer journey of brand interaction — one that continues well beyond the point of sale.

Marketing today is under pressure from increasing complexity, the ongoing fragmentation of channels and audiences, the growing importance of technology, and rising speed. This dynamic is mirrored in the agency landscape and forces marketing leaders to confront a central question: What is the right agency setup?

In the past, the question was simple: Who is the lead agency? — and the answer was often: a creative agency. Creativity is still essential today, but it must be placed in the right context: data-driven marketing. Whoever controls the martech systems — and thus the data — holds the advantage.

This gives media agencies a key role. They sit on a treasure trove of data that would belong to advertisers if they had the capabilities to unlock it themselves. Agencies and consultants can help — creating a data-driven foundation for marketing on which all partners can build. Beyond classical sociodemographics, behavioral targeting and mindset-based targeting now play a major role. Mindset-based targeting, in combination with AI-powered production capabilities, opens up new levels of personalization.

At this point, collaboration with creative agencies becomes critical — and the question of the modus operandi arises. Ultimately, the goal is to make marketing far more controllable and process-oriented across the entire journey — from activation to measurement and reporting. Meanwhile, retail and marketing are growing closer through commerce, D2C, and retail media. Paid and earned media must be orchestrated more intelligently and designed from the perspective of the customer journey to create a more relevant communication experience.

This may also mean reducing paid measures in favor of owned media with the right content and touchpoints. The system as a whole can become significantly more efficient than paid media alone — provided the impact and interplay of touchpoints can be measured.

Given increasing fragmentation, there is no alternative to close collaboration between creative, content, and media — underpinned by data and technology — to build effective and efficient consumer contact paths. We need to shape and evolve ecosystems of marketing, agencies, media channels, technology, and consumers. Such ecosystems don’t emerge overnight — despite the fast pace, they require a medium- to long-term perspective.

The entire system is an iterative process that improves with every cycle and benefits everyone involved — companies and agencies alike. Better campaigns with better results lift everyone at the table.

Ultimately, we all make the same promise: to help businesses grow.
And that works best with a system that crosses traditional boundaries — between companies and agencies, and between creative and media.

Against the breathless short-termism and the constant fear of missing out, only one thing helps: a sustainable, long-term foundation.
Brands need a base that cannot be shaken by every new channel or technology. Creating this foundation is the noblest task of strategy. And to achieve it, another boundary must be crossed: strategy manifests in a narrative — and the narrative becomes the strategy.

When the narrative itself is understood as strategy, strategic decisions are no longer made solely from the Excel sheet but emerge from the logic of the narrative itself.

This closes the loop to the market: meaning is not only created inside the organization but also communicated outward. People find the narrative compelling and pass it on; the media picks it up. It works internally for the business and is externally scalable. Behind this lies a fundamental anthropological insight: humans need stories to make sense of the world.

As Samira El Ouassil and Friedemann Karig describe in their book, humans are “storytelling apes.”
Our brains are wired for narratives. Through stories, we pass on essential knowledge and experiences. Narratives are therefore not static — they evolve as new insights and experiences emerge.

Narratives address the need for long-term strategic brand leadership by creating a dramaturgy. Alongside the protagonists, there are also antagonists: What is the gap to be closed? Which opposing forces stand in the way of progress? This is where communication planning can build — and from there, campaigns can be orchestrated. The story gains depth and temporal structure.

The most important thing our industry delivers is differentiation. Perhaps the agency industry itself needs a new narrative — a fresh answer to the question of what we contribute to society and how we remain relevant in the meaning economy.

This also means not limiting ourselves to the creative side, but engaging more deeply with business. Marketing must no longer be viewed in isolation from other areas like product and service development.

The role of agencies is to provide answers.
Narratives are our response to the questions of our time.