How marketing lost its bite and what marketers can do about it

Since the 1980s there has been a progressive skewing of attention, discourse and budget spend towards a highly-alluring promotional method that has now almost entirely captured the marketing profession.

Sales activation or performance marketing (these days...online, digital, programatic communication) works very well in the short-term, and is appealing to executives because results are measurable and allow for the minimisation of budget wastage.

But an over-reliance on performance marketing, over time, has a devastating effect on the long-term strength and growth of a brand.

Research proves that a bias towards performance marketing, at the expense of brand building, results in a brand struggling to maintain marketshare in their category.

The core problem - that is getting worse in our data-driven, analytical world - is that brand building efforts can't be measured.

There is no way to properly measure the affectiveness of your brand building spend.

And because most executives are reluctant to invest money into an expensive activity that can't be measured, brand building budgets have been slashed in favour of redirecting all of that money into digital advertising methods.

As a profession, marketers have been forced into becoming data scientists rather than informed specialists who craft approaches that masterfully embed their brand's image into the memory banks of the societies they operate in.

For decades now, brand building has been labelled as old-fashioned, ineffective and a waste of money; and marketers that still advocate for brand building work are often seen as "creatives that know nothing about the modern approach to marketing".

The truth is however that brand building and performance marketing are important.

Both are required.

Emotional and logical mechanisms need to be employed in order for a brand to successfully compete in a category.

Marketers today tend to find themselves drawn into just one camp; they're either brand-people or data-people (largely depending on how old they are), but effectiveness is actually as a result of a considered blending of the two.

Financial managers will 100% hate this idea and will argue enthusiastically that allocating money to stature media that has zero ROI is reckless and impossible - so there is no doubt that the fight is real and the odds are very much stacked against building anything intangible.

But marketing's successful future lies in marketing professionals having a truly holistic approach to what really matters, rather than a dogged clinging to any specific ideology.