Marketing has never been more sophisticated or commercially powerful, yet beyond our own circles, it remains misunderstood and undervalued. Fellow of The Marketing Society Rory Sutherland delivered a provocative session examining why marketing struggles with its own reputation, exploring how financial dominance, short-term metrics, and our own obsessions distort what we do and how we're perceived.
5 Key Points
Financialisation forces focus on what's expensive rather than what's valuable
The dominance of finance in business decision-making creates a fundamental distortion. Quantification and self-justification become such large parts of the job that resources flow to activities that are big and expensive, not necessarily to those that are valuable. When you need hundreds of clients at a media event because the activity is expensive, you end up with two people doing brand partnerships. The bits that are expensive get the attention, not the bits that work.
Family-owned businesses demonstrate superior marketing effectiveness
Four out of five winners of the 2024 IPA advertising effectiveness awards were family-owned businesses: McCain, Yorkshire Tea, Specsavers, and Laithwaites (with Guinness being the fifth from Diageo). These businesses aren't subject to the same obsession with short-term metrics. The timeframes in which they operate are fundamentally different, allowing for marketing approaches that actually build long-term value.
AI will be wrongly sold on cost reduction rather than value creation
The fundamental problem is being surrounded by people who think their whole role in life is to get the cost down rather than put the price up. This mindset will ensure AI gets positioned as a cost-cutting tool when it should be about creating value. The battle isn't about the technology itself but about who controls the conversation around it.
Where marketing makes money and where it adds value aren't the same thing
If you work in a restaurant, you understand the trade-off between one thing and another. You accept that where you make money and where you add value aren't the same thing. The same applies to marketing and agencies. The work given away for free was probably more valuable than the work that generated revenue. This misalignment distorts resource allocation and undermines marketing's true impact.
Marketing should focus on the unfashionable tactics that actually work
There's always been an idea for creating an "unfashionable agency" that focuses on all the things that work really well, like door drops and brand partnerships, that are always underweighted. These tactics don't get attention because they're not expensive enough to justify elaborate measurement systems, yet they often deliver better results than the costly, fashionable alternatives that dominate budgets.
Marketing's Reputation Crisis
Marketing's reputation problem isn't about what we do, it's about how we talk about it, measure it, and position it within our organisations. The financialisation of business has created a system where marketing gets judged by the wrong metrics and valued for the wrong reasons.
Consider the evidence from the 2024 IPA advertising effectiveness awards. Four out of five gold winners were family-owned businesses. McCain, Yorkshire Tea, Specsavers and Laithwaites. These aren't companies that operate under the quarterly earnings pressure that dominates most marketing departments. They work on different timeframes. They make decisions based on building brands over years, not optimising metrics over months. The results speak for themselves.
The problem runs deeper than measurement cycles. Financialisation creates a bias towards expensive activities simply because they need more justification. When you need to prove your value through detailed reporting and analysis, the activities that are big and costly naturally get more attention. A major media event requires hundreds of attendees because the budget demands it. A brand partnership team stays small because the work isn't expensive enough to warrant elaborate infrastructure. Yet which one often delivers better value?
The Restaurant Rule: Where Value and Money Diverge
This distortion extends to how we position marketing's contribution. We've become so focused on justification that we've lost sight of what actually creates value. In a restaurant, everyone understands that where you make money and where you add value aren't the same thing. The free bread brings customers in. The wine makes the profit. Marketing needs the same clarity. The work we give away for free, the strategic thinking, the customer insight, the positioning work, that's often more valuable than the campaigns we charge for. But our systems don't recognise or reward this.
The challenge becomes more urgent as AI enters the conversation. The technology itself isn't the issue. The issue is who controls the narrative around it. When you're surrounded by people whose entire role focuses on reducing costs rather than increasing prices, AI will be sold as a cost-cutting tool. This completely misses its potential for creating value, enhancing customer experience, and building competitive advantage. Marketing should be leading this conversation, not reacting to it.
Part of the solution lies in recognising what actually works. There's always been a fantasy about creating an "unfashionable agency" that focuses on the tactics that deliver results but don't get attention. Door drops, brand partnerships, the small-scale, low-cost activities that are underweighted precisely because they're not expensive enough to justify elaborate measurement systems. When you have two people running brand partnerships in a company that employs thousands in media, something has gone badly wrong.
The path forward requires changing how we talk about marketing's contribution. Stop arguing about which metrics matter and start demonstrating how customer understanding drives business growth. Stop justifying activities through elaborate frameworks and start showing how marketing decisions create value. Stop letting finance departments dictate what gets measured and start insisting on timeframes that reflect how brands actually work.
Think like a family business
Family businesses get this instinctively. They think in years, not quarters. They value brand equity because they plan to own the business long enough to benefit from it. They make decisions based on customer relationships because they know they'll still be dealing with those customers next decade. The rest of us need to learn from them.
Marketing's reputation problem is ultimately a positioning problem. We've allowed our function to be defined by people who don't understand what we do. We've accepted measurement systems designed for manufacturing applied to creative work. We've let short-term financial thinking override long-term brand building. The irony is painful. We're experts at positioning products and services, yet we've failed spectacularly at positioning ourselves.
3 Take-aways
Fight for longer timeframes in decision-making
The dominance of short-term metrics actively undermines effective marketing. Family businesses win effectiveness awards because they operate on timeframes that allow brand building to work. Push back on quarterly thinking. Insist on measurement periods that reflect how customers actually make decisions and how brands build value.
Reframe the AI conversation around value creation, not cost reduction
Don't let finance or IT departments position AI as primarily a cost-cutting tool. Marketing should lead the conversation about how AI enhances customer experience, enables personalisation, and creates competitive advantage. The technology is neutral. The framing determines how it gets used and who controls it.
Invest in the underweighted tactics that actually work
The most effective marketing activities are often undervalued precisely because they're not expensive enough to justify elaborate measurement systems. Brand partnerships, customer communities, and other "unfashionable" tactics deliver results but get ignored because they don't require big budgets. Find ways to champion and expand these approaches.
2 Action Items
Audit your marketing spend by timeframe and value creation
Map every major marketing activity against two dimensions: the timeframe it operates on (short-term tactical vs long-term brand building) and whether it focuses on cost reduction or value creation. Identify where financial pressures are distorting your resource allocation and build the case for rebalancing towards activities that create lasting value.
Build your case using restaurant economics
Use the restaurant analogy to reframe conversations with finance and leadership. Just as restaurants understand that where they make money and where they add value aren't the same thing, marketing's most valuable contributions often aren't the most expensive activities. Document specific examples where strategic thinking, customer insight, or brand positioning created disproportionate value relative to cost.
"Don't define marketing only as those things done by marketers. The overground is one of the greatest marketing triumphs of the last 20 years, because they rebranded a railway network as a tube line and basically created 20 billion pounds worth of value in infrastructure with pixels and ink and a tiny bit of infrastructure that was 200 million, not 20 billion."
Rory Sutherland
Thoughts from our other speakers
EY's Kate Mackie added her own perspectives and take away pointers from the Global Conversation looking through a B2B lens.
The Future Belongs to Marketers Who Own the Customer Conversation
As we look to the future of marketing with the onus on tech-enabled transformation, we are in a prime spot to own and drive the conversation from the customer data. AI should focus on impact more than efficiency. Art and science are both key. In the tech revolution we are living in, experience and emotion are the differentiators. We must double down on the value of an idea and its impact across the journey.
Kate's key take-aways
Change the vernacular
Move from internal activity metrics to business objectives alignment. Stop talking about campaigns and start talking about growth.
Build your stakeholder groups outside of marketing
Be business literate. Understand the impact of the full journey, not just the marketing funnel.
Change the battlefield
Present three invest/stop/start options with implications for growth, risk, margin, and time. Give leadership real strategic choices, not just marketing plans.
Deep dive into customer perspectives
Customer experience is key. Show marginal gains across experience shifts - prove how small improvements compound into competitive advantage.
Understand the full 4Ps, not just promotion
Marketing is product, price, place and promotion. If you only own the last one, you'll always be seen as tactical.
The Heineken Company's Gita de Beer's thoughts on marketing's reputation problem
Marketing has a reputation problem because we talk a lot about what we do, and not enough about how we think. That reputation problem is self-inflicted. We've spent years talking about metrics instead of meaning, so the business sees marketing as tactical rather than strategic.
But here's what gets missed: marketing creates value by reframing reality. When you change what something means, you change how people behave. This is the strategic power of marketing - not just explaining reality, but redefining it.
Which is why the arrival of AI matters so much. Most organisations still talk about AI as automation, personalisation, optimisation - saving time and money. That's tactical. The real strategic question is perception. AI systems increasingly decide what facts people see, how they're framed, and how often, quietly editing the story in people's heads and therefore their behaviour. AI is reframing reality at scale.
This creates a critical distinction we need to get right: humans must define the meaning - honesty, safety, trust. AI helps scale that meaning. AI didn't create trust. It amplified it. Humans define meaning. Machines scale it.
And ultimately, metrics don't build brands. Memory does. You can have perfect metrics on brand health and CTR and still see no significant brand growth. Consumers don't buy clicks. They buy what they remember. If memory is the growth engine, marketing must change how it shows up in the business - not as the team that optimises performance, but as the function that shapes what people remember and therefore choose.
