Why Is Marketing In Decline?

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of What's Going On in Banking. I'm your host, Ron Shevlin, chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors and author of the Fintech Snark Tank blog on Forbes.

Today's topic is marketing. No, don't run. Stay with me. I promise this is going to be a good conversation, even if you have nothing to do with marketing and generally hate the subject.

A big part of today's discussion is about why marketing is struggling. The idea came from a LinkedIn post I published a few weeks ago after having lunch with one of my former business-school professors. He now teaches at Harvard, which is just down the road from me, so I got to go to Harvard Square. That's about as close as I was ever going to get to being admitted to Harvard.

He's been a marketing professor for roughly 40 years and shared some observations that I thought were fascinating.

The first was that, academically, marketing is in decline. I didn't know this, but the number of marketing majors at business schools is falling, and even some of the top schools are having trouble filling marketing classes.

It's not surprising that many MBA students want to go into consulting, investment banking, or technology. But apparently, relatively few of them think marketing classes are worth their time.

The second observation was that marketing has lost much of its seat in the boardroom. As the chief marketing officer role became more prominent, many people who filled that seat didn't have the strategic horsepower, as my former professor put it, to maintain influence at the top of the organization. CMO tenure dropped dramatically, and marketing lost credibility in the boardroom.

But the comment that really hit home for me was this: Marketing is not doing a very good job of marketing itself.

To help unpack that, I've invited two people I've known for a long time and respect tremendously. Maryanne Keegan is the former CMO of Early Warning. I won't go through the rest of your résumé, Maryanne, because I'm not sure it would help your reputation here.

And Derek Sutton is chief marketing officer at Autobooks. Before Autobooks, Derek was at Jack Henry and, before that, CSI. Both of them have deep experience in marketing, technology marketing, and helping financial institutions improve their marketing.

Maryanne, before we get to the prescription, let's start with the diagnosis. Why is marketing in decline?

If you look at the last decade, or even just the last three to five years, marketing has changed incredibly quickly as a profession. It hasn't remained static.

Finance and accounting, for example, are disciplines with core practices that remain recognizable over time. Marketing has had to evolve constantly because of technology and because the C-suite increasingly expects metrics, tracking, and clear business impact.

The academic side has a hard time keeping pace with what is happening in the real world. I think that gap has been growing, and it will continue to grow unless the curriculum changes.

Derek, what would you add?

I view marketing today a lot like product management. I started my career as a product owner, building products and digital banking experiences, and now I work in marketing. The two disciplines increasingly feel similar.

Marketing has evolved into a field where you apply tools, run tactics, A/B test, and constantly measure performance. The metrics side of marketing has taken over.

That creates a challenge for universities. Engineering and product management face something similar. How do you build a curriculum around a field where the tools and best practices are changing constantly?

A university needs a defined body of knowledge it can teach and market to students. But if you can't easily define what good marketing or bad marketing looks like because the environment keeps changing, it becomes harder to put that discipline on the menu for students.

One of the things that struck me in the conversation with my former professor was the paradox here. A lot of students entering business school want to work for technology companies. And, Maryanne, as you pointed out, marketing itself is becoming much more technology-driven.

You'd think that would create a natural match. But is marketing really taking full advantage of the technology available to it?

That's a great question. I tend to think about marketing as a spectrum between art and science.

Twenty years ago, there was much more emphasis on the art and emotional side of marketing. That emotional element is still incredibly important, but marketing has become much more scientific.

When I look at university curricula, including through the experience of having two children in college, I still see a lot of emphasis on foundational marketing principles. Those matter, but the curriculum often doesn't go far enough into the data and technology skills marketers need to be successful in the C-suite.

If that doesn't change, the profession will continue to have a gap between what people are taught and what organizations expect from them.

There's another issue too: compensation. If you're a business student choosing between consulting, entrepreneurship, finance, or marketing, the starting salaries in marketing often don't look very attractive.

I don't think that reflects the true long-term opportunity. There are highly compensated and very successful marketing careers, but that path is not promoted very effectively at the university level.

If we want stronger students to choose marketing, they need a clearer picture of the career opportunity and a more robust curriculum around data, technology, and how marketing actually operates today.

That's exactly why I pushed my kids to major in statistics instead of marketing. I told them they'd get more job offers and higher salaries, even if they ultimately went into marketing. Thankfully, two of them listened to me, and at least one of them is probably watching this.

Derek, when you think about the technology available to marketers today, both at technology companies and at banks and credit unions, what should they be doing differently?

Go back to people.

Technology is a tool. It's a tactic. One reason marketing has become undifferentiated, and in some organizations is viewed primarily as a cost center, is that we focus too much on the tools.

The tools are useful. Being proficient in them is a real advantage. But tools alone don't create differentiation.

Marketing used to be much more explicitly about brand equity. When you had a large marketing budget and were thinking about television, print, major brand initiatives, and consumer-packaged-goods strategy, the work required a specialized mix of theory, operations, and creativity.

People who truly understood what motivated buyers and could make consumers identify with a brand had a specialized skill set. It required both art and science.

Digital has changed part of that. Creative execution has become much easier to buy. Almost any company can hire a strong designer. You can outsource a rebrand. You can outsource social media, paid media, and campaign execution.

A C-suite executive can look at many of those services as interchangeable tools that can be swapped out if they aren't working.

So the question becomes: What unique value does the marketing team or individual bring to shareholders and the organization that can't simply be purchased somewhere else?

To me, the answer is people. Marketing has to go back to the market and deeply understand what motivates customers to buy.

What pain are they experiencing? What do they actually need? How does the organization solve that problem? How do you educate the customer in a way that cuts through the noise?

Everything else around that can become fairly unremarkable.

Maryanne, I'm hearing a disconnect. Marketers have access to more sophisticated technology for execution, analysis, and tracking. But organizations still need people who can interpret the information and turn it into smarter business decisions.

At the same time, fewer people are choosing marketing. This is going to sound terrible, and I don't mean to suggest that the people going into marketing aren't smart, but if marketing isn't attracting the strongest talent, it creates a cycle.

Senior executives say, "Marketing isn't producing strategic value." Marketing asks for more people and more technology. Executives don't see the results and respond, "Why would I spend more money on this?"

How does marketing break that cycle?

It's not a simple answer, but it starts at the top.

The CEO's view of marketing has a major influence on whether the marketing team can be successful. Some CEOs understand marketing strategically and give the function room to operate that way. In other companies, marketing has been operationalized to the point where it becomes difficult to connect the pieces.

Going back to the art-and-science idea, technology is available to everyone. A C-suite executive can look at all these tools and say, "We can outsource this. We can automate that. How many marketing people do we really need?"

But the art is in connecting the dots.

You can have dozens of metrics from different tools in the marketing stack, but understanding the customer and knowing who you're actually selling to is a learned skill. It develops over years of experience.

If universities aren't teaching enough of that, and if the entry-level positions don't attract strong candidates because of compensation, the profession creates its own talent problem.

That's why I keep coming back to leadership. If you have a CEO who genuinely understands what marketing can contribute, the team has a much better chance of becoming strategic.

Can I add something quickly?

Of course.

When I say "connect the dots," I mean something very specific: Connect the effort and the spending to how the company makes money.

If I can tell a clear story that says, "We deployed this tactic, this resource performed these activities, those activities generated this result, this is how we acquired the customer, and this is how the company makes money from that customer," then marketing becomes easier to understand as a value creator.

A lot of marketing teams have lost that full story.

If marketing walks into the C-suite talking about attribution, NPS, Google Analytics, MQLs, and other metrics but can't connect those metrics to customer acquisition, usage, retention, and revenue, executives still have to do the mental work of figuring out why any of it matters.

That's where I think the gap exists.

Both of you are alluding to something I wrote about years ago in a report called Making Marketing Strategic.

I put a two-by-two matrix in that report because I've been a consultant for a long time, and consultants think in two-by-two matrices.

One dimension was whether the CEO understands marketing. The other was how strategic the marketing function actually is.

In the upper-right corner, the CEO understands marketing and marketing is genuinely strategic. In my experience, only a minority of financial institutions live in that quadrant.

A lot of organizations fall into one of the other categories. Maybe marketing is trying to be strategic, but the CEO doesn't understand or trust the function. Or maybe the CEO wants marketing to contribute more strategically, but the marketing team has historically been focused on execution.

We have to be realistic. Many senior executives in banking and technology have been in business for a long time and have never seen marketing operate strategically. Their skepticism didn't come from nowhere.

At the same time, there are excellent CMOs trying to change that perception.

John Huntinghouse from TAB Bank commented on my LinkedIn post that the issue really comes down to trust. How does marketing build more trust with the rest of the C-suite?

Data is part of it. If you're a CMO today and can't show ROI or present meaningful data, that's an obvious gap.

But cross-functional relationships are just as important. Marketing can't be successful without alignment with product. It can't be successful without alignment with sales.

Depending on the organization, some of those roles and boundaries may have been established long before the CMO arrived, so the marketer has to learn how to work across them.

PR and corporate communications may sit inside marketing or outside it. Branding may be part of marketing or managed separately.

A CMO needs visibility into how all those pieces affect the customer and the business. If the role is isolated from the rest of the organization, it's much harder to demonstrate the full value marketing can create.

Financial-services companies have broken down a lot of silos over the years, but marketing is still often treated as one of its own.

The opportunity is to give the CMO broader visibility because the customer is not touched only by marketing. Product, sales, service, operations, and other functions all shape the relationship.

Somebody has to see the full picture and connect those interactions.

Derek, your thoughts?

I'd probably add another column to your matrix, which I know ruins the whole two-by-two idea.

I think you also have to ask whether the financial institution is trying to maintain the status quo or genuinely grow.

If the organization is essentially trying to maintain what it already has, you could make an argument that marketing doesn't need a major C-suite role. If the machine is already established and the goal is simply to keep taking deposits and making loans, marketing can become part of the operating infrastructure.

But if the organization wants to grow, that's different.

One thing I would emphasize is marketing's willingness to own part of the revenue pipeline.

Reporting and ROI are table stakes. The harder question is: Are you willing to put your neck on the line and say, "I own part of the pipeline"?

A CEO can ask the chief lending officer, "What's the pipeline for loan growth? Who are we meeting with? What deals are moving? Did we close them?"

If marketing shows up with MQLs, SQLs, Facebook attribution, and a pile of dashboard metrics, the CEO still has to translate all of that into the language of revenue.

Marketing has to be willing to go further and say, "We'll partner with sales and product. We'll own part of the path from influencing the customer to acquiring the customer to monetizing the relationship."

When you do that, marketing becomes part of the revenue conversation, and the C-suite begins to see the function differently.

As you're saying that, I can hear 50 chief revenue officers yelling, "Absolutely not. Marketing is not owning my pipeline."

So there is a chicken-and-egg problem. Marketing has to earn the right to take on that responsibility.

I want to run another idea by both of you. When I studied economics, there was microeconomics and macroeconomics. Micro was about the firm and individual decision-making. Macro was about the economy as a whole.

Marketing doesn't really use that distinction, but maybe it should.

You could think of micro marketing as understanding the individual consumer: what motivates them, what they want, what message to send, and how to personalize the experience.

Macro marketing would be about understanding the marketplace as a whole: where behavior is changing, which segments are emerging, and how the competitive environment is evolving.

I think marketing has spent the last 15 years digging itself deeper into micro marketing. Everything became about the right message, at the right time, in the right channel, for the right individual.

Meanwhile, the function sometimes lost sight of the larger market.

Everybody talks about millennials and Gen Z being different, but that doesn't always translate into different products, tools, technologies, or go-to-market strategies.

Maryanne, does the micro-versus-macro distinction make sense to you?

It depends on the organization.

If you're a mature company with one established product, marketing can become more operational. But if you're in a growth stage, especially in fintech, you absolutely need both lenses.

The macro view is where I think marketers can really shine. The micro view is about using the data and tools well. The macro view is about understanding what all of that means for the larger business.

That's also where brand comes in. Brand is the 360-degree view of the company.

Teaching that in universities is difficult because every industry is different. Marketing pharmaceuticals is not the same as marketing fintech. But the discipline of learning how to understand the bigger picture is still essential.

And remember, many MBA graduates who never study marketing later become CEOs. If they don't understand what marketing can do, a CMO can bring all the data and tools in the world into the room and still struggle to get the message across.

We've only got a few minutes left, so I want to get to a couple of pointed questions.

Derek, you commented on the LinkedIn post that marketers have to balance long-term attention with short-term results. How do you manage that tension?

To me, that is another version of the micro-and-macro discussion.

There's an old product-management framework where you ask what you can ship in six days, six weeks, and six months. I think about marketing similarly.

What can we do in the short term that produces a result? And what do we need to keep doing consistently over the long term to build brand value?

At Autobooks, a lot of the long-term work is education. We're trying to change behavior and habits, both for small businesses and for banks. That doesn't happen because of one campaign.

Changing perception requires a consistent flow of information over time.

At the same time, I can run an email campaign, appear on a podcast, or deploy another tactic that moves the needle in the short term.

The challenge is that organizations naturally reach for short-term results, especially when they're under pressure. But short-term tactics can consume resources that would otherwise support long-term brand-building.

A good marketer has to explain that trade-off clearly.

If you can say, "Yes, we can do this now, but here's the long-term consequence of prioritizing it," you build credibility internally and help the organization make a better decision.

Maryanne, last question for you.

I've known you for a long time, and I've seen how influential you can be with CEOs and executive teams. We've talked about marketing as a function, but I want you to talk directly to the CMOs who are struggling to become more strategic.

What advice would you give an individual CMO who wants to move from the lower part of my matrix into the strategic quadrant?

Never stop learning. That's the starting point.

For a marketer, the kiss of death is deciding you no longer need to understand how the work actually gets done.

I like getting my hands into things. I feel like I'm only as good as my understanding of how all the pieces work.

Yes, I can hire someone to run social media. I can hire a team to handle digital marketing. But if I understand those components myself, I become a better leader because I can connect them to the bigger picture.

I've seen peers with phenomenal teams who are too removed from the details. What you see on paper isn't always what is actually happening behind the scenes.

The CMO has to be the glue that connects the pieces.

Delegating is necessary, but if you delegate so much that you lose touch with how the work functions, it becomes harder to see the larger strategic picture.

Short-term execution can run on autopilot through tools and the marketing stack. The long-term work requires judgment.

You also have to put the right people in the right seats. There are a lot of people who can speak the language of marketing without necessarily understanding the discipline deeply.

Part of the job is identifying people who truly understand the role they're being hired to perform and who understand the emotional connection behind brand and customer behavior.

That's a discipline, just like any other profession.

I'm a little surprised you didn't mention one thing I would have put near the top of the list: understanding the rest of the business.

I saw the same issue when I was an IT strategy consultant. The strongest IT departments weren't simply good at technology. They understood the business.

Marketing has the same challenge. A lot of marketers know the marketing part of the job very well but don't understand their internal clients, how the bank makes money, or what the other functions are trying to accomplish.

A CMO who can talk to the rest of the C-suite in the language of the business, and explain how marketing helps their priorities, earns a lot more respect.

Maryanne, Derek, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to have this conversation.

And thank you to everybody for joining us. I hope you'll join us again for another episode of the What's Going On in Banking podcast.