‘Stop staying in your lane’: What marketers need to quit for good
We asked speakers at this year’s Festival of Marketing what bad habits marketers need to leave behind.
· Marketing WeekBy Marketing Week Reporters 21 Sep 2026 6:52 am
Marketers need to stop seeing themselves as an execution function and start taking a broader role in their organisations, according to speakers at this year’s Festival of Marketing.
From focusing too closely on marketing metrics to benchmarking against competitors, marketers have identified a number of habits that can limit the function’s influence.
For fractional CMO Holly Rix, marketers need to stop “staying in their lane”.
“The best work I’ve done has come from organisations that embrace marketing shaping strategy and business values,” she says.
Stefanie Nastou, CMO at B2B tech firm AMS, argues marketers should stop waiting to be invited into wider business conversations.
“Too many marketers treat themselves as an execution function that responds to a brief, instead of a growth function that shapes the business,” she says.
Nastou urges marketers to earn its seat at the table by bringing a point of view that is backed by data and connected to commercial outcomes.
“A CEO once told me ‘be brief, be bold, be gone’,” she says. “If you can’t distill your value in two or three sound bites a CFO would repeat it in a board meeting, then you haven’t done the work yet.”
That means looking beyond marketing’s own measures, says Marketing Week columnist and founder of Passionbrand, Helen Edwards.
“Focusing only on marketing metrics and not drawing the line to business metrics” can hold marketers back, she says.
The role today is about driving growth across the board, building the brand, relationships with customers, market insight and understanding. Don’t be an island.Georgina Bramall, Giffgaff
CRM and email specialist, Beth O’Malley, founder of Astral, takes aim at another common tendency: looking to other businesses for a blueprint.
“Stop benchmarking against ‘industry standards’ and chasing best practice. Both are BS,” she says. “Build for your business and audience and benchmark yourself.”
Lauren Berkemeyer, CMO at YuLife, similarly believes marketers can limit themselves by becoming too focused on the mechanics of the function.
“We sometimes make ourselves smaller as a function by becoming too focused on marketing activity, whether it’s the campaign, the channel, the funnel, the metrics,” she says.
“Of course those things matter, but if you don’t understand the commercial model and you’re not close to sales, product and the customer, you’re limiting the impact you can have.”
‘Proactive, curious, willing’: Marketers on their mindsets for success
For Berkemeyer, this also means breaking down the separation between marketing and sales. Some of her most valuable experiences have come from getting closer to customers and seeing first-hand whether a proposition resonates.
“Some of my best learning has come from actually being out there trying to sell something, hearing how a customer responds to the proposition and, importantly, being turned down,” she explains.
“You learn very quickly whether the thing you’ve created actually resonates.”
She also warns against becoming too wedded to established playbooks. “Some of the biggest opportunities I’ve found have come from asking, ‘What else could this become?’ rather than simply executing what was there before,” she explains.
Georgina Bramall, CMO at Giffgaff, also argues marketers need to think beyond the boundaries of their own function.
“Frame your role within the broader organisation,” she says. “The role today is about driving growth across the board, building the brand, relationships with customers, market insight and understanding. Don’t be an island.”
Festival of Marketing takes place on 14 October at The Brewery. For more information, to view the full agenda and buy tickets, click here.