“Marketing” is dead. Long live marketing
In the second part of his series, The Line in the Sand, Johnny Corbett argues the version of marketing defined as “comms and advertising” deserves to die, while the true discipline has never mattered more.
· Marketing WeekBy Johnny Corbett 12 Nov 2026 7:01 am
I’m probably showing my age here, but whenever I hear someone use the word “marketing” when they really mean advertising, I think of Dr Evil.
The Austin Powers baddie had a habit of putting inverted commas around words which really didn’t need them. Normal phrases become faintly ridiculous when framed by excessively elaborate “air-quotes”.
Sharks with frickin’ “laser” beams on their heads spring to mind.
I’ve started imagining the same hand gesture whenever someone talks about “marketing” as the team that makes the ads, writes the social posts, briefs the agency and generally just “communicates”.
Because while marketing is definitely responsible for advertising and communications, it is far from all it should do, if properly unleashed across a business.
Like Dr Evil’s best laid plans, if we put marketing in a “pigeonhole” we’ll run the risk of it ending up in “handcuffs”, and no matter how well intentioned our ideas for world domination, they’ll be limited in their effectiveness.
I’ve previously described The Streetlight Effect, our tendency to search for marketing answers where it’s easiest to see, rather than where the biggest answers lie.
So we look at the campaigns, awards, case studies, research, dashboards, AI output, and so on, rather than the trickier challenges of culture, “the way things work around here” and the capability the business needs for marketing to deliver its potential.
But there’s another implication of the Streetlight Effect which is just as important: what people see as the output of marketing is what they assume marketing is.
And they mostly see marketing output as communications and advertising.
Over time, many of the other things historically associated with marketing have been redistributed around businesses. Pricing to finance or revenue management. Product to R&D, innovation or technology. Distribution to sales or commercial teams. The “promotion” P (where comms and advertising sits), stayed put.
How many marketers actually have influence over price?In fact, only a quarter (25.1%) of the respondents to Marketing Week’s 2026 Career & Salary Survey had influence over price, and even fewer (22.8%) any influence over the distribution of their product or service.
Those shifts were designed to apply specialist knowledge to complex challenges, but the upshot was that they moved the areas where marketing’s input was less immediately visible, and left it with the things that remained most obviously “theirs”. Namely, comms and ads.
The more the business saw marketing making communications, the more it assumed communications was marketing. The more marketing was treated as a communications function, the more communications became what marketing was asked to do.
And the beat goes on.
If you’re sceptical about whether marketing is actually “bigger” than it’s given credit for then it’s worth asking a robot for their thoughts.
In The Line In The Sand, a new report I launched recently with The Marketing Society,
I suggested the following prompt as something to use with a marketing team, leadership group or senior stakeholders:
“Define marketing based on a genuine understanding of the discipline as a commercial function, and its role in business strategy; show where the widely perceived or anecdotal definitions fall short. Keep the output concise, structured, and jargon free.”
Put that into whichever AI machine you favour and see what comes back.
Because AI is never wrong, right?
And the answer you’ll get back is a useful thought starter or discussion prompt.
Based on the whole history of the internet, the answer you’ll get back will outline “marketing” in terms which many businesses might struggle to recognise, and with huge potential untapped.
A strategic, commercial function, centred around customer understanding which has the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of almost all other areas of a business, but which is often, mistakenly, interpreted as “the social media folk”.
Big “M” and little “m” marketing
The implications of seeing marketing as a more universal force than communications and advertising become pretty clear – it’s got to widen its sphere of influence.
Not in a land-grabbing, world domination way, but in an intentional put-customer-understanding-at-the-heart way.
Because customer understanding should be the currency which travels across the business, and which marketing should trade in.
Counterintuitively, perhaps, finance as a discipline provides a good comparison.
The finance department provides oversight, expertise, systems, controls and guidance. The CFO sits on the leadership team and helps steer the business.
But nobody believes financial responsibility belongs exclusively to finance. Every department is expected to understand budgets, make sensible financial decisions and operate with a degree of financial prudence.
Marketing has the loneliest seat at the table but it is the only one with a panoramic viewYou don’t need to be a qualified accountant to know you shouldn’t set fire to the company’s money. Finance is both a department and a discipline.
Marketing should work the same way.
A useful shortcut is to think about the big “M” Marketing Department and the little “m” marketing discipline.
Big M Marketing is the department with specialist expertise, responsibility for direction, customer understanding, brand strategy and the overarching approach.
Little m marketing is the collective impact of all the decisions being made across the organisation which affect customers, demand, brands and, ultimately, commercial performance.
Marketing doesn’t need to own every decision, but it does need to influence the things that influence customers.
Boiling the ocean
Recognising marketing needs to operate as a business-wide discipline is a start. But it’s also daunting. It can feel like being asked to boil the ocean, or swallow the sun.
It means defining the role marketing plays in driving the business strategy. It means everyone understands what that actually means in practice. It means having a clear set of marketing principles that guide the work.
It means we need to ask ourselves what capabilities do people need? Which tools, processes, language and measures help everyone pull in the same direction?
It means establishing a cultural respect and understanding of marketing that gives marketing leaders the permission it needs to influence the areas of business it needs to influence.
Those are huge shifts, but they are the questions which need to be answered if marketing is going to achieve its potential.
It’s huge, but it’s not impossible, and in the final article in this series I’ll outline an essential part of the modern marketer’s toolkit, a defined “way of marketing”, which connects your businesses ambitions to the way marketing works.
It’s not a new concept, but it needs refreshing and revitalising for the world today; because with so many different options available, if a business isn’t finding a way-of-marketing that fits, they’ll not find their way at all.
Lose the inverted commas
We’ve all learned the dangers of declaring anything dead in marketing. Usually it means that, five minutes later, somebody else has demonstrated that it is very much alive and we all quietly move on.
But provocatively, we should be quite happy saying that the “marketing” which sits in inverted commas, caricatured as comms-and-advertising has passed away.
The world needs businesses which understand their customers deeply, which turn that understanding into better products, services and experiences, build distinctive brands, create demand for them and make more money.
There is a name for that discipline. It’s called marketing.
We can afford to lose the Dr Evil version. The downtrodden team waiting at the end of the line to be told what the business has decided so it can make some noise about it.
That “marketing” is dead. Long live marketing.
Johnny Corbett is the founder of marketing consultancy WhichWayUp and author of The Line In The Sand. He has worked in leadership roles for large corporate businesses, startups and agencies and has collaborated widely across sectors including consumer goods, technology, financial and professional services and the public sector.