Why Marketing Is Losing Its Edge

Marketing is moving faster than it’s thinking.

We’ve mistaken activity for progress.
AI, automation, and endless optimisation promise instant results, but the pace has made us reactive. Everyone’s busy. Few are effective.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing recently warned that marketing’s absence from the boardroom is hurting business performance. They’re right.
Most teams are drowning in martech and metrics instead of ideas, insight, and purpose.

Speed doesn’t create value. Clarity does.
Marketing’s strength has never been in motion, it’s in meaning.

We’ve lost sight of strategy.

Rory Sutherland calls it our addiction to “logic over magic.”
He’s right. We’ve rationalised marketing so completely that instinct and imagination barely get a look in.

Alex Smith describes the widening “strategy gap” the distance between thinking and doing. I see it everywhere: teams repeating what worked last year because the data says it’s safe. It’s not strategy; it’s survival.

When leadership doesn’t provide direction, marketing becomes a service line.
It reacts instead of leads.

Strategy isn’t repetition. It’s direction.
Without it, marketing is just motion without meaning.

We’re measuring the wrong things.

We cling to numbers because they feel safe. But they don’t tell the full story.
Spreadsheets can’t measure trust, loyalty, or belief — and those are the things that matter.

Here’s what counts instead:

• Conversations that turn into action.

• Customers who come back because they trust you.

• People who share your story because it means something.

I learned this the hard way. Early in my career, I equated busy with successful. I built campaigns that looked great on paper, but no one cared.
Now, I focus on proof that people believe, not just click.

If your data looks good but your story doesn’t stick, all you are doing is feeding an algorithm not building a brand.

AI isn’t saving marketing.

Let’s be honest. AI can automate. It can’t care.

MIT research shows that 95% of enterprise AI pilots have no measurable impact on profit.
Not because AI doesn’t work, but because no one knows why they’re using it.

Even when AI performs well, it only improves efficiency in technical tasks.
It doesn’t improve creativity, empathy, or judgment, the things that make marketing powerful.

Companies keep using AI to optimise bad ideas. Faster. Louder. Cheaper.

As Rory Sutherland said:

“Not everything valuable can be measured, and not everything measurable is valuable.”

Technology without strategy doesn’t fix marketing. It just makes mistakes happen faster.

So how do we get the edge back?

Marketing doesn’t need more lead gen tools or AI slop. It needs better thinking.

1. Turn activity into intention

Top marketers don’t start with deliverables. They start with tension.

Before launching anything, ask:

• What tension are we trying to resolve?

• Who holds the real decision power and what are they afraid of getting wrong?

• How does this connect a human outcome (trust, belief, action) with a business outcome (growth, retention, or reputation)?

• And the hard one: if we didn’t do this, would anyone care?

This goes beyond content calendars, it establishes clarity.

A B2B brand I worked with cut content output by 30% and doubled engagement by focusing on relevance instead of reach.

Do less. But make it count.

2. Protect time to think

We constantly feel we are on a hamster wheel churning out one campaign to the next. There is never enough time to really think anymore. This could be why so much work looks the same.

Can you review your calendar to see if there are times where you can reclaim some time to think or brainstorm?

Many successful strategic leaders I know carve out time to think even an hour can do wonders.

It’ll pay you back tenfold.

3. Define outcomes that matter, for them and for us

Top marketers are focused on KPIs. They define success at both a business and a human level.

They ask sharper questions:

• What’s the real shift we want to create, in behaviour, belief, or business value?

• What will success look like to the customer, not just the board?

• What’s the one outcome that proves this made a difference, not just that it happened?

• Are we measuring activity, or are we measuring change?

Then they do the work to make those answers real.
Start by auditing what metrics you’re actually capturing.
Understand what story those numbers are telling and where they fall short.
Then set parameters that fill the gaps, so you’re measuring the whole picture, not half of it.

The best teams don’t chase metrics; they chase meaning.
Because when you understand what truly moves the needle, you stop reporting activity and start reporting progress.

If it doesn’t change behaviour, it means nothing.

4. Work with leadership, not for them

Marketing isn’t decoration. It’s direction.
It’s how a business tells the world what it stands for and whether anyone should care.

But that only happens when marketing has a seat at the table, not just a to-do list.
When it’s part of the boardroom conversation not the slide deck that follows it.

Great leaders know marketing isn’t there to “make things look good.”
It’s there to translate business strategy into something people understand, believe, and act on.

That’s where real influence starts.

Marketing hasn’t lost its edge because the world changed.

Marketing didn’t lose its edge because of AI or data.
It lost it because we stopped asking why.

Automation is designed to buy us time, to move faster not to replace our thinking.

That’s how we bring back the edge, by choosing depth over default.