Why Does Marketing Have Such a Bad Reputation?

Marketing is distrusted by the public and doubted in the boardroom, and the two problems feed each other.

When the people at the top misunderstand what marketing is and start judging it on the wrong numbers, it underperforms, and that underperformance becomes the evidence that marketing doesn’t work.

Here’s how to fix it…

Ask a room of business owners what marketing is, and you’ll hear “adverts”, “social media”, “the colouring-in department” or, less kindly, “spin”.

Ask them whether it delivers, and many will shrug. For a discipline that is meant to understand how people think, marketing has done a poor job of managing its own brand.

That reputation has two roots.

The first is executive dysfunction: the way boards and business owners set marketing up to fail, then blame it for failing. The second is a set of incorrect perceptions about what marketing actually is.

Both are fixable, but only if marketers and the businesses they serve are honest about their part in it.

The Reputation Problem, in Numbers

Marketing is distrusted by the public and doubted in the boardroom, and the two problems feed each other.

Finding	Source
Only 16% of British adults trust advertising executives to tell the truth, compared with a 52% average across 28 professions	Ipsos Veracity Index 2025
Average S&P 500 CMO tenure is 4.1 years, versus 5.0 for the C-suite overall; only COOs turn over faster	Spencer Stuart via Marketing Dive
31% of S&P 500 companies have no CMO at all	Marketing Week
73% of CEOs said marketers lacked business credibility; yet 70% admitted their own attitude contributed to marketing’s poor reputation	Fournaise, via Marketing Week (2012 study, still widely cited)
A quarter of UK and Irish businesses named marketing and advertising as the first cost they’d cut in a downturn	Accountant Online survey (2022)
In Q1 2025, 24.2% of UK firms cut marketing budgets; the first net decline in four years	IPA Bellwether via Marketing Week

The short CMO tenure isn’t purely a failure story; Spencer Stuart found nearly two-thirds of departing CMOs moved to equal or bigger roles. But the pattern is clear: marketing is the function most easily questioned, restructured and cut.

Executive Dysfunction: How Leadership Sets Marketing Up To Fail

Most marketing that “doesn’t work” was never given the conditions to work. These five leadership habits do the damage.

1. Stop-start investment.

Marketing is ‘switched on’ when sales dip and off when they recover, or cut first when costs bite. Brand awareness, search rankings and referral reputation all compound over time; turn them off, and you lose the momentum you paid for.

2. Short-termism.

Les Binet and Peter Field’s analysis of the IPA Databank found that chasing short-term metrics undermines effectiveness and profit growth. Their benchmark split is roughly 60:40 in favour of brand building over sales activation. Most SME owners run something closer to 0:100, then wonder why every campaign has to start from scratch.

3. Marketing shrunk to promotion.

The Fournaise research found many CEOs had quietly stripped marketing of product, pricing and channel responsibilities, leaving it as little more than the communications team. Strip out three of the four Ps, and you’re left judging marketing on the one it can’t succeed with alone.

4. No seat at the table.

When marketing isn’t present where decisions are made, it inherits problems it could have prevented: a product nobody asked for, a price point the market won’t bear, a website built on the MD’s personal taste.

5. Briefing by instinct.

“We need a new logo.” “Can you get us on TikTok?” Tactics ordered without a strategy, objectives or budget, then judged against goals that were never written down. No discipline survives that.

The common thread: marketing amplifies what already exists in a business. Weak foundations, amplified, are still weak, just louder.

Incorrect Perceptions: What Marketing Isn’t

The public sees marketing as manipulation; many business owners see it as decoration. Both are wrong.

The perception	The reality
Marketing = advertising	Advertising is one tool. Marketing is understanding customers and shaping product, price, place and promotion around them.
Marketing makes people buy things they don’t need	Ipsos research found half of the UK public believes this. Good marketing matches the right offer to people who already have the need, and it can’t rescue a product nobody wants.
Marketing is the creative, “fluffy” bit	Strategy, research, data, customer journeys and measurement are the bulk of the work. The visible output is the last 10%.
Anyone can do it	Most people can post on social media. Fewer can diagnose why enquiries convert at 2% instead of 8%.
If it worked, we’d see results next month	Some activity pays back fast; brand, SEO and reputation take months. Judging all of it on a 30-day window guarantees disappointment.
Marketing is a cost	Done properly, it’s an investment with a measurable return, and the cheapest customer is the one who already trusts you.

For regulated sectors like healthcare and professional services, the “manipulation” myth bites hardest. Clients assume marketing means overclaiming, when compliant marketing is actually built on evidence, credentials and plain honesty.

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Where Marketers Are Complicit

It would be convenient to blame it all on the boardroom. However, it isn’t fair; marketers have earned some of this reputation.

Vanity metrics. Likes, impressions and open rates reported as though they were revenue. Fournaise found CEOs felt buried in marketing data that bore little relation to profit and loss.
Jargon. “Omnichannel brand storytelling” means nothing to a practice manager who wants to know why the diary isn’t full.
Chasing trends. Every new platform treated as essential, with no business case attached
Agreeing to bad briefs. Saying yes to tactics without objectives, because pushing back feels risky.
Overclaiming. Taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway, then struggling when a CFO asks for proof.

The Fournaise study captured the gap neatly: most marketers believed their campaigns had business impact, but couldn’t quantify it. Belief without evidence is exactly what erodes boardroom trust.

How Marketing Directly Supports Sales and Business Growth

Marketing earns its keep when it makes every stage of the sale easier, faster or more profitable. That’s the case to make in the boardroom, and it’s measurable at every step.

Stage	What marketing does	What to measure
Getting found	SEO, local search, Google Business Profile and referral visibility put you in front of people already looking	Organic visibility, website visitors, calls and direction requests
Generating enquiries	Clear propositions and conversion-focused web pages turn visitors into leads	Enquiries per month, cost per enquiry, website conversion rate
Qualifying leads	Pricing guidance, FAQs and case studies filter out poor-fit prospects before they reach sales	Lead-to-opportunity rate, time spent on unqualified leads
Closing the sale	Proposals, testimonials, credentials and comparison content answer objections before they’re raised	Enquiry-to-client conversion, length of sales cycle
Protecting price	A strong reputation lets you compete on value, not discounts	Average order or client value, discount rate
Keeping and growing clients	Email, onboarding content and follow-up drive repeat business, upsells and referrals	Retention rate, repeat purchase rate, referrals
Informing the business	Customer research and campaign data show which services, sectors and areas are worth pursuing	Revenue by service and source; decisions changed by the data

Sales and marketing need to work as one team.

In many SMEs, marketing generates leads and sales complains they’re poor quality, while marketing complains sales doesn’t follow up. Break the cycle with three simple agreements:

1. A shared definition of a good lead — agreed in writing, reviewed quarterly.
2. A follow-up promise — for example, every enquiry contacted within one working day.
3. A shared scoreboard — one monthly report showing enquiries, conversions and revenue by source, owned by both teams.

When marketing can point to the enquiries it generated, the deals it helped close and the clients it kept, the reputation problem starts to solve itself.

What Marketers Can Do About The Gap

The fix is shared: business leaders need to set marketing up properly, and marketers need to speak the language of the business.

For business owners and boards

1. Define what marketing is for.
Write down two or three business objectives eg. enquiries, conversion rate, average client value, retention, etc., before commissioning any activity.

2. Fund it consistently.
Set a baseline budget you protect through quiet quarters. Cutting first in a downturn hands market share to competitors who don’t.

3. Balance the long and the short.
Keep some spend on reputation and visibility, not just this month’s promotion.

4. Give marketing a voice in decisions.
Include it when you set prices, launch services or rebuild the website — not after.

5. Judge it on agreed measures over a fair timeframe.
Quarterly for activation; six to twelve months for brand, SEO and content.

For marketers

1. Report in profit-and-loss terms.
Cost per enquiry, enquiry-to-client conversion, revenue influenced. Drop the vanity metrics from board reports.

2. Start with an audit, not a campaign.
Fix the foundations (website, proposition, customer journey) before spending on promotion.

3. Push back on bad briefs.
Ask “what business problem are we solving?” every time.

4. Lose the jargon.
If the MD wouldn’t say it, don’t write it.

5. Be honest about what you can’t prove.
Credibility grows faster from accurate modesty than from inflated claims.

6. Market marketing.
Share wins, explain the thinking, and show colleagues the work behind the work.

The Bottom Line

Marketing’s reputation will improve when it’s treated as a business discipline rather than a creative accessory.

For SMEs across Torbay, Plymouth, Exeter and Bristol, that usually starts small: an honest marketing audit of what’s working, clear objectives, and a consistent plan measured against numbers the business actually cares about.

Not sure whether your marketing is pulling its weight?

Get in touch for a marketing audit that shows you where the gaps are, with figures you can take to the board.

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Why Does Marketing Have Such a Bad Reputation?