Who Killed Marketing?

Sunny Park

Founder & Principal, Ascendro Advisory

Over the past decade, at nearly every roundtable, forum, or CMO gathering I’ve attended, one question keeps resurfacing: "Why does marketing feel irrelevant today, and how can we bring it back?"

We all know the signs. CMO tenures are the shortest in the C-suite. Many organizations treat marketing as a cost center rather than a growth driver. Brand equity is often overlooked. This stands in stark contrast to the classic model taught in the hallowed halls of P&G, Unilever, J&J, and L’Oréal—where marketing was the nerve center, accountable for P&L, innovation, pricing strategy, and, at its pinnacle, brand building across advertising, campaigns, CRM, and data. With these memories, the new world of marketing is frustrating; often, the frustration comes from brand champions bewildered by their own organizations. “How can these salespeople not understand the value of brand?” Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, the sentiment is the same.

The most common culprit? Short-termism. The pressure for immediate ROI has become so intense that long-term brand equity no longer finds space in the boardroom. The age of quarterly deliverables and performance dashboards has reshaped expectations—and marketing, as we once knew it, feels pushed aside.

Recent study by McKinsey shows the serious magnitude of this problem: only 30% of CMOs feel their organizations have a clearly defined view of what constitutes marketing ROI in 2024 – that’s 10% points slide from 2023.

However, I don’t think the question of who killed marketing is proper. Many marketers feel this way, because the function once at the top of fame suddenly fell to an irrelevant position. But we must rationally look at the question with deeper assessments, because what has happened to marketing is complex, layered and ugly.

Think about a few possible dialogue scenarios if we keep asking the same way: Is brand topic completely out of boardroom? No, brand can be still critical in delivering business outcomes, but it may not be. Are the classic brand building activities, such as advertising, the only avenue to grow long term brand equity? No. Well-designed DTC UX (direct-to-consumer user experience) can be more powerful than Canne award-winning adverts. Are CEOs and CFOs being ever more impatient than before, and have no interests in brand because performance everything? Yes and no - CEOs and CFOs understand the long-term importance of brand, but they just can’t find a way to invest behind brands.

Since the problem is complex and layered, some shallow declarative answers floating around in management world are not helping either: “Make your business-unsavvy CMO report to CFO”, which often makes marketing investment fall into perpetual reduction cycle, or “Let management consulting firm fix this”, which leads to organizational restructuring of undermining team’s capability. Another vague one goes, “Marketing is still a mix of art and science. Capable CMO must be able to find the right ROI”. I hear these arguments in recent years yet haven’t seen a company who claims that they eventually figured it out.

Framing the question as who killed marketing misses the mark. The decline isn’t due to a single villain but a complex, layered shift in the business landscape. Marketing hasn’t died—it’s struggling to adapt. To understand why, we must zoom out and examine the forces at play.

1. The New Business Reality (That Many Still Ignore)

The context business leaders are missing lies in how dramatically the business environment has changed over the past 20 years.

Start with economics and technology. Consider the rise of the “Fantastic 8” — Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Netflix. Except for Apple and Microsoft, these companies reached $1T in market cap in just 18 years on average. Compare that to legacy giants— Aramco, Walmart, JP Morgan, P&G, Coca-Cola—who never reached that milestone or took nearly a lifetime to do so.

The rise of these tech titans is the symbol that much of new corporate growth thrived in a new software-driven, data-first economy. It wasn't just the dotcom dream of the early 2000s—it was real, sustainable growth powered by data, feedback loops, and product-led innovation. The “software economy”, probably incepted by Marc Andreessen in 2011, meant a new formula of growth.

Meanwhile, classic business models were still stuck in 20th-century frameworks—overweight on market share, distribution channels, and advertising campaign GRPs. In contrast, the “lean startup” mindset exploded: test fast, learn faster, and grow from insight, not instinct. This new model disrupted traditional marketing and sales playbooks. Concepts like Flywheels, Network Effects, CAC, LTV, ARR—these weren’t just buzzwords; they became the new rules of growth.

As these methods drove unicorn-level growth across every industry—finance, lifestyle, mobility, B2B SaaS, content—investors naturally became impatient with the slow, bloated growth of incumbents. And rightly so.

2. Compete with ghosts

When corporate world found the new formula of growth, it also evolved with more blurred geographic competition. Look at the recent rise of Chinese companies that didn’t exist 20 years ago – Temu, Xiaomi, ByteDance, to name a few. Backed by passport-less investors such as Sequoia, SoftBank, SIG, these new generation Chinese companies surprise their counterparts of the west by storm.

Plus, these companies didn’t start from traditional sales and marketing playbooks. Rather, they created their own playbook. ByteDance, who is probably one of the early frontiers of ML-based AI company, grew out of aggressive M&A, US market penetration and early ad sales flywheel. Xiaomi grew based on viral distribution instead of asset-heavy vertical manufacturing & channel build, leveraged community-based selling. Temu’s growth is anchored in new generation of China supply chain eco-system, yet with the mix of aggressive traditional & new marketing programs (Superbowl and referral marketing).

This shift isn’t new. Twenty-five years ago, 3G Capital’s creation of Anheuser-Busch InBev hinted at this evolution, blending cost optimization with aggressive marketing. Yet many legacy CPG leaders failed to adapt, leaving them unprepared for today’s hyper-competitive, borderless reality.

Borderless competition has grown so fast and made traditional sales and marketing companies hard to anticipate, reform and react to the new reality.

3. The Corporate Matrix: Death by a Thousand Stakeholders

Simultaneously, changes within organizations further complicated things.

The post-2008 obsession with optimization led to the rise of hard matrix structures. Mid-level leaders suddenly found themselves managing with “influence” instead of authority.

For front line management, which is our main interests, regional & market level presidents don’t have the full functions (marketing, finance, HR, supply chain, CS) anymore. It became luxury. Functions began reporting to vertically to global centers of excellence—splintering decision-making and destroying accountability. Plus, important decisions of 4Ps, especially product and price, were taken out from marketing during this change.

Even worse, within those functions, they are further fragmented. Sales function has global centers of excellence teams in pricing, capability and profitability, Marketing has brand, media, insights, and innovation teams—all siloed. As decision rights blurred, the system slowed. Frontline business leaders became powerless. Silos hardened. Finger-pointing thrived. And when strategies weren’t clear or aligned, investments faltered.

The outcome? Predictably poor ROI—and even worse morale.

So, when some argue that organization is fragmented and CEO must integrate back, it’s easier said than done, because the problem has deeply and widely implanted into organizations during past 15 years.