A few years ago, marketing was a bit more predictable. You could scale through search, double down on paid, publish some thought leadership and repeat.
Now? Nothing seems to work like it used to.
Campaigns cost more and deliver less. Content and social posts feel invisible. Even great creative gets scrolled past.
You’re not imagining it. The patterns that guided marketing for much of the past decade are either changing or completely breaking down.
Over the past 10 years, marketers benefited from relatively stable conditions – fewer channels, more predictable performance and clearer feedback loops.
But those certainties are unravelling.
Attention is scarce
Your audience is probably exhausted. Everyone has news fatigue, ad fatigue and inbox fatigue. Even in B2B, buyers are filtering hard. They talk to peers, rely on communities, and self-educate long before they ever engage with a brand.
Channels are decaying
Google keeps more clicks for itself and costs have increased by an estimated 10-15% YoY. Meta’s targeting has been hollowed out by privacy rules. LinkedIn costs have ballooned.
Meanwhile, new platforms appear faster than most brands can adapt. The real problem isn’t just the number of platforms, it’s that doing them all well demands more time, budget and people than most teams have. You have to box clever, choosing where you can show up consistently and meaningfully.
Marketing complexity is rising
What used to be a simple lever pull now looks like a systems problem. A PPC issue turns out to be a UX issue turns out to be a product-market fit issue. While this interdependence isn’t new, it’s intensified by the sheer number of channels and the way customer influence now spans beyond traditional touchpoints. Fixing “performance” often means rewiring the machine.
And inside the business…
Marketing has lost clarity of purpose. Leaders want commercial impact, but teams are measured on metrics that no longer correlate with how growth will actually be achieved.
The result: activity is up, effectiveness is down and everyone feels like they’re pushing the boulder up the hill again and again.
Push vs. pull factors
Ten years ago, marketing worked like outbound sales. Brands pushed messages into the market through ads, email, and events. Attention could be bought with enough budget. The system rewarded reach and repetition.
That world was built on information asymmetry. Brands controlled information distribution and could manufacture awareness. That asymmetry has collapsed.
Today, discovery is demand-led, not supply-driven. Customers decide when and how they engage. They expect brands to show up credibly and relevantly in their world, rather than being pulled into the brand’s world.
They research through peers, reviews, communities and, increasingly, AI tools that compare options on their behalf. By the time they reach a company’s site or sales team, they’ve already made most of their decision.
This is the structural inversion: marketing’s leverage point has flipped. The job used to be creating attention. Now it’s earning inclusion in the buyer’s field of view.
That shift means brute-force marketing delivers diminishing returns. Visibility alone no longer converts. The challenge is no longer to interrupt customers, but to ensure the business shows up credibly, both before and when demand emerges.
The new priorities
The answer isn’t a bigger budget or a new channel. It’s building a marketing system that improves the efficiency and impact of every pound spent:
- Map your specific customer journey
Understand how buyers actually discover and evaluate solutions, not how you hope they do. Identify the key moments, influencers and channels that shape their decisions, then make sure your brand is easy to find, understand and trust.
You can’t be everywhere; you have to identify the key moments and channels that matter most and concentrate there.
- Keep it simple
When someone encounters your brand, they should instantly understand what problem you solve and why you’re the right choice.
That requires a coherent, customer-tested value proposition and focused positioning that’s easy for your target audience (& increasingly machines) to grasp without needing translation or explanation.
- Build trust into every single damn thing you do
Buyers check before they choose. They look for evidence that you’ll deliver on your promises. Clear proof points, credible reviews, and consistent performance reduce perceived risk.
These aren’t new ideas at all; they’re the original foundations of good marketing.
- Understanding your audience.
- Articulating why you matter.
- Building trust through proof.
These have always been the fundamentals, but over the last decade many marketers have over-optimised for the short term, chasing low-hanging fruit because data and paid channels made it look easy. That shortcut no longer works. AI-driven research and shifting sources of influence mean the low-hanging fruit is getting harder to find.
When markets become more complex and customers control discovery, those fundamentals aren’t optional.
If your business competes only on visibility and brute force, you’re effectively paying a tax for not having a strategy.
You spend more to achieve less, while competitors with sharper positioning and better understanding of their customers will be laser-focused on what works.
In other words, the solution to a “broken” marketing system isn’t new hacks or more content.
It’s re-establishing the core disciplines that underpin long-term growth: understanding, clarity and credibility.
That’s exactly what a true marketing strategy does – it provides the structure and market alignment that makes execution effective.
