Marketing Has One Job. Most Briefs Forget It

Marketing is trying to accomplish one thing: change behaviour in a way that drives commercial outcomes. Not awareness for its own sake, not engagement metrics, not creative awards. The function exists to make people think, feel, or do something differently, and to do it in a way that shows up in revenue, retention, or market share.

That sounds obvious. It is not, in practice. A significant proportion of marketing activity is designed around outputs rather than outcomes, around what the team can produce rather than what the business needs to achieve. The brief gets written, the campaign gets made, the results get reported, and somewhere in that chain the original commercial question gets lost.

Why the Question Is Worth Asking Seriously

I have sat in hundreds of briefing sessions across more than twenty years in this industry. The question that almost never gets asked at the start is: what does the business actually need right now? Not what does the marketing team want to do, not what did we do last year, not what is the competitor doing. What does the business need?

When I was running agencies and managing client relationships across thirty-plus industries, the pattern was consistent. Companies that struggled with marketing almost always had the same root problem: they had defined marketing’s job as producing marketing, rather than solving a business problem. The brief was about deliverables. The success criteria were about delivery. The review meeting was about whether the assets were on time and on brand.

That is not a marketing operation. That is a production line wearing a marketing badge.

The companies that got real value from their marketing investment were the ones who started from a different place. They asked: where is our growth going to come from? What is standing between us and that growth? What does marketing need to do, specifically, to remove that barrier? Everything else, including channels, formats, budgets and creative approaches, was downstream of that conversation.

The Three Actual Jobs Marketing Has

Strip away the complexity and marketing has three legitimate jobs. It can grow a customer base by reaching people who do not yet buy from you. It can grow the value of existing customers by deepening engagement, increasing purchase frequency, or expanding into adjacent categories. And it can protect existing revenue by maintaining relevance and preference against competitive pressure.

These three jobs require different strategies, different channels, different measurement approaches, and often different teams. Treating them as one undifferentiated “marketing” function is where a lot of budget gets wasted.

The problem I see most often is companies over-investing in the third job, protecting existing revenue through retargeting and retention mechanics, while calling it growth. It feels productive. The dashboards look healthy. Click-through rates are strong, return on ad spend looks excellent, cost per acquisition is trending down. But the customer base is not actually expanding. You are getting better and better at capturing people who were already going to buy from you.

Earlier in my career, I overvalued this kind of lower-funnel performance work. It took years of managing large budgets across multiple categories before I started to see the pattern clearly. A lot of what performance marketing gets credited for, particularly in mature categories with established brands, would have happened anyway. The intent was already there. The marketing did not create it. It just showed up at the moment of conversion and claimed the result.

Real growth requires reaching people who are not yet in the market. That is a harder brief to write, a harder outcome to measure, and a harder case to make to a CFO. But it is where the compounding returns actually come from.

If you want more context on how this connects to go-to-market planning and commercial growth, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the broader strategic framework in detail.

What Marketing Cannot Do

This is the part that gets left out of most marketing strategy discussions, probably because it is uncomfortable. Marketing cannot fix a product that does not work. It cannot compensate for a customer experience that consistently disappoints. It cannot manufacture long-term preference for something people do not actually want.

I have worked with businesses that were genuinely excellent at what they did, where the product was strong, the service was reliable, and customers were consistently happy. Those businesses were usually easier to market than the ones with more budget and more ambition but more fundamental problems underneath. When the underlying experience is good, marketing amplifies it. When the underlying experience is broken, marketing accelerates the disappointment.

There is a version of this that I think about often. If a company genuinely delighted its customers at every touchpoint, that alone would drive a significant amount of organic growth through word of mouth, repeat purchase, and category expansion. Marketing in that environment becomes an accelerant rather than a crutch. But when marketing is being used to prop up something more fundamentally broken, the returns diminish fast and the costs keep rising.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which is one of the few major award programmes that requires evidence of commercial effectiveness alongside creative quality. The campaigns that win consistently are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most ambitious creative. They are the ones where the marketing was solving a clearly defined business problem, and where the solution was measurable. The brief was right before the work was good.

The Measurement Problem That Distorts Everything

One reason marketing loses its way is that the things that are easiest to measure are not always the things that matter most. Clicks are easy to count. Brand consideration is harder to track. Short-term conversion rates are visible in any analytics platform. The long-term effect of consistent brand presence on pricing power is almost impossible to isolate in a dashboard.

This creates a systematic bias in how marketing investment gets allocated. Budget flows toward what can be measured, which means it flows toward lower-funnel, short-cycle, intent-capture activity. The work that builds the conditions for future demand, that puts a brand in front of people before they are ready to buy, tends to get underfunded because its return is deferred and diffuse.

I am not arguing against measurement. I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across my career and I have never believed that instinct alone is a sufficient basis for investment decisions. But there is a difference between honest approximation and false precision. Analytics tools give you a perspective on reality. They are not reality itself. The mistake is treating the dashboard as the ground truth rather than as one useful lens among several.

When GTM teams report that execution feels harder than it used to, part of what they are describing is this measurement trap. The channels that used to produce clean, attributable results are more competitive and more expensive. The easy wins are gone. Vidyard’s research on why GTM feels harder surfaces this tension clearly: the environment has changed but the measurement frameworks and success criteria have not kept pace.

How to Define What Marketing Should Accomplish in Your Business

The answer is not generic. It depends on where the business is in its growth cycle, what the competitive environment looks like, and what the actual constraints on growth are. A startup trying to establish category presence has a fundamentally different marketing job than a mature brand trying to defend market share in a declining category.

The starting point is always the same, though. What is the growth problem? Not the marketing problem. The growth problem. Where is revenue coming from today, and where does it need to come from in twelve or twenty-four months? What is preventing that from happening? Is it awareness, where the right people simply do not know you exist? Is it consideration, where they know you but do not see you as a credible option? Is it conversion, where they are interested but something in the purchase process is breaking down? Is it retention, where you are acquiring customers but losing them too quickly to build compounding value?

Each of those problems has a different marketing solution. Treating them all as “we need more marketing” is how budgets get spent without results.

When I was building out teams and taking an agency from twenty to a hundred people, the discipline that mattered most was not creative quality or channel expertise, though both mattered. It was the ability to diagnose the actual business problem before proposing a solution. The teams that could do that consistently were the ones that built long-term client relationships and produced work that actually moved commercial numbers. The teams that skipped straight to execution were always fighting to justify their existence.

Growth hacking frameworks, for all their limitations, at least force this diagnostic discipline. Semrush’s breakdown of growth hacking examples is useful not because the tactics are universally applicable but because the underlying logic, identifying the specific constraint and designing an intervention around it, is the right starting point regardless of the approach.

The Demand Creation Problem Most Teams Ignore

There is a useful way to think about marketing’s role in demand. Some people are actively in the market right now. They are searching, comparing, ready to buy. Capturing that demand is important, but it is a finite pool and it is expensive to compete for because everyone else is competing for it too.

The larger opportunity is the people who are not yet in the market but will be. They have the need, or will have it, but they have not yet started looking. Marketing that reaches those people before the active search begins is the marketing that builds category preference, reduces cost of acquisition over time, and creates the conditions for sustainable growth.

Think about how this works in retail. Someone who walks into a shop and tries on a piece of clothing is dramatically more likely to buy than someone who never engaged with the product at all. The act of trying creates a connection that passive browsing does not. Marketing that creates that kind of early engagement, before the formal purchase process begins, is doing something qualitatively different from marketing that shows up at the moment of conversion.

Creator-led content is increasingly being used to do this kind of early-stage work, particularly in categories where social proof and aspiration are strong purchase drivers. Later’s work on creator-led go-to-market campaigns shows how brands are using this channel to reach audiences before they enter the active consideration phase, not just to convert people who are already there.

The challenge is that this kind of upstream marketing is harder to attribute and slower to show results. It requires a leadership team that understands the difference between short-term efficiency and long-term effectiveness, and is willing to invest in both simultaneously.

When Marketing Is the Wrong Answer

This is the conversation that almost never happens in marketing reviews, but it should happen more often. Sometimes the answer to a growth problem is not more or better marketing. Sometimes it is a pricing change. Sometimes it is a product improvement. Sometimes it is a distribution decision. Sometimes it is fixing the post-purchase experience so that existing customers stay longer and refer more.

Marketing teams are not always well-positioned to have this conversation because their incentives point in one direction. More budget, more activity, more campaigns. But the most commercially credible marketing leaders I have worked with over the years are the ones who can say, clearly and without defensiveness: marketing is not the constraint here. Fix this other thing first, and then marketing can do its job properly.

Referral and growth loop mechanics are a good example of this in practice. Hotjar’s growth loop framework illustrates how product design and user experience decisions can drive acquisition more effectively than paid media in certain contexts. The marketing question and the product question are not always separate.

Forrester’s research on go-to-market struggles in complex categories, including their analysis of healthcare device and diagnostics GTM challenges, consistently surfaces the same finding: companies that struggle most are the ones where marketing is trying to compensate for unclear positioning or undifferentiated products. The marketing cannot do its job because the upstream strategic decisions have not been made clearly enough.

More thinking on how marketing connects to broader commercial strategy, including where it fits in a go-to-market plan and how to sequence investment decisions, is available across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy section of The Marketing Juice.

Bringing It Back to the Brief

The most practical place to apply all of this is the brief. Before any campaign, any channel decision, any budget allocation, the brief should answer three questions clearly. What is the business problem? What does marketing need to do to address it? How will we know if it worked?

Not: what are the deliverables? Not: what is the timeline? Not: what is the brand tone of voice? Those things matter, but they are downstream of the three questions above. If the brief cannot answer those three questions in plain language, the campaign that follows will be optimised for the wrong things.

I have seen this play out at scale, across large agency relationships with Fortune 500 clients and in small business settings where the marketing team is one person. The discipline is the same regardless of size. Start with the business problem. Define what change in behaviour would address it. Design marketing that creates that change. Measure whether it happened.

That is what marketing is trying to accomplish. Everything else is execution.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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