Does marketing need a rebrand?
When you think of the word ‘marketing’, what immediately comes to mind? It’s probably going to depend on where you sit within the team. It might be content, social media, ads, design analytics, results, strategy or implementation. We’ve heard marketing referred to as ‘the colouring in department’, ‘the people who make things look pretty’, or ‘the people who post the ‘silly’ TikToks’.
For the longest time, we’ve all gingerly laughed along when Mark from accounts starts making his little jokes, and we’ve not advocated enough for ourselves as a critical business function. But after many discussions, rants and chats with people in various roles across different businesses, one thing has become clear: marketing needs a rebrand.
Feel free to use this article as ammunition!
What is marketing?
Marketing is such a huge umbrella that it’s no wonder its meaning can occasionally get lost in the sauce. So we’re going to start by breaking it down into its two core functions. Would you agree?
Lead generation
Brand experience
Lead generation
We’ve all seen it. When times get tough, marketing is often the first team or function to get cut. And when things pick up, the first team to get brought in is sales. Marcus Sheridan references this pattern in his book, They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today′s Digital Consumer. It feels like a tale as old as time at this point.
But there’s a huge problem here. There can’t be sales without marketing, and vice versa. Marketing tees things up with brand awareness and resonance. Sales make the drive and get the thing over the line (can you tell I’ve been watching The Masters?)
We have enough data by now to know that digital buyers are generally around 70% of the way through their buying journey before they ever make contact with your sales team. They tend to reach that 70% because they’re interacting with your brand’s content, website, reviews or whatever else you have out there.
If those pieces aren’t being created or updated regularly, your digital buyers may have little to no brand resonance, maybe even awareness in some cases. You’re left with a sales team that has to graft harder than a male contestant on Love Island to build a relationship and rapport with that lead. By that logic, if you go balls to the wall on growing a sales team when you have no marketing team in place, you’re left in a bit of a pickle (not to mention you’re making life and conversions 10x harder for your sales team).
It’s not to say that ‘cold’ selling or outreach is dead. But in 2026, you have to have some seriously good data to personalise cold outreach and make it extremely relevant to that particular person.
Without marketing, you’re unlikely to have this data. How do you know whether someone has interacted with your company’s website, your content, or your previous campaigns, where they are in the awareness stages? Without this intel, your business could end up spending exponentially more on wasted cold outreach than if the lead generation function had kept ticking over in the first place.
One study revealed that businesses that kept a minimal amount of marketing activity going during economic downturn saw their leads decrease by about 7.5%. For the ones who shut it down completely, theirs dropped by nearly four times as much, sitting at nearly 29%.
Can you afford to cut this crucial part of the sales process?
Brand experience
The other critical side of marketing? What happens to your customers once they’ve bought from you? If you don’t give them a well-rounded, positive brand experience, your chances of turning those people into repeat customers go down the toilet.
What comes under this brand experience umbrella?
Nurturing comms
Whether you’re B2C or B2B, your relationship with a customer or client doesn’t have to end when they finish working with you. It’s marketing who nurture these relationships via a series of different touchpoints.
They may look like:
Nurture email sequences where you showcase what else you have to offer.
Sending unique promotions or offers exclusively to existing customers.
Creating and sending incentives in exchange for customer testimonials.
Real-life experiences and events
Then there are the valiant marketing teams working in tandem with events to bring your brand to life.
From engaging influencers, thought leaders and sought-after speakers to getting bums on seats, these are the people who take your brand from a digital space to something that exists in real life and connects people.
Consistent social media presence
Marketing is the one making sure you avoid the ‘feast and famine’ pipelines.
They’re the ones maintaining your consistent social media presence, making sure you’re staying in front of customers both old and new. They’re the ones making sure you stay relevant in a changing marketing place.
Suddenly, the ‘silly little TikToks’ don’t seem so silly after all.
How do we go about the marketing rebrand?
Firstly, we make it impossible to ignore the business cost of cutting marketing (which we know can be huge, both in the short and long-term).
Secondly, and this may be uncomfortable for some, we have to stop playing down our industry. It’s only when business leaders fully understand the value of the function that they’ll stop advertising ‘entry level’ ‘marketing manager’ roles for £18,000 a year.
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