Marketing’s MI
Today, marketing faces its own “mission impossible” moment—one that has trapped businesses in an unsustainable paradox:
CMOs deliver Growth. CFOs demand Profits. CEOs want both.
This trifecta of expectations sounds reasonable—until you try to meet it. Traditional marketing, with its deep roots in volume-based outreach and acquisition-led strategies, simply cannot reconcile the push for rapid growth with the pull of profit discipline. Business leaders experience this every day: scaling revenue requires ever-increasing marketing spend but rising spend eats into margins. And so, the faster you grow, the more your profits shrink. The more you focus on efficiency, the more growth suffers.
This is not just a budgeting problem. It’s not a matter of tweaking media mix models, refining attribution, or finding the next campaign innovation. It’s a structural failure—a product of how modern marketing systems have evolved in the digital age.
The problem starts with the addiction to acquisition. Marketers are incentivised to chase new customers, often at any cost. Digital ad platforms, with their opaque auctions and rising CPMs, have become essential gatekeepers. Every time a customer clicks, converts, or comes back, brands pay a toll—to Google, Meta, Amazon, or other marketplaces. These platform “revenue taxes” can consume 20–30% of total revenue, especially in B2C and eCommerce businesses.
Even worse, much of this spend is reacquisition—targeting customers the brand already knows, who’ve already bought before. Instead of deepening the relationship through owned channels, brands are paying again and again to re-win attention they once had. It’s a leaky bucket strategy—AdWaste—disguised as growth.
Meanwhile, martech stacks are bloated and underutilised. While companies invest in powerful automation tools and customer data platforms, most only use a fraction of their capabilities. The complexity overwhelms teams, integration takes forever, and the dream of personalisation remains just that—a dream. Campaigns are still built for segments, not individuals. Messages are generic, not contextual. Journeys are broken across channels. The result? Customers tune out. Attention fades. Churn accelerates.
And so the cycle continues: acquisition compensates for poor retention, new spend covers up old inefficiencies, and marketing becomes a black hole of investment with diminishing returns.
This is why the tension between growth and profit feels unresolvable—why it seems like marketing’s own “mission impossible.” It’s not for lack of effort. It’s because the tools, metrics, and mindsets are misaligned with the outcomes business leaders truly want.
But what if that wasn’t the case? What if marketing could be reimagined—not as a cost centre or chaotic collection of campaigns, but as a systematic engine of profitable growth?
That’s the shift we need. That’s the opportunity ahead.
