B2B marketing's existential crisis & why it became too small to matter

In many B2B companies today, "marketing" no longer describes the full set of growth levers it once did. It's a loss to the profession and the business it serves.

Over the past 15+ years, the function was steadily reduced to a single “P” of the classic 4P marketing mix. Promotion. The other levers—product, price, and place—have been absorbed by other functions: product management, sales, channel operations, finance.

Marketing is a function that became a fraction of itself.

Even segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP), historically marketing's diagnostic and strategic core, is often split between product management and product marketing. In SaaS especially, product marketing is treated as a separate market intelligence and positioning function, distinct from communications campaign execution.

This separation reinforces the view of "marketing" as the 1P promotion function, while other elements of the mix sit elsewhere in the business.

This narrowing has been accelerated by the "SaaS-ification" of B2B growth models, where predictable revenue frameworks emphasized pipeline conversion over long-term market development.

At the end of the day, whatever the reasons, marketing became a support function for sales velocity, rather than the integrator of the full market mix and custodian of the firm's GTM growth capital.

The strategic cost of scope erosion

When marketing's remit is narrowed to communications, its ability to shape growth capital allocation disappears.

Decisions about which segments to pursue, which channels to prioritize (to reach those segments), how to price, and where to invest growth capital are made elsewhere, often without the benefit of integrated customer and competitor intelligence.

The consequences become structural:

• Marketing becomes an expense to manage, not a lever to scale.
• Growth bets are made with partial data and disconnected insight flows.
• The function is evaluated on activity volume and campaign metrics, not on its contribution to return on invested capital.

As an aside: It's worth considering whether the rise of the CRO is less about organizational innovation and more about symptom management. Perhaps it's an unintended response to marketing's reduced scope, placing revenue accountability under another title because the function no longer owned enough levers to influence growth end-to-end.

This erosion has direct business impacts CEOs and CFOs should not ignore, which are becoming increasingly obvious in the post-ZIRP era:

• Higher CAC. Sales-led growth without long-term brand investment ensures each customer remains expensive to acquire, with no compounding efficiency over time.
• Margin erosion. Without brand-driven "relative differentiation," price competition intensifies, compressing gross margins.
• Capital misallocation: Growth budgets are optimized for short-term wins rather than building long-term market advantage.

So what? The business ends up paying more to win less, consistently over-allocating resources to near-term pipeline at the expense of sustainable market position.

Over time, the firm becomes trapped in a cycle of rising acquisition costs, price competition, and fragile revenue streams. Without intervention, the long-term cost of growth keeps climbing while the competitive moat shrinks.

Let's consider the case of the ~20% of large public companies that are classified as "zombies." That is, unable to cover their debt from operations and kept alive only through refinancing.

That's a financial symptom of a deeper problem: these firms very likely don't have a market-oriented diagnosis guiding their choices. Without that, capital deployment and go-to-market execution are pure guesswork.

The real turnaround path isn't another debt rollover: it's a marketing function with the authority and competence to define where the company can win, and the discipline to align product, price, place, and promotion to that reality.

You can refinance debt, but you can't refinance irrelevance. That's why fixing marketing beats rolling over loans, starting with market diagnosis.

The genie is out of the bottle

Now that the marketing function is culturally and operationally defined as 1P in many firms, reclaiming control of the full marketing mix will be difficult.

Other departments now "own" pieces of the puzzle, with budgets and authority to match. Few CEOs will re-centralize those levers under marketing, even when they see the value of a more integrated approach.

This is why the existential crisis is real: the title "CMO" may remain, but the scope it represents in many firms is too narrow to meet the demands of a capital-disciplined growth strategy.

Searching for a practical path forward

The way out doesn't require dismantling what exists, but it does require building what's missing. That means establishing a capability that integrates:

• Customer and competitor intelligence gathering systems integrated with cross-department insights distribution.
• Segmentation, targeting, and positioning rooted in capital allocation logic, starting with the a shared understanding of the time value of money.
• Prioritizing growth initiatives based on their projected return on invested capital, with clear thresholds for funding and stage gates for continuation.
• Building the capability to rapidly reallocate budget, talent, and channel focus from underperforming areas to higher-potential opportunities as market conditions change.

This capability can be housed inside marketing, but in many firms it will be more effective to frame it as something new—Growth Capital Strategy (?)—so it can operate across silos without triggering territorial resistance.

But the truth is that we don't need a new function for this: it's called a marketing department. Absent that, it might be time to merge elements of FP&A and marketing strategy into a unified group.

Why GTM growth capital strategy matters today

Capital discipline is no longer optional, as everyone knows. Whether driven by investor expectations, rising cost of capital, market volatility, or competitive pressure, CEOs and CFOs are looking for growth bets that can be clearly linked to business outcomes.

In B2B, the firms that recognize marketing's scope erosion and act to rebuild an integrated growth and capital allocation strategy capability will:

• Reduce CAC through stronger brand memory recall at the time of purchase, while achieving broader reach across segments.
• Protect margins by supporting price premium through "relative differentiation" (h/t to Mark Ritson).
• Increase customer lifetime value by deepening loyalty and expanding buying relationships.
• Improve capital productivity by funding growth bets with the best risk-adjusted return potential.

Those that don't will keep spending on promotion while the real levers of growth remain fragmented, or join the 20% ...

Closing Thought

The crisis isn't that marketing failed. It's that the definition of marketing in B2B became too small for the job the business' growth now requires.

The fix isn't nostalgia for a past remit. That ship sailed. We need a deliberate redesign of how companies generate insight and allocate GTM growth capital across the business.