Marketing Is Broken

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Marketing is broken not because the theory is wrong, but because the best practices are GUTTED.

Remember when marketing started with a promise and ended with a purchase? Somewhere along the way, the promise got outsourced to a dashboard. What marketing has become is a chorus of metrics. We have reduced marketing to performance. We are ignoring brand and are overlooking strategy. The scoreboard got louder than the story. That may add up to numbers, but not to building a brand. This piece is about putting the brand back at the centre and metrics back in their place.

 

Performance Marketing Is Not Branding

The realty: Most marketers are not doing Marketing. They are doing campaigns, ads, content, and promotion. And that’s the trap. Activity without alignment, output without outcome.

When you advertise in a newspaper, you look at circulation. On TV, you check TRPs. With hoardings, it’s footfalls and eyeballs. These are media metrics. Useful for planning, not substitutes for the brand itself.

Performance marketing works the same way. Reach, impressions, CTRs tell you how far your message travelled. They don’t tell you if people believe it, remember it, or value it. That still belongs to the brand.

Done right, performance marketing amplifies brand. It maximizes the reach of a story you have already built through clarity on product, price, place, and promotion. But if there’s no story, no brand foundation, performance becomes life support. Unplug it, and the brand flatlines.

Also, audiences are not exactly waiting for ads with folded hands. As per a study by Nielsen 64% of people actively avoid ads on free, ad-supported video. So, if your strategy is just more frequency, you are turning up the volume on a channel people are muting.

 

The Order Take Trap

If you only work at the end of the pipeline, you are not doing marketing. You are doing service delivery. Real marketing is upstream. Shaping propositions, packaging, price logic, routes to market, and then creating communication that fits the reality you just designed.

Marketing is not an order-taker. Marketing is meant to be a change maker. Push upstream. Co-own the decisions that make communications effective, long before “go-live.”

 

Solution is Fixing 4Ps

Marketers talk about the 4Ps but in reality they are stuck in the 4th P: Promotion. Without a say in Product, Price, Place, marketing becomes decoration, not direction.

When Product, Price, Place, and Promotion express a single brand idea, media works harder. When they don’t, you’re just optimizing a leaky bucket. The industry’s most-cited effectiveness work (Binet & Field) points to a 60:40 balance between long-term brand building and short-term activation. Tweak the exact ratio for your context, but ignore the principle at your peril.

It’s not that performance is bad. It’s that performance without brand is expensive. It’s like spending money to rent attention instead of owning memory.

 

What are Other Solutions to Fix Broken Marketing?

Distinctive brand assets. Create identifiers people can spot at 3 seconds and 3 meters: colour, shape, sonic, mascot, pack. Your media is a distribution system for identifiers.

Memory, not just clicks. Not everyone is going to buy today or right now. Branding builds recognition, recall and preference. So when your consumers think of buying, they remember your brand. That’s catering to future demand.

Creative that earns attention. If the work doesn’t move a human, it won’t move a metric. Make work people want to watch, not work they work to avoid.

Balance brand and activation. Use the long-term/short-term split as a starting point, not a straitjacket. Build demand and harvest it.

Pricing power as a KPI. Instead of thinking just about leads and conversions, think about role of branding in protecting margins and delivering price resilience. Strong brands ride out downturns and discount wars better.

Make measurement serve strategy. Add brand KPIs next to your CAC and ROAS, such as your mental availability, distinctiveness, price premium.

 

The Difference That Matters

Strategy v/s Tactics
Long term v/s Short Term
Meaning v/s Metrics

Tactics can spike a graph. But when strategy is missing, even the best tactics fall flat. Strategy aligns Product, Price, Place and Promotion. And then earns the right for performance to scale it. That’s how you get growth that sticks instead of traffic that blips.

 

What We Need More Of (and Less Of)

What we need more of is branding and marketing working together. Less noise, more meaning. More courage and creativity. Less dashboard worship. More ideas people remember, repeat, and pay for. We need to see and imply brands as a force for good.

 

If your brand feels like it’s sprinting in place, it isn’t because marketing theory broke. It’s because the best practices got gutted and the order-taking began. Put strategy back in front, bring the 4Ps back together, and let performance amplify, not substitute, the brand you have built.

At Purple Phase, we partner upstream and downstream. Shaping propositions, aligning the 4Ps, designing systems (not one-off ads), and building creative people actually want to see, then using performance to carry it further. If you want numbers that mean something because they come from a brand that stands for something, we would love to help.

Write to: info.purplephase@gmail.com or connect with us at +91 9327009400.