The Lie About What Marketing Can’t Fix

Crappy product

A genuinely bad product, one nobody wants, nobody needs, nobody can use, rarely exists. What exists far more often is a product designed in a vacuum. A product nobody validated.

Marketing’s role is to stop that. It’s the process of testing demand before you spend heavily on supply.

Think about it:

• How many hours get wasted developing features that never get used?

• How much stock ends up discounted because it wasn’t what the market wanted?

• How much internal energy gets burned defending a product people outside the building don’t care about?

That’s not “just a product or service problem.” It’s a marketing failure.

Done right, marketing ensures you understand what people value, identify the gaps, and know how much they’re willing to pay for it. It shapes the proposition before you pour money into building the wrong thing.

And even when the product or service itself is fine, marketing is often what turns it from “meh” to must-have. The classic example: you don’t need to change the product, you need to change who you’re aiming it at, how you explain it, or how you get it in their hands. The wrong product for one market can be the perfect one for another.

No vision

Vision gets treated like something lofty and untouchable. It’s often also the first thing that businesses roll their eyes at when the marketing team wants to talk about “brand vision.” Vision problems often exist because there isn’t one defined. And the reason you need one? Because if staff can’t explain why the company exists and believe in the vision, you can be sure that customers won’t know why they should care.

If you think that’s not a marketing issue, you’re kidding yourself.

Marketing forces clarity. It asks:

• Who are we here for?

• What problem are we solving?

• Why us instead of the next best option?

When those answers are fuzzy, the business is for want of the better expression floating in gravy without a boat. Departments or team members invent their own version of the truth. Staff waste energy on projects that don’t connect. Investors and customers stop listening because it all sounds like noise.

When marketing pins it down, everything sharpens. The story aligns. Staff have a filter for decisions: does this fit who we are for? Customers finally hear a reason that cuts through.

Internal chaos

Chaos is rarely random. It usually comes from disagreement over direction. Sales chasing one type of customer, product chasing another, ops chasing efficiency for a third. Or my favourite, nobody knowing who their customer is, and the complete lack of coordination and organisation and decision making that comes with that!

Marketing brings discipline. It forces the company to commit:

• Which customer comes first.

• What promise we are making.

• Which projects serve that promise, and which don’t.

Without that, chaos spreads. The business starts to look busy but incoherent. People pull hard, but in opposite directions. Meetings multiply. Energy drains.

With it, the noise drops. Fewer projects, but sharper ones. Staff know the boundaries. Decisions get made faster because the frame is clear.

Pricing that makes no sense

This is the one that gets missed the most.

Boards treat pricing as finance. Add up the cost, put a margin on top, maybe glance at what competitors are doing, and call it a day. That’s NOT pricing strategy. 

Pricing lives in people’s heads. It’s set by context, framing, and perceived value. Which means it’s marketing’s job.

• Price too high without proof → you look arrogant.

• Price too low without a story → you look cheap.

• Price the same as everyone else → you look invisible.

Marketing sets the frame around the number. It’s the case studies, guarantees, comparisons, and outcomes that make £10,000 feel cheap in one context and £1,000 feel expensive in another.

Get it wrong, and sales end up discounting to close. Buyers get trained to expect deals. Margins quietly die over time. Once the market sees you as cheap, you rarely climb back out.

Get it right, and the price holds. You stop teaching people to haggle. You move from “cost plus” to “value based.” You gain the confidence to set tiers, offer choices, and hold the middle ground without sweating every objection.

Pricing isn’t a spreadsheet exercise. It’s a marketing one.

A broken sales process

When sales stalls, the default is to blame salespeople. Not enough calls, not good enough closers, poor training.

But most broken sales processes are actually marketing failures.

If buyers don’t know you, don’t trust you, or don’t see the value, sales has to fight uphill. They’re trying to close deals that weren’t ready to close in the first place.

That’s where marketing matters. It creates awareness before the first call. It builds credibility so the brand feels safe. It sets the value frame so the price doesn’t shock. It warms the prospect so the sales team can finish the job rather than start from scratch.

When sales and marketing are aligned, the funnel feels seamless. Prospects don’t stall out because each stage has proof or reassurance ready: a case study, a testimonial, a guarantee, a demo. The buyer feels like they’re moving forward, not being dragged.

When they’re not aligned, sales is rowing in circles.

The hidden costs

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the biggest cost of ignoring marketing isn’t in what you spend. It’s in what you never get.

• The customers who never find you.

• The deals that never start because your story was unclear.

• The margins you never hold because nobody believed your price.

• The referrals that never come because customers left confused.

You don’t notice them because they’re invisible. But they’re real. They’re the deals your competitors close. The talent that joins someone else. The churn that eats your growth quietly until it’s too late.

That’s opportunity cost. And it dwarfs the tidy line item you saved.

So what can marketing fix?

Not incompetence. Not fraud. Not laziness. But almost every other “unsolvable” problem that directors like to pin elsewhere.

Product. Vision. Chaos. Pricing. Sales. They’re all shaped, supported, or fixed by marketing when it’s done properly.

The real question isn’t “what can marketing fix?” It’s: “how much are we losing by pretending it isn’t part of the fix?”