The Myths That Keep a Marketing Function Stuck

When marketing feels stuck, most businesses respond in the same way.

They push harder. Increase activity. Try something new. New campaigns. New agencies. New ideas to inject momentum and restore confidence.

On the surface, this makes sense. If results aren’t improving, it feels logical to do more.

But effort is not the same as effectiveness. And in marketing, increased activity often masks deeper problems rather than solving them.

A poorly designed marketing function can look incredibly busy. Content is produced. Campaigns are launched. Meetings are held. Reports are shared. Yet progress remains slow and results remain hard to pin down.

As frustrations mount, what follows is almost always the same cycle. Leadership debates about what’s broken and how to fix it. Because everyone is exposed to marketing every day, everyone has a view. And those views tend to converge around the most visible explanations.

Hire someone better.
Find a stronger agency.
Refresh the brand.

These responses are understandable. They’re also the reason marketing frustration tends to repeat itself.

Because while they feel like action, they’re built on a set of assumptions that quietly keep marketing stuck.

The myth of the “good marketer”

One of the most persistent beliefs in marketing is that performance problems can be solved by hiring a better individual. 

A more experienced marketer or a more commercial thinker.
Someone who’s “done it before”.

When progress stalls, the logic seems sound: if results aren’t good enough, the person must not be good enough.

But this belief confuses talent with functional capability.

Even the strongest marketers struggle inside poorly designed functions. Without clear priorities, decision authority, operating rhythm, and commercial clarity, they spend most of their time reacting rather than leading.

All too often a single Marketing Manager is expected to plan, execute, manage and analyse performance - and when that inevitably becomes overwhelming, the conclusion is drawn: “We need someone better.”

In reality, the role itself is impossible. There was never any chance of success. 

This is why many businesses experience a familiar cycle. A new hire joins with energy and optimism. Early activity increases. Expectations rise. And then, gradually, progress slows as the same structural constraints reassert themselves.

Capability is not just about skills. It’s about whether the function is designed to allow those skills to be used effectively.

The problem wasn’t the individual. It was the environment they were dropped into.

If hiring doesn’t create the step-change hoped for, the focus typically moves to external expertise.

Why agencies don’t fix functions

When internal capability feels limited or the business has lost confidence in an internal hire, fully outsourcing to an agency can often appear to be the answer.

They bring expertise, capacity, and confidence.
They promise momentum without the complexity.

And agencies can be extremely effective (within the right context and with the right remit). Among other benefits, they often have access to top talent and specialist skills that would be difficult to build in-house. 

The problem arises when they’re asked to play a role they weren’t built for: be the marketing function, rather than act as a specialist contributor within it.

Agencies are built to execute. That’s their strength. But because their commercial model is tied to the services they deliver, they can’t be expected to take a fully impartial view on which activities are the best use of your time and budget. That responsibility sits elsewhere. 

Without a clear operating model and strong leadership, agencies end up filling gaps rather than delivering focused impact. They become de facto decision-makers, priority-setters, and sometimes even referees between internal stakeholders.

Over time, this creates dependency rather than maturity.

When the relationship ends, progress stalls. Not because the agency was bad, but because the function itself was never strengthened.

Agencies can improve a well-designed function. They cannot substitute for one. And when neither people nor partners seem to shift performance, attention often turns to the brand itself.

The lure of a rebrand

Few initiatives create a greater sense of progress and achievement than a rebrand. 

There’s energy. Workshops are scheduled. Leadership teams get aligned around language and ambition. Visuals are refreshed. Messaging is rewritten. For a while, it feels like something meaningful is finally happening.

And sometimes, a rebrand is genuinely needed. Businesses change. Markets move. Categories evolve. What once fitted no longer reflects who the company is or where it’s going. And to be frank, most branding isn’t fit for purpose, and does need looking at to ensure it’s not holding back performance. 

So the problem isn’t rebranding itself. The problem is how often it’s used as a substitute for fixing deeper functional issues.

When marketing feels stuck, changing how the business looks is far easier than changing how the function actually operates. A rebrand feels decisive. It’s visible. It creates momentum without forcing difficult conversations about structure, ownership, or accountability.

In contrast, redesigning a marketing function is uncomfortable. It raises questions about roles, priorities, decision-making, and leadership. It exposes gaps that can’t be solved with a new colour palette or tagline.

So the rebrand becomes a proxy for progress.

The result is familiar. The brand changes - the function doesn’t.

New assets are created and dropped into the same unclear operating model. For a short period, the new brand carries things forward. Externally, it looks sharper. Internally, it feels motivating. But because the underlying function hasn’t changed, the impact quickly plateaus.

And slowly, frustration returns - this time with better visuals.

Why these myths persist

Across all three responses, the same underlying logic is at work. Problems are framed as people problems, partner problems, or creative problems - because those are visible, tangible, and easier to act on.

Functional maturity, by contrast, is largely invisible. It’s structural. It doesn’t announce itself loudly when it’s missing, but it quietly shapes everything that follows.

When marketing underperforms, the instinct is to change what you can see. The harder work is addressing what you can’t: tackling the system itself, rather than its symptoms.

These myths persist because they’re comforting. They suggest that improvement is just one hire, one agency, or one initiative away, and they allow businesses to avoid more uncomfortable questions about structure, leadership, and design.

They also persist because, occasionally, they appear to work. At least in the short term. A strong individual can carry a broken function for a while. A good agency can create momentum. A rebrand can generate a temporary spike in attention and interest.

But without structural change, those gains rarely last.

Clearing the ground for real progress

None of this is to suggest that people, partners, or creativity don’t matter. They do. But they matter within a properly designed marketing function.

Until a business is willing to look beyond surface-level explanations for underperformance, marketing will continue to feel harder than it needs to be. Frustration will continue to resurface, leading back to the same familiar fixes.

When businesses recognise that the real constraint is structural, marketing stops feeling like a constant struggle, and starts working the way it was always meant to.

If you find these articles and way of thinking useful, you can read more about my background and the type of work I do here or sign up to receive updates below.