What a Marketing Function Is Actually Supposed to Do

Most businesses mature their functions out of necessity, not choice. Sales matures because missed targets hurt quickly. Operations matures because inefficiency becomes expensive. Finance matures because lack of control introduces risk. 

And some functions are forced to mature in order to keep up with external factors. For example a HR team responding to changes in employment law or a technical teams evolving to meet new industry regulation.

Marketing rarely faces the same immediate pressure.

For a start, marketing isn’t highly regulated, so with the exception of changes to data protection laws or a once-in-a-decade threat from a competitor, it's rare to see an external factor that forces a business to invest in its marketing capability with any real urgency. 

Then when marketing underperforms, the business usually still survives. Growth might slow, but it doesn’t stop overnight. As a result, marketing problems can persist for years without forcing structural change.

Over time, this creates a maturity gap.

Sales, operations, and finance evolve into well-defined functions with clear roles, systems, and accountability. Marketing remains loosely defined, under-structured, and heavily dependent on individuals.

Not because it’s less important, but because the consequences of marketing immaturity are less visible in the short term.

What happens when marketing lags behind 

No business sets out to under-design marketing.

It happens because customer growth comes first. Then delivery. Then cashflow. Then people. Then systems. A marketing team is usually introduced after sales momentum already exists, brought in to support growth rather than architect it.

This lag effect between marketing and the rest of the business often means that marketing is treated differently, and held to a different standard to other functions. 

Sales is allowed to focus. Operations is allowed to say no. Finance is allowed to slow things down in the name of control. This feels natural because their level of accountability is high. 

In contrast, marketing is often expected to accommodate the demands of other departments, but is held accountable for very little. The function is expected to be flexible, responsive, and creative, but rarely is it expected to be operationally mature. Be helpful, and the status quo is maintained. Be collaborative, and everyone keeps their jobs. 

That expectation creates a problem. It’s the moment where performance starts to drift and the function’s overall impact no longer matches what you set out to build.

Marketing as a Service Desk 

When a function exists primarily to respond to internal requests, it loses the ability to prioritise external impact. Instead of activity being shaped by the market, it becomes shaped by the organisation. Over time, the team absorbs requests, reacts to internal pressure, and fills gaps, behaving less like a growth engine and more like a service desk.

If you intended marketing to be a back-office support function, that’s fine. The problem arises when you expected it to drive growth. That’s when frustration creeps in. Requests pile up, short-term needs crowd out long-term impact, and confidence begins to erode across the business.

None of this happens because people don’t care. It happens because the function was never given a clear chance to succeed. There’s an expectations mismatch that few can articulate, because most businesses never explicitly define what they expect marketing to deliver in the first place. 

Confusing activity with contribution

One of the most obvious signs that a marketing function that’s become a “service desk” is that most conversations revolve around activity, not outcomes. 

What campaigns are running.
What content is being produced.
What channels are being used.
What tools are being implemented.

Activity is visible, tangible, and easy to discuss. It gives the reassuring sense that something is happening.

But activity is not the same as outcomes. 

A mature function is not defined by how busy it looks, but by what it consistently delivers. Not in a vague sense. Not in terms of activity or output. But in terms of contribution to the business.

Instead, expectations build up informally over time. Marketing is expected to launch campaigns. Update the website. Generate Leads. Manage agencies. “Do social”. Sort events. Produce materials. Fix problems.

Individually, none of these expectations are unreasonable.

Collectively, they create confusion around what the marketing function exists to deliver, and it becomes very difficult to judge whether it’s working at all.

In other parts of the business, this difference is obvious.

Sales isn’t measured by how many calls are made, but by revenue generated. Operations isn’t judged by how many processes exist, but by reliability, efficiency, and throughput. Finance isn’t valued for spreadsheets, but for cost control, insight, and confidence.

Marketing, by contrast, is often left floating somewhere between effort and impact.

Marketing’s real job 

At its core, a marketing function exists to create the conditions for sustainable growth.

Not growth at any cost. Not growth driven by short-term tricks. But growth that is predictable, repeatable, profitable, and scalable over time.

That means marketing’s role is not simply to execute campaigns or generate noise. It exists primarily to:

• Shape how the business competes in its market 
• Improve the efficiency of how it generates sales
• Reduce reliance on individual relationships or heroics

In other words, marketing should make growth easier to manage as the business scales, not harder to sustain.

When it works properly, marketing reduces friction elsewhere in the organisation. Sales conversations become warmer. Prospects are better informed before they engage. Pricing becomes easier to defend. Revenue becomes more predictable, rather than dependent on bursts of activity.

This is what many businesses hope marketing will do, even if they’ve never articulated it explicitly.

What it takes to compete

The level of performance required to drive meaningful growth is often underestimated.

Most businesses talk about wanting to grow by 20% year on year. In practice, only a small minority ever achieve it. Data from the UK Office for National Statistics and the British Business Bank shows that more than half of UK businesses stand still or shrink each year, and only a small minority manage sustained growth at that level. To grow by 10%, you need to be in roughly the top third of your market. To grow by 20%, all else being equal, your sales and marketing setup needs to outperform nine out of ten competitors.

That’s a sobering thought.

And it’s the reason outperforming your market must be approached as a function design challenge, not a tactics exercise.

The difference between outperforming your competitors and delivering average results is not effort or ideas. It’s the difference between doing marketing and running an effective marketing function.

Doing marketing is about execution: running campaigns, producing assets, managing channels, and responding to requests.

Running a marketing function is about design, structure, skills, systems and accountability.

It’s about deciding what marketing is responsible for, how it contributes to growth, how priorities are set, how success is measured, and how decisions are made.

Many businesses do plenty of marketing. Very few operate a mature marketing function.

And without a certain level of operational maturity, execution becomes reactive by default. Reactive marketing may look busy, but it will never put you in the top 10% of your market.

Before setting ambitious performance targets, some more basic questions need to be answered.

What does a best-in-class marketing operation actually look like in your category? What is this marketing function here to do for your business? And what would it take (functionally and operationally) for it to perform at that level?

Until those questions are clear, every attempt to improve marketing rests on shaky ground. Plans feel arbitrary. Metrics feel open to debate. Investment decisions feel risky, because no one is quite sure what “good” looks like.

This is why marketing so often becomes a source of frustration rather than confidence. Not because people aren’t trying hard enough, but because the function itself is being asked to perform without a clear role, structure, or point of reference.

Clarity is not the end goal. But without it, there is no sensible starting point.

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.