Marketing is dead and the clients are paying for the funeral.

There is a phrase by Peter Drucker that gets quoted constantly and understood almost never. "The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous." Most people read it as a motivational aphorism. It is, in fact, a technical definition of surgical precision, and it contains within it the diagnosis of a systemic failure that has lasted thirty years.

If you have to sell aggressively, if you have to convince, manipulate, shout to move your product, then your marketing has already failed. True marketing is designing something that fits so perfectly into a real need that the purchase becomes an inevitable consequence, not the result of coercion.

This is engineering. What we call marketing today is decoration.

The great semantic substitution

When did the switch happen? And more importantly: why did no one stop it?

The answer lies in the incentives. In the 1990s, with the explosion of digital media, a new category of suppliers emerged: digital communication agencies. These agencies needed a product to sell. And the easiest product to sell is one that can be seen, measured, and renewed.

An advertising campaign is visible. A social media post can be counted. A new logo can be touched. They are all tangible deliverables, billable, repeatable.

True marketing, Drucker's kind, is invisible. It is the decision not to launch a product because the market does not want it. It is choosing a price that positions rather than competes. It is designing an experience that eliminates friction rather than masking it. None of this produces a colourful slide to show the board.

So the market did what markets always do: it optimised for what is measurable, not for what is important.

The economics of paint

The mechanism is identical to what one observes in strategic consulting.

McKinsey does not sell strategy. It sells the feeling of having done strategy. It produces documents, frameworks, presentations that allow management to say "we have done strategic work". The fact that those documents end up in a drawer is irrelevant. The deliverable has been delivered. The invoice has been paid. Everyone is happy.

Marketing agencies operate on the same principle. They do not sell market positioning. They sell the appearance of marketing activity. The client sees movement, sees output, sees something they can show their boss. The fact that sales do not move is a problem that will be addressed next quarter, with another campaign.

It is a stable equilibrium because all actors benefit in the short term. The agency invoices. The marketing manager justifies their budget. The CEO sees activity. The only loser is the shareholder, but the shareholder is not in the room when these decisions are made.

The temporal misalignment

There is a technical name for this phenomenon: the Principal-Agent Problem. When those making decisions do not bear the long-term consequences of those decisions, decisions will be systematically skewed towards the short term.

A marketing director stays in post for an average of two years. Redesigning a product takes three years and delivers results in the fourth. An advertising campaign delivers green charts in three months.

The rational manager, in the economic sense of the term, optimises for their career, not for the company's longevity. It is not stupidity. It is not incompetence. It is perfectly logical behaviour given the incentive system in which they operate.

The system rewards those who plant annual flowers, not those who plant oaks.

The symptom and the disease

The pharmaceutical industry discovered long ago that treating symptoms is more profitable than curing diseases. A drug that eliminates the cause of a problem is taken once. A drug that manages symptoms is taken forever.

Modern marketing works the same way. Solving a client's structural problem would mean losing the client. If the product is wrong, if the price is wrong, if the distribution model is wrong, the correct solution is to redesign everything. But redesigning everything is a project that ends. An advertising campaign can last forever.

The rational agency prefers to put lipstick on the pig rather than tell the client that it is not a prize-winning pig.

The myopia of the pixel

There is an entire professional generation that has developed a form of selective blindness. They see only what happens inside the screen. The funnel, the click, the conversion, the retargeting. As if the world ended at the edges of the monitor.

No one asks any more: does the product solve a real problem? Is the price consistent with perceived value? Can the customer actually buy it where and when they need it? Does the post-purchase experience generate word of mouth or regret?

These questions do not exist in the vocabulary of the average agency. Not because they are irrelevant, but because they do not produce recurring monthly invoices. It is far simpler to optimise cost per click. To test a new creative. Activities that can be done indefinitely, without ever touching the substance of the problem.

It is as if a doctor, faced with a patient with a tumour, focused exclusively on the colour of the bandages.

The button factory

The rhetorical masterpiece lies in how these agencies present results. "We managed campaigns worth two million pounds." Splendid. Was it your money? No, it was the client's money. You spent it, you did not generate it. It is like a chauffeur boasting about the miles driven with petrol paid for by someone else.

"We reached three million people." Wonderful. How many bought? Silence. What was the return on investment? "It is complicated to calculate." It is not complicated. It is uncomfortable.

The favourite KPI is "reach". It is the equivalent of measuring a restaurant's success by counting how many people read the menu through the window. Not how many came in. Not how many ate. Not how many returned. How many looked at the menu. There is your monthly report.

When sales results do not arrive, the blame is always elsewhere. The algorithm changed. The market is difficult. Seasonality. Never, under any circumstances, is the strategy at fault. Because a strategy, in the proper sense, never existed. There was a budget, there was a platform, there was someone pressing buttons.

The fragmentation of knowledge

There is a generation of professionals convinced that "doing marketing" means choosing between a carousel and a reel. That positioning is the position of the logo on the graphic. That segmentation is selecting "women, 25-45, interested in yoga" in the targeting panel.

They know how to do one thing: buy attention. Which is like knowing how to light a fire without knowing what to cook.

It is not their fault. They are the product of an educational system that has fragmented knowledge until it became unrecognisable. Marketing has been broken into micro-specialisations: those who create content, those who buy space, those who analyse data, those who manage social media. Each knows their own bolt, none understands the engine.

Undergraduate degrees where semiotics is studied but a profit and loss account is never opened. Masters where viral campaigns are analysed but break-even is never calculated. Courses where one learns to use tools that will be obsolete in two years, without ever understanding the principles that have remained valid for two centuries.

The academic system has created communication technicians completely separated from understanding the business they are supposed to serve. It is like training cardiologists who have never seen a whole body.

The result is an army of specialists convinced they are strategists. And a market that can no longer tell one from the other.

Architecture versus scenography

Theatre needs scenery. No one denies it. Good scenery contributes to the experience, creates atmosphere, supports the narrative.

But the scenery is not the play. If the story does not work, if the actors cannot act, if the direction is confused, no scenery will save the show. At best, it will make it more beautiful to watch as it fails.

The same is true for companies. Communication is scenery. It supports, amplifies, makes visible. But if there is no solid structure underneath, if the product does not solve a real problem, if the price is not consistent with perceived value, then all the communication in the world will only make the failure more visible.

The market, in the end, is not fooled for long. You can attract attention with noise. You can generate curiosity with creativity. But the transaction only happens when perceived value exceeds perceived cost. And on that, communication tricks have a short lifespan.

The way out

There is no recipe. Anyone selling you "the 5 steps to real marketing" is doing exactly what this article criticises: simplifying to sell.

There is, however, a direction. It starts with an uncomfortable question: if we switched off all advertising tomorrow, would the product continue to sell? If the answer is no, the problem is not the advertising. It is everything else.

True marketing begins when you stop asking "how do I convince more people" and start asking "why should someone choose me instead of the alternatives". The first question leads to spending more. The second leads to thinking better.

Drucker knew this sixty years ago. The tools change every two years. The principles governing purchasing decisions have not changed in two centuries. The fact that we still have to repeat this today says a great deal about how much the industry has an interest in not understanding it.