Marketing's Civil War

Marketing is stale. Or at least the conversation around it is.

Marketing is a two-party system. You’re either a brand person or a performance person.

Brand people are artists. Performance people are scientists.

Brand people are navel-gazing and wasteful. Performance people are robots who drain the humanity out of business.

This is the current narrative.

Like most narratives, the tension between brand and performance is fictional.

The fact that it’s fictional doesn’t make it any less appealing. Lies travel much faster than the truth, after all.

For marketers, it gives you a tribe. You pick your party, cling to your beliefs, and fight it out.

But this framing avoids the more important question:

Is any of this actually good marketing?

Not “good” in the sense of the quality of the work, but in a deeper sense:

• Does this further the reason a company exists?

• Does this help you accomplish goals or visions for making a change in the world?

• Does this align with your values and what makes you proud?

• And is this sustainable—would we do this if the business were to be around for hundreds of years?

If your marketing, whether you label it “brand or performance,” helps you answer yes to those questions then it’s worthwhile.

If it doesn’t, then it’s a worthless, wasteful, or even harmful exercise.

All good marketing performs.

And all marketing that performs is good for your brand.

Everything else is just a narrative.