Why is marketing so hard?

Because we’re expected to be god-like magicians, and most humans aren’t god-like magicians.

Everyone experiences marketing in one way or another, so everyone has an opinion on it and often thinks they can do it! Knowledge and experience help combat this, but data speaks the loudest and quiets the noise.

The overweighting of performance marketing has drained a lot of the creativity out of it. We’ve become obsessed with the numbers we can track rather than the bigger picture, partly because founders and the C-suite can rationalise Google ads and CRM far more easily than a brand campaign, PR or social. I’m hopeful we’re coming out the other side, because AI flattens all of those channels and customers are getting savvier and quicker to dismiss slop. The companies that invest in brand and product marketing will be the ones that win.

I think that’s a myth. It’s not easy but it wouldn’t be fun if it was - and the amount of data, creativity, and ability to move customers at our fingertips is exciting.

Because customers don’t care about your campaign. They care about solving their problem, and the market changes faster than your assumptions.

Pace of change. People change, data evolves, technology shifts. Sometimes that change can make things overwhelming. But I believe if you remain true to the fundamentals of your brand and audience, you won’t fail.

Because people are not machines. You can’t just present information in black and white - you need to tap into their pains and emotions.

Because marketing sits in the messiest part of business: human behaviour. It’s hard because you’re trying to make people care, trust, remember and buy… in a world full of noise, short attention spans and internal chaos.

The “rules” change every day. At this point it’s about endurance. The best marketers aren’t always the most talented or intuitive. I’ve found it comes down to organisation, communication, and managing stress and expectations. Yours and everyone else’s.

From a PR perspective, the hard part is finding the story beneath the terminology. You’re working in a category full of technical language and similar phrases, so real cut-through comes from clarity, relevance and having something meaningful to say.

I think it might be due to a mix of a constantly moving target with ever-evolving technology, while trying to stick to what matters amidst a constant flow of noise… and everyone has a say about it.

Everyone defines it differently. Performance is measurable and controllable. Brand and PR play a longer game - harder to attribute, impossible to ignore.

Because we try to do too much. The real impact comes from doing fewer things phenomenally well, anchored in a clear brand vision and purpose.

I honestly think it’s because many people don’t understand it. Leaders often treat it like sales, expecting quick results. Some marketers often treat it as just brand awareness, when it really does need to connect to revenue. It’s a complex discipline that sits at the intersection of revenue, reputation, and the trust of both prospects and existing customers. That complexity is why I love it.

It’s not really. Fundamentally it hasn’t changed in decades. People make it hard by missing the fundamentals of strategy and getting straight to the doing, and some believe they have cracked the code by building a social brand, then struggle because it doesn’t transfer and scale beyond social when it needs to.

Everyone consumes it so everyone thinks they can do it.

It’s not. It’s just the C-suite think it’s free. It’s our job to demonstrate its value and hold ourselves to account for it.

Marketing as a discipline isn’t fundamentally difficult, and most principles remain the same. But marketing is indeed evolving very fast, and being a marketer means being a lifelong learner, but the difficulties come more from organisations and opinions.

Everyone has an opinion. The reality is good marketing should be driven by data and experimentation, not gut feel. With how fast the landscape changes, testing is the only real truth.

Marketing feels hard because the landscape is fragmented. The multiple channels, fast-changing tech, and shifting buyer behaviour make it complex. But the fundamentals haven’t changed: know your customer, your product, and how you make money. The challenge is balancing simplicity with complexity using tech and data wisely while keeping creativity at the heart to cut through the noise.

It’s not black and white despite the perceived ability to be able to measure everything.

The myth that marketing is just advertising and everyone has an opinion that we should be doing X, Y, or Z. We know marketing is a far broader and more complex expertise. Marketing requires a broad skillset, combining art / creativity, science (data and behavioural science), operations, tech and digital capability, and match that with a fast evolving marketing technology backdrop, AI, economic climate, pressure to drive performance and justify ROI, whilst building investment cases for the future. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but boy do I love it!

Because everyone has an opinion on how to do it, and no one really knows what ‘it’ is.

Because everyone thinks they can do it, but no-one’s willing to invest (properly) in it.

My first thought when reading this question was: it isn’t - we’ve made it hard. And while I believe that’s true - that we’ve overcomplicated marketing with deterministic cadences, workflows, useless dashboards and a fixation with personalization and tracking - the reality is that it is still complex mostly because of its data. Marketing data is enormously complex. It is much, it is varied, it is unstructured, it is messy. To the point where similar metrics have different semantics. But the biggest reason why marketing is so complex is that it is non-linear. It is very hard to predict. It has brand and delayed variables that have to operate within the same wavelength as linear performance variables. So it becomes really hard to see how all of it fits together, and interoperate together. Thankfully, we’ve built a solution for that.

Marketing right now is incredibly complex. So many channels, tools, funnel considerations, strategies to manage. But to people outside of marketing? Looks super simple. “Just post on Instagram and go viral, right?” Meanwhile, you’re not just convincing customers to buy. You’re also selling internally, educating non-marketing stakeholders on why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Because most people (including many marketers) misunderstand the fundamental role of marketing. Marketing is not advertising. Marketing is not messaging, story telling, or even revenue generation. Marketing is EVERYTHING that connects the value of the product to the unmet needs that exist in the market. The definition and role of marketing needs to be broadened in most organizations.

Because you’re balancing art, science, finance, psychology, and politics… all while chasing an ever-moving target.

It’s a job that requires delivering the right product, at the right price, with the right messaging, to the right audience, at the right time. It’s challenging to align all of these things while managing budgets, pleasing stakeholders, and keeping the company alive.

Art vs science, every single day.

Because everyone wants something different from it. Sales wants leads. Product wants details. Leadership wants results. I’m caught in the middle trying to pull all those expectations into one clear, consistent story that actually connects with people.

Because good marketing feels simple, but getting there is anything but.

Nothing worthwhile is ever easy! I never think of it as hard. It’s mostly joyful and if it’s not, it’s time to move on.

Because what worked last week is already outdated. Marketing evolves faster than we can keep up, and the goalposts never stop moving. But that’s what makes it fun and exciting too.

Because everyone has an opinion. But that’s also part of the magic 🪄.

It’s hard when you don’t have a clear understanding of your target consumer and exactly which of their needs are fulfilled by your product. I see this time and again - stakeholders and partners are in a rush to get the product to market, so there’s a lot of retrofitting the message vs. building it from concrete consumer insights.

Marketing is hard because:
1. What worked before might no longer be effective
2. Consumer behaviour constantly shifts
3. There’s a saturation of marketing channels
4. There’s often pressure to deliver immediate ROI, even in channels that require long-term investment to produce meaningful results

Our natural bias towards the short-term means we prioritise performance over brand time and time again, when really we need both to work together.

Two reasons:
1. It’s about changing humans’ attitude and behaviour, and humans are fundamentally complex and unpredictable
2. Internal non-marketing stakeholders think it’s simple and predictable and anyone can do it (very much not true)

We’re our own worst enemy. We spend more time chasing the next hype and buzzword, than shaping marketing strategy and measurable outcomes.

I guess a unique challenge to marketing is that – while its fundamental frameworks are evergreen – specific implementations really are not. If you’re reading about an activation that’s absolutely ideal for your brand, chances are its value has already been diminished by someone else being first out the gate with that idea. I don’t think you could say the same for ops or finance, for example.

Because everyone’s got an opinion, and our job is to trigger them. If people aren’t debating your work, it’s probably not working.

It isn’t. But world-class marketing is. Like golf, anyone can swing a club. But elite performance means mastering dozens of tiny variables. And that’s hard!

Because it’s SO visible wherever you work and everyone thinks they can do it better than you. What effective marketing looks like is just so personal to you, as everyone responds to different things!

Beyond the proliferation of channels / platforms, we have over-rotated on trying to prove deterministic vs. probabilistic outcomes. Human behaviour is unassailably and beautifully illogical, irrational, and non-binary - but we’re trying to convince ourselves otherwise.

Magpie syndrome. There is always a new shiny object and the lure of a side quest. It takes discipline to drill down into what is working, systemise it, and keep going.

Marketing is hard. Marketing financial products is even harder. You don’t have a tangible product to put in the hands of your customers. Instead it’s an app that you need them to log into and do some ‘finance’ stuff. So as financial marketers we need to be creatives, educators, trust builders, and orators.

Everyone has an opinion, and it can be quite noisy to stick to your plan. Plus, marketing constantly evolves, there’s always a new platform, tactic, or trend. It can feel like you’re never doing enough or that you’re always catching up.

Because it is so often viewed the wrong way - as the sole area responsible for growth. Marketing needs to work closely with other key functions to drive growth as a shared goal.

Because everyone thinks they can do it, so we inevitably spend a percentage of our days politely listening to stakeholders thinking they have the skill and knowledge to do our jobs – it can be exhausting!

Because everyone’s got opinions, but only the data gets a seat in the boardroom.

People still think it’s colouring in. It’s not. It’s growth with endless paths.

Quite simply because everyone else thinks they can do it.

Constant innovation means you need to be an expert across multiple channels. As a startup with limited budget it’s difficult to manage; however we have the advantage of being able to experiment and move quickly.

Marketing’s hard because as soon as something works, it’s already old - you have to keep inventing before the crowd catches up. It’s like a race where the finish line keeps moving.

Because it never stands still. Marketers today are expected to do far more than just ‘marketing’ - and that remit is always evolving. That’s what makes it challenging, but also endlessly interesting.

Because what’s needed varies drastically for each product. At Abound, our customers care about whether we’re giving them the best rate they can find and how quickly we can get money into their account. Brand, and design, don’t matter. It’s all about execution. Yet for many other places I’ve worked, brand and how the product makes you feel is crucial. So it’s all about understanding who your customers might be and coming up with a strategy to get in front of them while providing them with something they actually need/want.

You’re constantly trying to prove that marketing drives future growth, while being seen as a cost or a risk. It’s a structural challenge on the P&L that often bleeds into company culture. Your brand is just as much of an asset as your product. I genuinely believe it should be classified as CapEx. We’ve all seen how brand power influences valuations ahead of an IPO, but I don’t think any of us (including me) have cracked how to make that case or navigate the strict accounting rules!

Because there’s no one right answer. And because it’s easy to get addicted to exact attribution when it’s actually the harder-to-attribute things that drive real, longer-term success.

Financial marketing is especially tough. You’ve got a lot of different regulations across markets and customer groups that vary so wildly (each product is not suitable for - or even available to - each customer). That, and everyone has an opinion on what you’re doing. It’s a blessing and a curse.

Because everyone thinks they know how to do it until it doesn’t work. Then it’s your fault, obviously.

Because everyone thinks they can do it 😉 That said, everyone has a role to play in delivering on the brand promise consistently in every customer interaction.

Stepping into your target customers’ shoes and understanding where you can catch them in their decision-making journey is hard. The principles of marketing don’t really change, but the tools to do the job do, so you’ve got to have that eagerness to learn and explore new things.

If you’ve got good product-market fit, and a team that’s willing to roll their sleeves up, it shouldn’t be hard. What’s harder is being able to demonstrate clear ROI for all the activities you’re doing – often it’s a combination of activities that ultimately gets the customer through the door.

Because it looks easy! We all watch TV and see tube ads and think “I could do that!” but the end product is a result of so much you don’t see. The approvals, feedback, research, deadlines... it’s all such a stress. Oh, and the typos.

Best advice I ever got was to realise that everyone is an expert at their own job and marketing! It helps me as a mantra to deal with all the stakeholder feedback!

I literally have a Substack called ‘Marketing is Hard’ so I could give you a hundred reasons. Everyone thinks they’re a marketer.