When Marketing Becomes a Service Desk
Order taking is not the vibe. So why does it keep happening in major organizations?
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When marketing becomes a service desk
My observation
A pattern I’m seeing across companies right now.
Marketing is quietly being de-resourced and treated like a service desk.
Budgets are getting crunched and we all know what that means: marketing teams are shrinking in headcount. This is immediately putting marketing teams (sometimes teams of ONE in large companies) into reaction mode, less on strategy. Instead of thinking about the brand’s growth over a 24 month roadmap, senior brand leaders are designing collateral sheets for sales teams.
Marketing becomes the place everything lands because there’s no system to protect the work that compounds over time. Brand marketing gets chipped away in favor of whatever’s urgent. These days pressure is high and capacity is low. Add lack of structure to the mix and your beloved marketing team’s function defaults to supporting whatever feels like it’s on the shortest ROI cycle (usually direct sales).
What this signals
Why it matters, and where things are headed.
Once this cycle starts, it’s hard to get back out in front of it because the mechanisms that were building long term opportunities are now spent supporting short term wins. In other words, the infrastructure is no longer being built and we’re just reacting to what’s in front of us.
It looks like:
Collateral becomes ad hoc based on whatever prospect sales is working to close
Leadership is obsessed with ROI of very tactical activities vs. overall growth
Marketing is doing strategic work in off hours because 9-5 is reactive
Vendors and headcount are getting cut while performance goals go up
Your decision model
How to tell if this is showing up at your job.
1. Who decides what work gets done? If priorities are set by whoever asks first or prioritized based on who is asking, marketing is operating as support. If work is set based on approved plans tied to leadership business goals (and maybe you have some occasional department requests) then you’re likely in a healthy spot.
2. Is there a source of truth everyone works from? If decks, messages, and narratives get recreated every time, the brand isn’t being managed. If you get a request from Chief A and then Chief B tells you their request is more important, you lack a source of truth. This is what we like to call “absolute effin chaos”.
3. What gets protected when things get busy? If strategy is always the first thing to go, it’s not part of the system. I’m not describing leaning out or scrutinizing spend more closely when things get tight—that’s just good business practice. I mean when leadership cuts off any strategic forward-looking work with the vibe of “it doesn’t have return.”
4. Can marketing say no without escalation? If every boundary requires leadership intervention, authority doesn’t really exist. This is also true if there is no system or resource for those unmet requests to get answered. For example, if the strategy work had included a collateral design kit with locked elements, marketing can easily say no and point to the resources for sales to DIY. If it’s just a hard “no” then sales doesn’t have the support they need either and no one wins.
Inside the work
How I’ve handled it with a client + the template we used.
My client’s long time creative director was about to implode or quit and her leadership team already exited after a string of acquisitions.
Overnight, the brand surface area exploded.
