Marketing Has Become Obsessed With Certainty
Marketing should absolutely be measurable — but accountability and guarantees are not the same thing.
How quickly can you get us leads?
What ROI should we expect?
What conversion rates have you achieved previously?
How soon will we know if marketing is working?
These are reasonable business questions.
But I also think they quietly reveal something happening across marketing right now.
Marketing has become increasingly pressured to provide certainty in an environment that is still inherently uncertain.
And honestly, I don’t think marketers have ever felt that pressure more than they do today.
Every day we are surrounded by:
– performance metrics
– growth stories
– AI-generated content
– lead targets
– viral campaigns
– thought leadership
– “proven frameworks”
– constant examples of what everyone else appears to be achieving
At the same time, marketers are still expected to experiment, create, build trust, understand audiences and generate commercial outcomes — often all at once.
That tension is becoming harder to ignore.
Because despite how measurable marketing has become, it is still part psychology, part timing, part strategy and part experimentation. Increasingly, broader industry discussions are positioning experimentation as a core part of modern marketing strategy rather than something separate from it, particularly as technology and customer behaviour continue to evolve. Forbes
You can have strong messaging, good content, clear positioning and targeted campaigns and still not get the result you expected. At the same time, an idea that seemed relatively small can suddenly resonate far beyond what anyone anticipated.
That unpredictability has always existed in marketing.
The difference now is that businesses increasingly expect certainty before the work has even properly started.
That doesn’t mean marketing shouldn’t be measured. I actually believe the opposite.
Marketing should absolutely be accountable. Leads matter. Pipeline matters. Reporting matters. Businesses should expect visibility into what marketing is doing and whether it’s contributing to broader company goals.
But there is a difference between accountability and guarantees.
A lot of businesses now approach marketing wanting exact answers very early in the process:
How many leads?
How quickly?
What ROI?
What cost per acquisition?
Again, these are not unreasonable questions. But when they become the only lens through which marketing is viewed, the conversation starts to narrow very quickly.
The better early-stage questions are often:
How should we build trust in this market?
How do our customers actually discover businesses like ours?
What problems are they already trying to solve?
What type of content would genuinely help them?
How do we want our brand to be experienced over time?
Because before marketing becomes a lead-generation engine, it first needs to become visible, relevant and trusted.
That process is much harder to predict with exact numbers, particularly for newer businesses or businesses trying to reposition themselves within a competitive market.
What I find interesting is that many marketing activities themselves often remain relatively similar across businesses.
Most companies will still need:
– content
– campaigns
– visibility
– customer education
– email nurture
– webinars or events
– social presence
– sales enablement
– websites and SEO
But the conversations surrounding those activities can feel completely different depending on the mindset of the business leadership team.
Some businesses want to focus heavily on branding and visual identity. Others want reporting dashboards and lead numbers immediately. Some prioritise visibility and trust-building, understanding that momentum compounds over time.
In many cases, the activities themselves may not change dramatically. But the expectations attached to them do.
And I think that’s part of why so many marketers are quietly questioning themselves more than ever before.
Marketing has become incredibly visible. We are constantly surrounded by performance metrics, growth stories, AI-generated content, viral campaigns and examples of what other businesses appear to be achieving.
The result is an industry that increasingly compares outcomes without always acknowledging the complexity behind them.
Recent discussions around imposter syndrome within marketing suggest this is becoming increasingly common, particularly as technology and content creation continue to accelerate. Debbie Gainsford explored this recently in her article on imposter syndrome in marketing, highlighting how constant comparison and rapidly shifting expectations are affecting confidence across the industry.
And honestly, I understand why.
Marketing is one of the few business functions where businesses expect both creativity and certainty at the same time.
They want experimentation, but they also want guarantees.
They want innovation, but they also want predictability.
They want fast leads, but they also want long-term brand trust.
The reality is that good marketing usually sits somewhere in the middle.
It should absolutely be accountable. Strong marketing requires measurement, refinement and alignment to commercial goals. But it also requires space to test ideas, understand audience behaviour and build trust over time.
Because marketing is not simply about generating activity or chasing numbers in isolation.
It’s about understanding people well enough to create relevance, consistency and momentum in a way that supports business growth over the long term.