Is Marketing Broken? Why the Soul of the Industry is on Life Support (and How We Can Save It)
I didn’t expect my simple question to spark such a powerful conversation. But when you ask a man like Mark Schaefer—a global marketing visionary with his finger on the pulse of both the human heart and the algorithmic beast—”Is marketing broken?” you’re going to get an answer that hits like truth serum.
And wow, did it ever.
I’m part of Mark’s RISE community, a subscription-based collaboration of marketers who want more than best practices.
We crave the edge.
We ask hard questions.
We play with new ideas before they go mainstream.
And most importantly, we show up as humans—in a world that seems increasingly designed to squeeze the humanity out of everything.
So when we recently had an AMA with Mark, I asked the question that had been gnawing at me: “Is marketing broken?”
His answer stopped me in my tracks.
Mark reminded us that marketing didn’t start as clicks, funnels, and conversions.
It was anthropology, psychology, and sociology.
It was human.
Marketers used to be trained in human behavior so they could understand where people fit in the world and how to communicate clearly and compassionately with them.
The core purpose?
Connection.
Understanding.
Empathy.
Today? Most job descriptions in marketing read more like IT roles. You’re not a marketer unless you know how to manage a full tech stack, build attribution models, and squeeze every drop out of a CRM system.
But here’s the kicker—it’s not all our fault.
In a world where marketing has become more fragmented, more automated, and—let’s be honest—more forgettable, there are three disruptive forces pulling it further from its roots. These forces aren’t just trends; they’re systemic shifts that are rewriting the rules of how brands connect, convert, and build trust. If we want to fix what’s broken, we need to name what’s breaking it.
As Mark put it, marketing used to be coin-operated.
You put money in, you got results out.
Nice and tidy.
But today’s reality is messy.
Complex.
Fragmented.
Let me give you an example straight from Mark’s blog: He wrote about how the traditional sales funnel no longer applies. Consumers jump in and out, loop around, and change paths on a whim.
Yet many CMOs still measure success by outdated metrics that assume a linear journey.
Meanwhile, marketing teams are being told to “do more with less” while juggling platforms, tools, regulations, and fragmented audiences.
Tension is high.
Attention is low.
And yet somehow, the KPIs haven’t evolved.
It’s only been 20 years since pay-per-click advertising hit the scene, and now it dominates the conversation. Every boardroom wants leads. Every CMO wants attribution. But at what cost?
Mark calls it the “soul drain.“
Performance marketing has turned many brands into math equations.
Metrics over meaning.
Targeting over trust.
Automation over authenticity.
And what do we have to show for it? Consumers are exhausted. Ad blockers are everywhere. Even the almighty Meta is struggling to keep users engaged with content that doesn’t feel like anything.
The result? As Mark wrote in a post titled “The Most Human Company Wins“, brands have become interchangeable.
People no longer trust ads—they trust people.
Everyone’s playing it safe.
Everyone’s recycling the same TikTok trends and tone-deaf email sequences.
We’ve traded bravery for benchmarks.
Mark didn’t mince words in our session. He said what many of us have felt: the soul has been sucked out of marketing.
He pointed to bold examples in his new book, Audacious, of brands that dared to zig when the world zagged. Like Liquid Death, who built a rabid fanbase by taking the most boring product (water) and making it metal. Or the now-famous “Breaking the Super Bowl” campaign by Tubi, where they didn’t just buy airtime—they hijacked it with storytelling so weird and compelling, people had to talk about it.
Those brands aren’t just getting attention.
They’re earning trust.
They’re standing out in a sea of sameness.
When I asked Mark what he would do if he had a magic wand, his answer was simple:
“Lead with heart, empathy, and compassion.”
He believes the companies that win in this new era won’t be the ones with the best data—but the ones who put customers over profit. The ones who show up like humans, for humans.
One example Mark gave on his blog is of Patagonia, which famously gave away its company to fight climate change. That wasn’t a PR stunt. That was soul. And their customers felt it.
Another example is Chewy, the online pet retailer that sends flowers and sympathy cards when a customer reports a pet has passed away. That kind of gesture doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet. But it shows up in loyalty.
And then there’s Trader Joe’s, a publicly traded company that breaks every rule of performance marketing. No loyalty program. No influencer campaigns. Just consistent, curious, customer-obsessed service. Their success proves what Mark has been saying all along: most human companies win.
But the challenge is steeper for public companies with quarterly revenue goals. For those businesses, it’s not enough to do the right thing when they get caught. They must lead with the right thing from the start.
So yes, marketing might be dismantling.
But it’s not beyond repair.
We just need to remember who we are.
Marketing isn’t about funnels. It’s about feelings.
It’s about people who are hurting, hoping, healing, and hustling.
It’s about daring to matter again.
And it starts with those of us brave enough to ask the hard questions, like the ones Mark inspires us to explore every day in the RISE community.
The future of marketing belongs to the bold, the curious, and the deeply human.
Now let’s go build it.