There’s something deeply unsettling about realising you’ve spent fifteen years in marketing without REALLY doing marketing.

Not properly, anyway. Not the full-spectrum, four-pillars-of-the-discipline kind that they used to teach before we all got distracted by funnel metrics and decided that marketing meant getting people to click on things.

(Because apparently, that’s all we’re good for now.)

The moment of clarity usually comes in a meeting. Someone with a very specific idea of what you should be doing—someone who’s never run a campaign but has strong opinions about your conversion rates—explains exactly how narrow your world is supposed to be.

Product decisions? That’s technical. Pricing strategy? That’s finance. Channel partnerships? That’s sales.

Your job? Feed the funnel and report on how many leads fell out the bottom.

Welcome to the engineerification of marketing.

When everything becomes maths

The software boom created a generation of companies led by brilliant engineers who approached every challenge like a technical problem waiting for an elegant solution

(And fair play to them—they built some cool things.)

Low user adoption? Optimise the onboarding flow. Churn too high? Improve the algorithm. Not enough leads? Well, that’s simple mathematics: spend more on PPC and push more numbers through the system.

Send more emails. Post more content. Scale the inputs to scale the outputs.

It’s appealingly logical, this view of marketing as applied mathematics. Numbers go into the funnel, conversion happens at each stage, numbers come out the bottom. Measure everything, optimise the weak points, repeat.

Marketing becomes a series of equations where humans are variables to be optimised rather than, well, humans.

But here’s the thing—and this is where the beautiful logic falls apart like a cheap suit—people aren’t particularly mathematical about how they decide to give you money.

They’re biased. Emotional. Delightfully irrational.

They might choose the more expensive option because they trust the brand, or avoid the obvious choice because their boss once had a bad experience with that vendor. You can persuade someone to take a look at something when the maths might have excluded them entirely.

But explaining this to an engineering-led leadership team often feels like describing colour to someone who sees only in shades of grey.

(And then they ask you to quantify the ROI of colour.)

The territories we never claimed

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to admit: most of us have never worked in marketing departments that own all four Ps. We’ve inherited a profession in full retreat, surrendering territory that was rightfully ours and calling the remaining patch of ground “demand generation.”

Product became “technical.” Never mind that successful products require deep market understanding, customer research, and positioning strategy. Engineering knows what to build, apparently. Marketing’s job is to explain whatever gets built. (And if it doesn’t sell, well, that’s a messaging problem, isn’t it?)

Pricing became “finance.” Ignore the fact that pricing is fundamentally about customer psychology, competitive positioning, and market dynamics. Finance has spreadsheets, so they can handle it. (Because nothing says “understanding customer value perception” like a good old Excel model.)

Place became “sales.” Channel strategy, partnership development, go-to-market decisions—all handed over to the people whose primary concern is this quarter’s numbers.

What’s left? Promotion. The fourth P. The bit where we try to make people aware of products we didn’t help design, at prices we didn’t help set, through channels we didn’t help choose.

And somehow we’re supposed to be accountable for growth.

It’s like being a chef who’s only allowed to plate the food. Someone else chooses the ingredients, someone else sets the prices, someone else decides which restaurants serve it. But if diners don’t like the meal? That’s clearly a plating problem.

The buzzword smoke screen

Perhaps sensing that our territory had shrunk to the size of a postage stamp, we started inventing new names for old concepts.

(Because if you can’t expand your influence, at least you can expand your vocabulary.)

Account-Based Marketing became revolutionary. Apparently, focusing on key accounts was a novel idea that nobody had thought of before. Demand Generation sounded more important than “promotion.” Product-Led Growth suggested we were strategic pioneers rather than people doing one quarter of the marketing job.

The terminology changes every ninety days, but the fundamental retreat continues. We’re like generals who’ve lost most of the battlefield but still issue increasingly elaborate names for our remaining foxhole.

Meanwhile, companies that understand marketing—proper marketing—continue to dominate their markets. They control the entire customer experience from first impression to final purchase. They understand that brand accelerates performance, that pricing communicates positioning, that channel strategy shapes customer perception.

They’re playing chess while we’re counting funnel metrics.

(And wondering why our CAC keeps rising.)

The human element

The saddest part of the engineerification of marketing is how it strips away the most interesting aspect of what we do: understanding people.

Marketing has always been about human psychology disguised as business strategy. Why do customers choose one option over another? What stories do they tell themselves about their purchases? How do they actually make decisions when faced with complex choices?

These aren’t mathematical problems. They’re human problems. They require empathy, creativity, and a deep understanding of how people actually behave rather than how they should behave according to our conversion models.

The companies that remember this—that treat marketing as a people problem rather than an engineering problem—tend to build remarkable brands and sustainable competitive advantages. The companies that don’t tend to compete on price and wonder why customer acquisition costs keep rising.

(Spoiler alert: it’s because you’re all chasing the same keywords with the same messages.)

Breaking the cycle

So how do we reclaim lost territory? How do we expand from promotion-only marketing back to proper, four-P marketing?

The answer isn’t revolutionary, which probably disappoints the LinkedIn gurus looking for the next big framework: demonstrate the power when it happens. Show the outcomes. Influence and build your role incrementally.

Start by asking different questions in interviews. Don’t just accept the narrow brief like some grateful supplicant. Understand how the leadership sees marketing’s role. The key thing is accountability and responsibility. If someone has already defined exactly what your senior marketing role should do, they probably don’t understand what senior marketing should do (red flag).

Once you’re in, look for opportunities to influence beyond promotion. Can you contribute to product roadmap discussions? Can you provide market insight for pricing decisions? Can you identify channel partnerships that would serve customers better?

Build bridges with other departments early. Don’t wait for them to come to you with leads complaints. Go to them with insights about customer behaviour, market trends, competitive intelligence. Make yourself useful beyond the funnel.

And perhaps most importantly, start reporting on more than pipeline metrics. If all you ever report is clicks and conversion rates, that’s exactly what leadership will think you do. Create comprehensive reports that show marketing’s broader impact: customer satisfaction, brand awareness, competitive positioning, market share.

(Because what gets measured is what gets managed, and what gets managed is what gets respected.)

The way forward

The four Ps haven’t become irrelevant just because we stopped talking about them. Product, Price, Place, and Promotion remain the fundamental levers for business growth. Companies that master all four tend to outperform companies that optimise just one.

Marketing should be customer-focused and market-oriented across all four pillars. That means understanding what customers actually want (Product), how they value solutions (Price), where they prefer to buy (Place), and how to reach them effectively (Promotion).

It means treating marketing as a strategic discipline rather than a tactical execution function. It means focusing on brand and customer understanding rather than just funnel optimisation. It means dealing with people—biases and all—rather than trying to engineer them into predictable behaviour.

Most importantly, it means remembering that marketing’s job isn’t to feed the sales machine. Marketing’s job is to create customers. Everything else follows from that.

The great marketing retreat doesn’t have to continue. But reclaiming lost territory requires admitting we lost it in the first place—and deciding we want it back.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to acknowledge: we did this to ourselves. We accepted the narrow definitions. We retreated to the safety of metrics we could control rather than fighting for influence over the things that actually matter.

The engineers didn’t steal our territory. We handed it over because it was easier to optimise conversion rates than to argue about product strategy in rooms full of people who thought marketing was just advertising with better tracking.

But customers don’t care about our org charts. They experience the whole thing—product, price, place, and promotion—as one integrated reality. If we want to create customers rather than just process leads, we need to own that whole experience.

Or we can keep counting funnel metrics while wondering why growth is getting harder.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.