What is marketing and why many businesses only do the last part

Beyond Promotion: part 1 of 4

This piece sets out what marketing actually is and the 7 Ps that sit behind every communication a business puts out. Part two puts five real client examples against those and looks at what happens when marketing only gets a seat at the table after the big decisions are made. Part three covers why marketing teams may end up stretched too thin to do this properly, and why measurement is usually the first casualty. Part four covers what AI genuinely changes, the parts of marketing that never touch a screen, and the question worth asking before the next campaign is signed off.

What is marketing? In short, it’s the management process of understanding what customers and markets need, building a strategy from that insight and delivering it profitably through the 7 Ps. Promotion is the last bit of that process, the part everyone can see. That’s why so many businesses start there, and why so many stop there.

1. Why marketing is so widely misunderstood

I’ve been doing this for, let’s just say long enough that my first CRM was a filing cabinet and my first bit of ‘automation’ was a fax machine set to redial. I don’t think misunderstanding of what marketing actually is has ever been more widespread than it is now. I hear it from peers still working client side, from former colleagues who’ve moved into general management, and I see confidently stated nonsense about it most days, on LinkedIn, in board packs, in briefs. Some of it is well-intentioned. Most of it wouldn’t survive contact with a P&L.

The boardroom data suggests it isn’t just a LinkedIn problem either. Boathouse Group’s fifth annual CEO study surveyed 150 CEOs of major US companies in January 2026. The share who call marketing a profit centre fell from 65% to 40% in a year, and four in ten gave their CMO a C or lower on strategy and the ability to drive growth.

To me, and based on what I’m hearing out there, that number is a verdict on what some businesses think marketing is, and therefore what they let it do. Treat marketing as a line item to be managed and it will behave like one. Treat it as a growth capability to be invested in, with the right people and resource, and it earns its keep. The evidence is everywhere. McKinsey found companies involving their CMO in strategic decisions grow 1.4 times faster, and decades of IPA effectiveness research point the same way. The client examples in this series add a few more.

This series isn’t a complaint about any of that. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a run of switched-on businesses who treat marketing as what it actually is, a management discipline with its own rigour, not a cost centre to be squeezed or a lever to yank when growth stalls. The examples through this series are drawn from that work. This blog series covers what the difference actually looks like.

2. Marketing vs promotion: the landing page that went nowhere

We once looked at a landing page for a new product line a UK tech business had launched several months earlier. Clean design, proper credentials, decent copy. It had generated precisely zero enquiries, which, credit where it’s due, is at least a number everyone could agree on.

The problem wasn’t a lack of promotion. The page was trying to speak to three core audiences at once, each one splitting further into segments with genuinely different needs, all squeezed into a single message that satisfied none of them.

We’d been brought in to focus on what they called “more marketing” or specifically, paid advertising on a serious scale. What the business actually needed first was an extensive research, brand and positioning exercise, working out who those audiences really were and what each one needed and where the fit was. Once that was done, website work followed and the mix shifted too, a heavier focus on SEO, considerably less on advertising and events.

Enquiries went from zero to an average of 145 a month. Just over half came from Google search and direct marketing, the rest from paid advertising at roughly a quarter of the annual media spend the business had already committed. Across that one product line, the work helped build seven figures in earned and forward revenue.

This example is the argument behind the whole Beyond Promotion series, in miniature. When a business says “we need more marketing”, it usually means “we need more promotion.” Promotion matters, it’s one of the seven levers. Pull it harder while the other six are stuck and decent budgets end up making the wrong offer more visible, faster. All volume, no signal.

3. What is marketing? A definition that goes well beyond promotion

Quick caveat before the definitions. Marketing is a genuinely broad discipline, spanning strategic thinking, research and insight, technical plumbing, creative work and no small amount of applied psychology. Every example in this blog series, including the ones below, is one illustrative snapshot of that breadth, so treat them as evidence of it, not the whole of it.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing has long described marketing as the management process for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. The American Marketing Association’s definition is broader still: marketing is “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Look at the verbs. Creating. Delivering. Exchanging. Communicating is one job on that list, not the whole job description, whatever your agency’s pitch deck might imply.

Our own working definition at ProMotive blends that rigour with what actually running a business feels like: marketing is the management process of researching, analysing and anticipating what customers and markets need, building a strategy from that insight, then executing it through the marketing mix to create, communicate and deliver value, profitably and sustainably. Four pillars sit inside that one sentence:

3.1 The four pillars of marketing

We define these as follows:

Research and insight – market research, customer data, competitive intelligence and buyer psychology are analysed to inform every decision. Marketing without insight is guesswork.
Strategy before execution – understanding the market, defining the audience and setting objectives come before any tactic is deployed.
Execution through the mix – the 7 Ps are the levers, pulled through a mix of technical delivery and creative craft. Strategy without execution is irrelevant, both must work together.
Commercial accountability – marketing must connect to revenue, margin and growth. Activity for its own sake is just noise.

Skip any of these and the rest gets wobbly.

3.2 Why more promotion won't fix the wrong offer

Posting, advertising, email campaigns, content, these are the visible end of a much longer process. That process starts with research, analysis and insights, runs through strategy and proposition development, and only then reaches execution, with measurement feeding back into the start.

And, it’s an iterative process. It works less like a train timetable and more like a sat nav, recalculating as it goes. Roadworks, closures and the odd tractor doing 10 mph for 6 miles are all part of the journey. Good marketing course-corrects around them. Bad marketing ploughs on regardless and drives confidently to somewhere nobody wanted to be, having spent a fortune on fuel.

A business can promote the wrong offer to the wrong audience through the wrong channel with genuine skill and enthusiasm. More activity does not fix that. It just makes the mistake easier to see, and considerably more expensive.

3.3 Why many businesses only do the last bit

Promotion is the bit you can see. It’s easy to brief, easy to buy and produces something to show the board by Friday. Research, positioning and pricing are slower, less visible and harder to put in a monthly report.

Measurement makes it worse. Marketing produces more metrics than most boards know what to do with: impressions, reach, click-through rates, cost per lead, conversion rates and attribution models that contradict each other before lunch. To the uninitiated, a dashboard full of numbers looks like proof of genius or proof of waste, depending on which slide they land on. Turning that data into something useful takes time, to clean it, interpret it, present it and pull out the insight that changes a decision.

The switched-on businesses give it that time. They know insight is where the return comes from, and they plan for it. Others want the answer on one slide, ideally pretty and over-simplistic, and by close of business tomorrow! So the numbers that are easiest to produce sometimes win out over the numbers that matter, the insight never arrives and the board decides marketing can’t prove its worth. Then the research and strategy that would have proved it are the first things cut. It’s a bit like skipping the car service to ‘save money’, then wondering why it breaks down on the M6.

In those businesses, marketing often gets called in after the product and price are already decided, usually with too little capacity to push back, which is rarely anyone’s intention. Promotion becomes the only lever left to pull. It’s quick, it’s visible and nobody has to wait for the insight. Part three digs into what that does to measurement.

The cost of only doing the last bit now shows up in job titles. Forrester found that just 36% of Fortune 500 companies still use the CMO title, down from 55% two years earlier, and as Mark Ritson points out in The Drum, the senior marketing roles that remain keep picking up extra words like customer, growth, experience.

Weird thing is that growth, customer and experience have always sat at the heart of marketing, and any seasoned marketer knows it. You do have to wonder whether the extra labels are chosen by the people who don’t.

The irony is that there are seven marketing levers. They were already there, but many businesses only ever know of one.

4. The 7 Ps of marketing: seven levers, not one

The clearest way to see this is the extended marketing mix, usually called the 7 Ps. Most people can recite the original four without much thought.

Yes, I’m talking about the marketing mix again. No, I’m not sorry.

I’ll keep banging this drum until the neighbours complain, because every time I open LinkedIn, someone with “Growth Ninja | Brand Alchemist” in their headline has declared the marketing mix is “basically just promotion”. Four hundred people have replied “Great insight!”

Promotion is just one of the seven Ps. Treating it as the whole of marketing is like buying a steering wheel and calling it a car. You can grip it with real conviction, but without an engine, wheels and fuel you’re not going anywhere.

Meanwhile product, price, place, people, process and physical evidence sit at the back like the less talented members of a boy band. They do all the work while the one with the good hair gets the posters. Get the price wrong, hire the wrong people or make buying from you feel like a tax return, and no number of carousel posts and videos will save you.

So if you’ve noticed a theme in these blogs, well done. You’ve already worked out that marketing is more than promotion, which puts you ahead of most of the people posting ‘5 Marketing Secrets Nobody Talks About’. The biggest secret is that there are six other Ps, Dave. Nobody talks about those.

4.1 The original 4 Ps: product, price, place and promotion

Product – what you’re actually offering, and whether it solves a problem someone genuinely has
Price – not just the number, but packages, terms, discounts and what the price signals about quality
Place – how and where someone actually finds, buys and receives the thing, increasingly that includes marketplaces, comparison sites and whatever a chatbot or an AI answer happens to recommend, not just your own website
Promotion – the advertising, content, PR, search and social that tells people it exists

4.2 The extended 3 Ps: people, process and physical evidence

The later additions matter just as much, arguably more, for any service-led business, and they’re the three that tend to fall off the end of the agenda:

People – everyone who shapes the experience: sales, delivery staff, support teams
Process – how easy or painful it is to enquire, buy, onboard and get supported afterwards, a clunky multi-step form or a slow-loading mobile page does as much damage here as a rude phone call
Physical evidence – the website, the reviews, third-party ratings, the case studies, the accreditations, everything a buyer quietly checks before believing the promise

Promotion is one of seven. A business can win an award for the advert and still lose the sale on price, process or proof. The seven work as one system, so a weak lever holds back the other six.

Yes, to this day we keep banging the drum on the 7 Ps, and if you’ve read anything else on this site you’ll have seen it before, including why founders end up sabotaging their own marketing. We repeat it because it’s the thing small and less resourced businesses forget first, and yet getting it right isn’t just about growing faster, it’s vital for survival.

And if some of that is new to you, BINGO, you’ve just learned something useful.

You’ve probably also realised that you’re already involved in some of these areas of marketing in your business, whether you consciously think of them as marketing or not. You may be making decisions about pricing, shaping the product, improving how customers buy from you, managing the people who take your offer to market or building trust through reviews and reputation, all without ever having had formal marketing training or experience.

That’s partly the point. Marketing isn’t something that suddenly starts when somebody opens Adobe or Canva, writes an advert or posts on LinkedIn. In most businesses, marketing decisions are being made every day, they’re just not always recognised as such and the decision making is often questionable.

5. Before you spend more on promotion, check the other six Ps

If enquiries have stalled, the instinct is to turn up the volume. More posts, more ads, a bigger stand at the next event. Before signing that off, run the offer back through the other six Ps and the four pillars behind them:

Do you know exactly who you’re talking to, and what each audience needs to hear?
Does the product solve a problem those buyers genuinely have?
Does the price, and the way it’s packaged, signal the right thing?
Can people find you, buy from you and get supported without friction?
Would your website, reviews and case studies convince a sceptical buyer?
Is anyone connecting the activity to revenue, margin and growth?

If the answer to any of those is ‘not sure’, more promotion will only make the gap more visible, faster. Fix the foundations, then turn the volume up. That’s the difference between marketing and promotion, and it’s usually where the growth is hiding.