I spent 20 years training as a senior brand marketer at companies like IBM and Mastercard. By all traditional measures, I succeeded. I had the titles, the budgets, the seats at the table. Yet for two decades, I operated miles away from real income. I was not an architect of business growth. I was an optics keeper.
The moment that crystallized this for me came when my business partner placed “CMO” next to my name on a slide presentation. My stomach dropped. It was a visceral reaction, because in most organizations, the marketing director is the person responsible for coloring: brought in after the product has been built, the sales strategy is defined and responsible for making it stand out. They are given a disconnected product and asked to take advantage of it.
This shows how far marketing has strayed from its core purpose. It is more focused on optics, activity and internal validation than on achieving real business results. Like me, many marketers now operate at a distance from revenue, lacking the fundamental technical knowledge that connects their work to growth.
Today, as an entrepreneur, that corporate protection is gone. When no salary protects you from results, you quickly realize: if you can’t connect your creative work to a cash register, you’re not a strategist. You are an amateur with an expensive deck.
My refusal to be called a CMO is an act of self-preservation. I’m experiencing a forced return to the technical foundations I was trained to ignore in favor of monitoring dashboards that measure movement rather than momentum.
The Mandela marketing effect
Marketing is trapped in a collective illusion – what psychologists call the Mandela effect. The term was coined in 2009 by researcher Fiona Broome, who found that thousands of people shared a vivid, false memory of Nelson Mandela’s death in prison in the 1980s.
Mandela was of course released in 1990 and died in 2013. This was not a simple mistake. It was a mass confabulation: the brain filling in the gaps of incomplete knowledge with whatever seemed logically coherent, until the false memory was accepted as truth.
Our industry has done exactly the same thing. We have filled the gaps in our professional knowledge with buzzwords that sound right but lack substance. We tell ourselves that we are data-driven and strategic. The truth on the ground is much more embarrassing.
According to a recent industry benchmarking analysis by strategist Mark Ritson, about two-thirds of marketers cannot define the technical foundations of their own profession. They failed to define basic concepts like positioning, branding or even data. Just like those who swear they watched Mandela’s funeral in the 1980s on television, we are convinced we are marketing when all we do is monitor dashboards that produce no real intelligence.
Lieutenants in a posture of fear
There is a structural gap between senior management and the marketing department. The common explanation – that executives simply don’t understand marketing – misses the most dangerous truth: Most marketers don’t understand business.
As Marketing Accountability Council Strategist Moni Oloyède observed, marketers who I can’t speak the language of ROI, pipeline, or financial default to a survival mechanism. They are not strategic partners. They are subordinates looking for a little daylight, a way to keep the leaders happy and off their backs. This dynamic confines marketing to the role of a reactive cost center rather than a proactive driver.
Your customers are searching everywhere. Make sure your brand introduces himself.
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
Start free trial
Start with
The Mandela effect makes this problem worse. Marketers take operationally nuanced ideas and strip them of their complexity, reducing them to overly simplistic tropes. Take the main funnel. In a real-world operation, a funnel is a sophisticated instrument for deliberately guiding people through a brand experience. It has been transformed into simplified diagrams designed for clear presentations rather than actual use.
When we eliminate the context of a brand to fit a shared model, we are not innovating. We admit that we no longer care about the nuance of why a customer chooses one thing over another.
The BMS framework: where efficiency lies
True marketing effectiveness does not lie in a single discipline. It sits at the intersection of business, marketing and sales – a framework the Marketing Accountability Council calls BMS. When these three elements do not intersect, you are not strategizing. You do context washing: using clever copy on paper over structural cracks.
Consider Los Tacos #1 at Madison Square Garden. This is not a branding accident or viral fluke. This is the BMS alignment made visible.
- From a business perspective, they secured a high-leverage location with built-in foot traffic and designed unit economics for high-speed viability.
- From a marketing perspective, the product validates the brand promise the moment you taste it: the promotion is the sensory experience and consistency of craftsmanship.
- From a sales perspective, the service model quickly converts this crowd into revenue.
No pillar can support the others. If the location was poor, marketing would not be able to generate sufficient demand. If service was slow, sales would hamper revenue. If the product was average, the marketing would just be too promising.
You can’t fight your way out of a bad place. You can’t run a creative campaign to get out of a slow checkout queue.
The courage to say “I don’t know”
The release of the Marketing Mandela Effect is not a new AI tool, a better dashboard, or a more aggressive content calendar. This requires a return to marketing intelligence and radical honesty in naming the unspoken truths and untapped emotions that the industry is too afraid to acknowledge.
If two-thirds of practitioners fail to define the foundations of their own work, the first step is not sophistication. It’s honesty. It is the desire to say, clearly and without performance: I don’t know.
Without this admission, we walk around with metal detectors, looking for value in a pile of rubble we helped create.
The brands that will matter in the next decade are not the ones with the most optimized dashboards. They are the ones who have the courage to stop making up stories, to stop chasing the ghosts of strategies that died ten years ago and to rebuild on truly solid foundations.
The question is not whether the industry needs to change. The question is whether you are ready to be honest about your current situation.
