Where Does Marketing Cynicism Come From?

Let’s grab the bull by the horns.

In our recent survey report on marketing mindsets among manufacturers, one of the key groups to emerge were the Cynics: people whose decisions about and actions toward their own marketing indicated divestment from efforts to promote their business.

Read the Report » From Achieving to Believing: 2024 B2B Marketing Mindsets

We didn’t ask anyone to self-identify as Cynics (or any other group). Instead, our survey probed into specific aspects of their behavior, and then looked for what groups emerged, and what traits they shared. As it turned out, this was no small group. In fact, the Cynics comprised roughly a third of our respondents. Here’s what we learned about them.

Defining characteristics of Cynics:

Cynics cited more conflict between departments (14% vs. only 4 or 5% for Believers and Achievers.)
Their biggest challenge relative to other groups is “increasing productivity” (39% for Cynics vs. 17% and 25% for Achievers and Believers respectively).
They suffer from a marketing leadership gap: Only 35% have a marketing director, compared to 65% of Achievers and 71% of Believers. (Numbers are similar for project managers.)
Cynics also express apathy toward other aspects of business growth: They are only half as likely as Achievers to be interested in attracting new customers, converting prospects to customers, or engaging with existing customers, and only 9% are concerned with communicating the value and benefits of their products and services (compared to 26% of Achievers and 36% of Believers).
Cynics also show little interest in their prospects: Only 14% believe they need to understand their customers, compared to 51% of Achievers and 63% of Believers.
Cynics expect a similar level of disengagement from those they work with. Across the board, they have lower standards for their agencies than Achievers and Believers.
Cynics feed into their confirmation bias by neglecting to track any measurements of marketing success. Only 28% have ways of calculating ROI (compared to 69% for Achievers and 55% for Believers). Even for a metric as easy to check as website traffic, only 23% of Cynics check in, compared to 57% of Achievers and 60% of Believers.

On some level, it’s no surprise that marketing cynicism exists the way it does. Marketing is a field based on persuasion—on trying to convince people to take certain actions that they might not have taken without your messaging. This requires trust from the customer, and when that trust is broken, cynicism is the natural result.

It must also be said that marketing doesn’t have to be intentionally misleading to be bad. Marketing can also fail because it’s uninspired, tone deaf, or unaligned with business goals. In fact, given all the reasons marketing can fail, it’s no surprise that so many manufacturers lose faith.

However, the presence of the other two mindsets identified by our survey—Believers and Achievers—proves there’s more to the story. Clearly marketing works for some people, and this raises some important questions:

Why are people cynical not just about marketing in general, but in their ability to market themselves?
Should Cynics change their minds and give marketing another chance?
What steps should Cynics take to avoid the pitfalls of previous attempts—and position themselves for success this time?

There’s a lot of meat here, so let’s dig in.

1. Where does marketing cynicism come from?

Let’s state the obvious: no one is cynical about marketing that works. Cynicism is born from failed or thwarted efforts. When it comes to marketing, the most common culprits are these:

Negative experiences with marketing in the past. You put a lot of work into a campaign that failed. You worked with an agency who over-charged and under-delivered and the experience has left you jaded.
Uninspired marketing in the present. Messaging around your business feels fake or off-the-mark. You’ve never liked your marketing—and you aren’t much impressed with your competitors, either. You believe you’re in an industry where marketing isn’t effective.
Inability to track KPIs or measure marketing success. You don’t know if your marketing has ever been successful—and you don’t know how to find out. KPIs feel vague or too removed from the results you need.
Internal dysfunction and competition. Sales is unhappy that marketing never gives them what they want, marketing is frustrated that sales won’t credit them with leads, and leadership is constantly changing directives without enough forewarning.
Inconsistent effort and unrealistic expectations. You only turn to marketing at moments of acute need—and the lack of immediate payoff leaves you unimpressed.

If you’re cynical about your own marketing, it’s worth giving these causes a hard look. As dispiriting as it can be to feel like your marketing never goes anywhere, it can be even more frustrating to realize you’re undermining your own chances at success.

The good news is this: none of the above issues are permanent, and most of them are far more tractable than they appear.

2. Why marketing deserves your perseverance.

If we have your attention, let us share one of our favorite marketing analogies: going to the gym. We all know that getting in a workout once every three or four months won’t do you any good. It doesn’t matter how much work you put into that one gym session—you’ll be limited by your lack of preparation, and without follow-up, your efforts will soon fade.

Marketing offers a lot of parallels—and a lot of reasons you should restart your workout schedule:

Marketing works for others; it can work for you. Provided you have a healthy business and a modest budget, there’s no reason your marketing can’t be successful. Achievers don’t have access to some secret magic solution that you can’t also have—they’re just putting in work that you haven’t.
Marketing can fail for factors outside your control. We said “provided you have a healthy business” for a reason. Your workout can fail if you slip and break a leg. And if there’s anything that COVID taught us, it’s that sometimes large external forces lay waste to our best-laid plans.
Landing on the right strategy takes time. If you’ve ever abandoned a sport or exercise routine because it wasn’t a good fit for you, you’ll recognize the truth in the saying that “the best workout is the one you’ll stick with.” Again, marketing has some similar parallels! The strategy that works for one business may not work for yours, even if you’re very similar on the surface. Your differentiating factors, target audience, the nuances around your products and services—these features that set you apart will also demand different marketing strategies. You can’t copycat your way to success.
Your business deserves it. There are plenty of companies out there suffering from organizational rot. It’s not that the marketing is bad—it’s that the culture is toxic, the departments are dysfunctional, and the products and services aren’t delivering value to the customers. If this is your business, then you’re right: You have bigger worries on your plate than your marketing.

  But if you’re proud of your business, it’s time to show it. A good company should be distinguishable at a glance from a bad one. You may believe in your soul that it only takes a good face-to-face and an honest handshake to win a prospective client over. But before that meeting happens, your customer needs a reason to talk to you over your competitor. Marketing should be your best wingman, helping you look your best so your clients walk into their first meeting with you excited for the good things you can accomplish on their behalf.

3. Setting your marketing up for success.

Okay. So you’re warming up. Cynicism is exhausting, and you’re ready to hope again. What steps can you take to give yourself the best chance for success this time?

I have good news: You don’t have to take all this on faith. If you are like most of the Cynics in our survey, there are actionable steps available to you to set yourself on a path toward success.

Fill your leadership gap. Your marketing will fail if no one on your team has the mandate to make it successful. This may mean hiring a full-time marketing manager and supplying them with a budget to accomplish your goals. If you’re a smaller company, then you, the owner, may have to commit to understanding and tracking your marketing efforts. If you’re going to invest in your marketing, part of that investment includes your attention.
Lay the groundwork with discovery. Do your due diligence. Most people carry a number of assumptions about their company, their customers, and their industry—but if you haven’t done the work to challenge those assumptions, you could be surprised by the outcomes. We once ran a competitor analysis that showed that the shade of blue chosen by our client was in the same family of desaturated teal as every one of their direct competitors, while the aspirational group they were trying to reach were choosing bolder, brighter colors.

We’ve worked with other clients whose “differentiating factors” were identical to every other business in their industry. In other cases, leadership had one set of expectations about client needs, while those on the ground working with the customers day-to-day have a different perspective. Talk to your team and your customers, ask the right questions, and do the research.
Set higher standards for your marketing. We were surprised by the number of Cynics in our marketing report who were still partnering with a marketing agency even when they weren’t impressed by their work. Specifically, they felt their agency hadn’t taken sufficient time to know them or their customers before producing deliverables. This arrangement can be fine in some cases—especially if your internal department is highly engaged and you only need someone to handle overflow work. But if you’re unhappy with the quality of work your agency delivers, it’s time to look elsewhere.
Establish KPIs and know how you plan to track them. Determining KPIs can be a challenge. How do you know what results are reasonable? Can you trust your methods of measuring them? What if you change your strategy partway through and your KPIs are no longer relevant? These are good questions, and you should work with your marketing team to settle on the answers. Avoid the impulse to set top-down standards for success, and don’t get hung up on one indicator. Instead, look at the results holistically to see if they add up to meaningful movement. Maybe you aren’t seeing the progress in SEO you were hoping for, but email open and click-through rate is up. Leads have only gone up slightly, but the quality of those leads is higher. You’re hearing from contacts at your annual trade show that they’ve taken notice, and you’re getting more meetings booked on your calendar. Attribution can be difficult, so don’t lose sight of your successes just because they don’t fall into the list of KPIs that you set eight months ago.
Align your teams. Sales and marketing need to be rowing in the same direction. This can be difficult for both parties: Sales is often hungry for results, and can be impatient about any effort that doesn’t immediately generate more leads. Marketing wants attribution statistics, and gets frustrated when sales doesn’t input their data into their CRM. And this isn’t even accounting for other departments! Do the work to create internal buy-in so that the success of your marketing is a victory for everyone.
Be prepared to iterate. Markets can change rapidly, and your messaging, strategies, and tactics sometimes need to be nimble to adjust. Remember that your marketing efforts take time to build. You will be better served by a mindset of continuous improvement than an expectation of immediate results.

Don’t confuse the means with the ends.

To close, let me offer an example from our marketing survey—one that I think explains a lot about why marketing efforts fail. Most of those surveyed—even the Achievers—thought that 300 words (about three paragraphs) was a good length for a blog article.

This assumption that “shorter is better” has been widely debunked. In fact, the metrics clearly indicate that longcontent (minimum 1,000 words but often 2,000 or higher):

Ranks higher in search engines
Earns more traffic
Is shared more frequently on social media
Receives more engagement (likes, comments) on social media

So why the disconnect?

To me, this is a perfect illustration of how a cynical mindset can permeate marketing and undermine its own success.

Here’s how I imagine a Cynic thinks about their blog articles:

My marketing agency tells me I should put blog posts on my website to boost my SEO.
I want to rank for XYZ keywords, so one of our customer service reps is going to write a few quick articles whenever their workload is light enough, and we’ll just make sure we mention those keywords a few times each.
My customer service rep doesn’t really like to write and these articles bore me to tears, but if they improve my search rankings, I guess they are worth it.
My rankings aren’t getting any better. I was right to believe marketing wasn’t worth it.

The mistake our Cynic has made is that they’re chasing an outcome (SEO rankings) that is disconnected from their goal (business growth).

So, let’s get our priorities straight.

What if you approached your content marketing this way:

I want to build trust with current and future customers, and I want to do that by offering the expert advice of myself and my team.
Our company blog is the right platform for this. My team and I are going to identify what content would be most useful for our customers, and then we’ll offer full explanations on those topics so that our customers can feel confident and informed.
Our customer success team is thrilled. They’re better able to support our current customers to make the best use of our products and services. Churn is down and client satisfaction is up.
Oh hey, it just so happens that writing in detail on a topic helps it perform well on Google.
We’re getting a good response from our sales team. The content we put together is well received when they share it with prospects, and they’re now sending us a list of pain points from their leads and want us to write more content around those topics.
We’re seeing a shorter close cycle on our sales, and have better relationships with the customers who come in because we took the time to educate them and build trust up front.

I could say the same about any number of marketing efforts, from developing a new website to running a more targeted ad campaign. Regardless of the tactic or the strategy, the bottom line is the same: When your marketing delivers value to the customer, the customer responds by investing in your company. It’s hard to be cynical about that.