Your marketing is missing 3 cylinders

MY DEEP DIVE

How I rebuilt marketing into a growth engine in 90 days

A few years ago, I realized something uncomfortable.

I was doing good marketing.

Campaigns shipped. Dashboards looked fine. Teams were busy.

But deep down, I knew the truth.

If budgets were cut tomorrow, my work would be questioned first.

That feeling stayed with me.

Not because I wasn’t working hard.

But because I was running marketing on one cylinder.

Most marketing teams today run almost entirely on promotion.

Ads. Content. Campaigns. Channels.

It looks productive.

It feels measurable.

But it’s fragile.

Classic marketing was built on four levers:

product × pricing × placement × promotion

Growth happens when all four work together.

Not additively.

Multiplicatively.

If one is weak, the whole system underperforms.

Shayne De La Force summed it up perfectly on my podcast:

That line hit me because it explained why so much effort produced so little leverage.

Here’s the structural problem most teams ignore:

Only ~5% of your market is ready to buy at any given time.

The other 95% isn’t.

This is the 95–5 rule, researched by the LinkedIn B2B Institute and Ehrenberg-Bass.

Promotion is designed for the 5%.

So when marketing focuses only there:

This is why promotion-heavy marketing feels busy but fails to compound.

And it explains why promotion is the first thing cut when pressure rises.

Marketing budgets are no longer growing.

Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey shows marketing budgets flat at roughly 7–8% of company revenue.

No extra fuel is coming.

Which means growth now comes from reallocation, not expansion.

That’s when I stopped asking:

“How do we run better campaigns?”

And started asking:

“How does marketing actually drive the business?”

Executives don’t need more activity.

They need:

Forrester reports that around 70% of companies now track marketing-sourced pipeline, not just leads or traffic.

That’s the shift.

Marketing credibility today isn’t earned through output.

It’s earned through commercial contribution.

I didn’t rebrand.

I didn’t add channels.

I rebalanced the system.

One cylinder per month.

I forced clarity.

One problem we solve.

One reason customers choose us instead of doing nothing.

If product clarity is weak, promotion just spreads confusion.

Pricing was the lever we avoided the longest.

Small pricing and packaging changes had more impact than entire campaigns.

McKinsey consistently highlights pricing as one of the fastest profit levers in a business.

Ignoring it is expensive.

Most “lead quality” problems turned out to be placement problems.

Friction.

Misaligned handoffs.

Broken buying journeys.

Fixing access mattered more than generating more demand.

Only after product, pricing, and placement were aligned did promotion start working properly.

Then:

Long-term effectiveness research supports this balance between brand and activation.

The 4Ps are not a strategy.

Academic research has criticized them as too simplistic when applied mechanically, especially in B2B and services.

That criticism is valid.

Used correctly, the 4Ps are a decision checklist.

They force marketers to stop hiding behind promotion and take responsibility for growth.

When all four cylinders run:

You stop being useful.

You start being trusted.

That’s the shift from execution to ownership.

If promotion stopped working tomorrow,

which other cylinders would still be running?

If the answer makes you uncomfortable, that’s the point.

CTA

If you want to go deeper, watch to the full podcast conversation that shaped this thinking.

It’s linked below.

— Ivan