Marketing is Back | Aug 2026

I’ve been thinking about something that comes up often in conversations with founders: marketing is making a comeback.

For a while, marketing became synonymous with brand. Then it became synonymous with performance. Somewhere along the way, we created a false choice between the two.

I don’t think that makes sense anymore.

Because whether you’re B2B or B2C, once the customer experience moves online, the expectations become the same.

Even if you’re selling enterprise software, logistics, professional services or industrial equipment, there’s still a person on the other side making a decision. They’re searching online. Comparing options. Reading reviews. Asking AI. Talking to colleagues. Forming an opinion about your company before they ever speak to your sales team.

As Seth Godin puts it, “People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic.” 

That applies far beyond traditional consumer brands. 

The marketer founders actually need:

I often hear B2B founders say they don’t want a “traditional marketer.” What they usually mean is that they don’t want someone who only knows how to build awareness. They want someone who can create demand. Someone who understands digital. Someone who can look at a customer journey and identify where the business is losing people. Someone who understands performance, content, data, conversion and the experience a customer has with the company online.

And I get it.

As a founder, you want marketing to contribute to the growth of the business. You want to see a return.

But here’s where I think some companies are getting it wrong.

Performance marketing without a strong brand eventually becomes expensive.

If nobody knows who you are, trusts you or remembers you, you’re constantly paying to introduce yourself. And brand without performance can become an expensive exercise in looking good without necessarily moving the business forward.

The opportunity is in bringing them together.

Brand × Digital × Performance.

That’s the modern marketing equation.

Marketing has changed

Today’s strongest marketers aren’t just thinking about advertising. They’re thinking about the entire customer experience.

• How does someone discover you?

• What happens when they search for you?

• What does your website tell them?

• What do they see on LinkedIn?

• How easy is it to understand what you actually do?

• What happens after they fill out a form?

• How does sales pick up the journey?

• Where are customers dropping off?

• What data are you learning from?

And increasingly, what happens when AI becomes part of the buying journey?

That last one is going to matter more and more.

Customers are already using AI to research companies, compare solutions, summarize information and make recommendations. The way people discover businesses is changing. Marketing has to change with it.

So, is marketing back?

I’d argue it never really went anywhere.

What changed is that businesses started demanding more from it. And I think that’s a good thing. Marketing can’t sit in a corner and say, “We built the brand. Our job is done.”

It needs to understand the P&L.

It needs to understand the customer.

It needs to understand the journey.

It needs to create demand and help convert that demand into growth.

But that doesn’t make brand less important. It makes brand more important.

When customers have more choices, more information and more ways to interact with you, the companies that are easy to understand, easy to trust and easy to buy from have an advantage. The best marketing leaders understand that brand and performance aren’t competing agendas. They’re two parts of the same job.

And when you get that right, marketing doesn’t just support growth. 

It can be one of the things that creates it.