Marketing under pressure: the hidden cost to B2B growth

In my work and conversations with leaders across B2B and tech businesses, from early-stage start-ups to more established organisations navigating the pressures of scale, I’ve noticed a recurring theme: marketing is under pressure like never before.

This comes at a time when its potential business impact and reach have never been greater across brand, commercial strategy, client success, company culture, digital infrastructure, and organisational narrative.

And here’s the rub.

Marketing’s remit has expanded. But in many businesses, its authority has not kept pace. The widening distance between what marketing could do and what it is actually being asked to do is, in my experience, one of the most underexamined constraints on B2B growth.

Why Marketing’s Authority Is Shrinking in B2B

Two recent pieces of thinking have sharpened this picture for me, and they approach the problem from different angles.

McKinsey’s State of Marketing Europe 2026 surveyed 500 senior marketing decision-makers across the UK and Europe. The findings paint a picture of a function that is simultaneously optimistic and under-evidenced. A significant majority of CMOs plan to increase budgets this year, and branding has reasserted itself as the number one priority. Yet only 3% of those same leaders can demonstrate return on investment across more than half of their marketing spend. The ambition and the evidence are running in opposite directions.

Separately, strategist Zoe Scaman recently published a forensic examination of what she calls the calcified canon on her Substack. It explores the tension she identifies between teaching classical marketing frameworks, such as the 4Ps and segmentation, whilst overlooking the fact that the conditions that produced them have changed beyond recognition. Zoe’s argument is not against education or rigour, quite the contrary. Rather, it is an illuminating piece that calls out the habit of mistaking memory recall for competence, whilst also highlighting a ‘systemic, structural, incentive-driven unravelling’ of marketing as a discipline.

Read together, these two perspectives describe the same underlying problem for me: a profession that is highly capable of performing expertise, and considerably less certain about where that expertise actually lands.

The real constraint isn’t capability

In my work with B2B businesses at various stages of growth, marketing underperformance is rarely a capability problem at its core. The function usually contains intelligent, hard-working people doing considered work. The constraint tends to be upstream, stemming from the how, when, and on whose terms marketing is brought into the strategic conversation.

The pattern I see most often looks something like this. A business has a growth challenge. Marketing is asked to respond to it. Campaigns run, content is produced, pipeline is chased. Activity accumulates. Traction is harder to find than expected. The diagnosis eventually settles on marketing performance, whether that’s messaging, channel mix, audience focus, conversion rates, or all of the above. However, the actual problem quite likely took root before any of that work began.

Marketing was positioned too late, against a brief it had no hand in shaping (if indeed there was a brief at all), and measured against metrics chosen for their convenience rather than their relevance. The capability was present. The conditions for it to land were not.

This is not a story about poor strategy or weak execution. Often it is a question of where marketing sits in the decision-making architecture of the business, and what that costs when growth becomes less straightforward.

Where the ground has shifted

This isn’t simply a matter of marketing being undervalued. The landscape itself has changed in ways that have materially altered what marketing owns, influences, and is held accountable for.

Product teams own the proposition and roadmap. Finance owns pricing and the ROI framework. Sales and client success teams are closest to the customer conversation and the experience that follows. Each of these shifts reflects where expertise naturally sits in a modern or maturing business. The risk isn’t the shift itself. It’s what happens when there is no function actively integrating those perspectives into a coherent market proposition. That integration is, and remains, marketing’s most important job.

And then there is AI. Conspicuous in its absence from most marketing strategy conversations, AI is nevertheless already reshaping the function from the inside. AI is increasingly influencing content creation, campaign decision-making, and customer insight at speed. The McKinsey data is pointed here: the 6% of European marketing organisations that have reached genuine AI maturity are already reporting efficiency gains of 22%, which they are reinvesting in growth. The remaining 94% have yet to move meaningfully. That gap will not stay theoretical for long.

Marketing is, in other words, simultaneously losing ground in some directions and failing to claim it in others. The authority question is not just about where marketing sits in the business hierarchy. It is also about whether the function is actively shaping its own relevance, or allowing it to be defined by default.

What changes when marketing has genuine authority

The businesses I have worked with closely over the years, at very different stages and with very different resources, that get the most from their marketing investment tend to share one characteristic. Marketing has been part of the commercial conversation early enough to influence what success looks like, not merely to report against a definition someone else wrote.

This is not primarily a question of budget or headcount, though both matter. It is a question of timing and positioning within the business. When marketing has shaped the go-to-market thinking, when it understands the commercial model well enough to have a view on where the real constraints are, when it has been trusted to push back on a brief that won’t work, the outputs look different. Not always more polished. More grounded.

The McKinsey data supports this directionally. Among the small minority of European marketing organisations that have advanced their capabilities — in brand, in measurement, in the integration of new tools — the results are meaningfully better. Not because they have more resource, but because the function has been given, and has earned, the right to operate strategically.

The question leadership should ask

When a leadership team begins to sense that marketing isn’t delivering as expected, the instinct is often to look at the marketing itself. This can range from messaging, channels and ICP to team structure and agency relationships. Occasionally, those are exactly the right places to look.

More often, the more useful question is earlier than any of that: what has marketing actually been asked to do, and was it ever adequately resourced and in a position to do it?

Marketing’s reach isn’t shrinking. But its authority will continue to contract in businesses that treat it as a delivery mechanism rather than a growth function. This mistake tends to compound quietly, showing up not as a single failure but as a persistent, low-grade drag on commercial momentum that is difficult to attribute and harder to reverse.

The businesses that resolve this don’t necessarily spend more on marketing. They think more carefully about when and how they use it. That distinction, in my experience, is rarely the easier choice. Yet it is almost always the more effective one.

Element 8 works with B2B leadership teams navigating growth complexity, helping them identify the real constraints on marketing performance and bring in the right capability at the right time. If this resonates with where your business is, we’d welcome a conversation.