Marketing has an image problem even among its own practitioners, who when surveyed anonymously mostly say they wouldn’t recommend their own marketing departments to prospective hires, according to research by the trade group MMA Global.
Surveys of more than 1,100 marketers since 2021 find they give their own marketing organizations a -2 Net Promoter Score. And the trend is negative. The most recent batch of data from 2023 surveys pushed the number to -2 from -1.4.
Greg Stuart, CEO of MMA Global, sees the negative NPS as a stunning indictment of the state of marketing. “Nothing identifies more why we’re kind of a mess than the fact that we wouldn’t recommend others to come to work in marketing with us,” Stuart said. He plans to focus on the research—and ways to improve marketing’s image inside companies—in his keynote at the group’s Possible conference in Miami starting April 17.
The scores are based on how marketers answer on a 1-to-10 scale the question: “How likely is it that you would recommend to people you like and respect to come work in marketing in your company?” The study covered a wide range of industries, company sizes and countries.
In keeping with conventional NPS methodology, marketers who answered 9 or 10 are counted as “promoters,” while people who answered 1 to 6 are “detractors.” Those in the middle count as neutral. The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
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“My hunch is that if we would have done this 10 years ago, the NPS score would have been significantly higher,” said Neil Morgan, marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin and one of the academics working on the research. “Everybody [in the surveys] has talked about dramatic changes impacting marketing and digital and consumers’ willingness to share. That has increased opportunity, but exponentially increased complexity in most of these marketing organizations. Dealing with that complexity is part of what’s underlying all this. People are living through this constant state of transformation, where nothing is in one place or fixed long enough for folks to get used to working that way.”
The aggregate NPS number underlies a wide range of responses. NPS scores are much higher, averaging +45, among the 11% of companies that researchers identified as “winning marketing organizations,” Morgan said. Another group of lagging marketing organizations averaged a -41 score. Companies were placed in the winning and lagging categories based on factors such as sales and profit growth.
There is a chicken and egg problem in identifying whether better NPS scores lead to better performance or vice versa.
“We don’t have enough years of data yet to be able to isolate the degree to which it’s causal in one direction or another,” Morgan said. “I would anticipate that it is reciprocal, so that it works both ways. If you’ve got marketers who are engaged in what they’re doing, they’re more productive. And when the needle is moving in the right direction, everyone’s happier.”
Omar Rodríguez-Vilá, professor of marketing at Emory University and a former Coca-Cola Co. marketer who also helped oversee the research, attributes low NPS scores to “organizational friction.”
Marketers who rate their departments poorly, he said, “are having a lot of difficulty doing their best work, because they’re in organizations that are confused about the role of the function or their own personal way of contributing.”
The confusion often stems from companies dispersing marketing responsibilities among different departments, Rodríguez-Vilá said, with different people overseeing marketing technology, analytics and traditional brand management.
“It’s increasingly rare to find a person that oversees all those pieces,” he said. “That fragmentation leads to creation of these tribes,” with separate groups of performance and brand marketers sometimes in conflict, he said.
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The proliferation of titles within marketing organizations—such as consumer experience, growth, performance, commercial or communications roles entering the mix—also appears to drive down Net Promoter Scores, Rodríguez-Vilá said.
“We thought it should have a small impact,” he said. “But it actually has a pretty high impact and increase in friction, because it just increases organizational confusion.”
Conversely, clarity about roles of marketing in an organization and “marketing capability fit,” where the capabilities of staff match the defined needs of the organization, were the biggest predictors of higher NPS scores and performance, Morgan said.
In other words, the more successful companies have people who are “good at things that matter most to driving growth,” he said.
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The survey broke down 72 capabilities and practices, he said, identifying if they’re present in the organization and the quality with which they’re carried out. That might, for example, include a focus on personalization and the specific capabilities required to carry it out. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, Morgan said. Capabilities needed by leadership or challenger brands might be very different, even for companies within the same business category.
Even if marketing and marketers are viewed negatively by many consumers or customers, that’s not much of a factor in driving the NPS of practitioners lower, Morgan said. “I think it has more to do with how leaders and people in other functions think about marketing inside the organization.”
Stuart said the MMA hopes to address the negative view CEOs and executives in other functions have of marketing in part by improving the quality of the measurement so marketers can show their impact on growth and enterprise value. The Marketing Accountability Standards Board has been on a similar multi-year quest to develop financial accounting standards to measure marketing impact. But Stuart said MMA’s plan is to go beyond financial accounting to develop and grade metrics on how well they improve marketing effectiveness.
The MMA, originally founded as the Mobile Marketing Organization, is now a general marketing organization with membership across the industry and marketers taking the lead, Stuart said. Marketers make up about half of the group’s board, with media, ad tech and agency executives also represented. The group describes its mission as “architecting the future of marketing,” and it includes think tanks focused on organization design, marketing attribution and data.
The Possible event is new this year, rolling up several MMA events into one big annual conference, Stuart said. The conference also has attracted attention and some controversy thanks to a planned appearance by Elon Musk for a fireside chat with Linda Yaccarino, chairman of global advertising and partnerships of NBCUniversal. And since Musk has eliminated much of Twitter’s marketing staff amid a 75% headcount reduction and doesn’t do much advertising at his other companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, he isn’t exactly one of the marketing profession’s biggest C-suite backers.
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Stuart said the conference will still be a step toward a plan to fix the poor reputation marketing departments have among their own marketers.
“Marketing has not developed a very good reputation amongst itself,” he said. “We need to be better.”
