I spent 20 years training as a high-level brand marketer at companies like IBM and Mastercard. By every traditional metric, I was successful. I had the titles, the budgets, the seats at the table. Yet for two decades, I was operating miles away from actual revenue. I wasn’t an architect of business growth. I was a custodian of optics.
The moment that crystallized this for me came when my business partner placed “CMO” next to my name on a slide deck. My stomach dropped. It was a visceral reaction, because in most organizations, the CMO is the coloring officer: brought in after the product is built, the sales strategy is set and told to make it pop. They’re handed a disconnected product and asked to manufacture a benefit from it.
That shows how far marketing has drifted away from its core purpose. It is more focused on optics, activity and internal validation than on driving real business outcomes. Like me, many marketers now operate at a distance from revenue, lacking grounding in the technical fundamentals that connect their work to growth.
Now, as an entrepreneur, that corporate protection is gone. When there’s no paycheck insulating you from outcomes, you realize very quickly: if you can’t connect your creative work to a cash register, you’re not a strategist. You’re a hobbyist with an expensive deck.
My refusal to be called a CMO is an act of self-preservation. I’m undergoing a forced return to the technical foundations I was trained to ignore in favor of monitoring dashboards that measure motion rather than momentum.
The marketing Mandela Effect
Marketing is trapped in a collective delusion — what psychologists call the Mandela Effect. The term was coined in 2009 by researcher Fiona Broome, who found that thousands of people shared a vivid, false memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s.
Mandela was, of course, released in 1990 and passed away in 2013. This wasn’t a simple error. It was mass confabulation: the brain filling in the gaps in incomplete knowledge with whatever seemed logically consistent, until the false memory became accepted as truth.
Our industry has done exactly the same thing. We’ve filled the gaps in our professional knowledge with buzzwords that sound right but lack substance. We tell ourselves we are data-driven and strategic. The ground truth is far more embarrassing.
According to a recent industry benchmark by strategist Mark Ritson, approximately two-thirds of marketers can’t define the technical foundations of their own craft. They failed to define basic concepts like positioning, brand or even data. Much like those who swear they watched Mandela’s 1980s funeral on television, we’ve convinced ourselves we are doing marketing when we are just monitoring dashboards that produce no real intelligence.
Lieutenants in a posture of fear
There’s a structural divide between the C-suite and the marketing department. The common explanation — that executives simply don’t understand marketing — misses the more dangerous truth: most marketers don’t understand business.
As Marketing Accountability Council strategist Moni Oloyede has observed, marketers who can’t speak the language of ROI, pipeline, or finance default to a survival mechanism. They aren’t strategic partners. They’re subordinates scanning for a piece of daylight, a way to keep leadership satisfied and off their backs. This dynamic locks marketing into the role of a reactive cost center rather than a proactive engine.
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The Mandela Effect compounds this. Marketers take operationally nuanced ideas and strip them of complexity, reducing them to oversimplified tropes. Take the lead funnel. In a real-world operation, a funnel is a sophisticated instrument for deliberately guiding people through a brand experience. It’s been bastardized into dumbed-down diagrams built for clean presentations rather than actual use.
When we bleach the context out of a brand to make it fit a shared model, we aren’t innovating. We’re admitting we no longer care about the nuance of why a customer chooses one thing over another.
The BMS framework: Where effectiveness lives
True marketing effectiveness doesn’t live in any single discipline. It lives at the intersection of business, marketing and sales — a framework the Marketing Accountability Council calls BMS. When these three don’t intersect, you’re not doing strategy. You’re doing context washing: using clever copy to paper over structural cracks.
Consider Los Tacos No. 1 at Madison Square Garden. It isn’t a branding accident or a viral fluke. It’s BMS alignment made visible.
- From a business standpoint, they secured a high-leverage location with built-in foot traffic and designed unit economics for high-velocity viability.
- From a marketing standpoint, the product validates the brand promise the moment you taste it — the promotion is the sensory experience and the consistency of the craft.
- From a sales standpoint, the service model converts that crowd into revenue at speed.
No single pillar can carry the others. If the location were poor, marketing couldn’t manufacture enough demand. If service were slow, sales would bottleneck the revenue. If the product were average, marketing would just be overpromising.
You can’t brand your way out of a bad location. You can’t creative-campaign your way out of a slow checkout line.
The courage to say ‘I don’t know’
The path out of the Marketing Mandela Effect isn’t a new AI tool, a better dashboard or a more aggressive content calendar. It requires a return to marketing intelligence and the radical honesty to name the unspoken truths and untapped emotions the industry is too afraid to acknowledge.
If two-thirds of practitioners can’t define the foundations of their own work, the first step isn’t sophistication. It’s honesty. It’s the willingness to say, plainly and without performance: I don’t know.
Without that admission, we’re walking around with metal detectors, looking for value in a pile of rubble we helped create.
The brands that will matter in the next decade aren’t the ones with the most optimized dashboards. They’re the ones with the courage to stop confabulating — to stop chasing the ghosts of strategies that died a decade ago and to rebuild on ground that’s actually solid.
The question isn’t whether the industry needs to change. The question is whether you’re willing to be honest about where you’re standing right now.
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