Marketing Has a PR Problem
Why Everyone Thinks They Can Do Your Job
The conversations play out in organizations every day. Marketing gets dismissed. Often not loudly, and (hopefully) not cruelly. But dismissed nonetheless. The budget shrinks. The seat at the table disappears (or never appears). Often, the marketers in the room, who can sometimes be among the most analytically rigorous, strategically sophisticated people in the building, are left out of critical organizational decision making.
What happened isn’t a personal problem (though it can feel like it is), in my opinion, it’s a PR problem.
I want to be clear about something before we go further. I am not talking about marketers who are just not good at their jobs or bad marketing, both of which admittedly exist. I am talking about a structural perception gap, one that has been documented in peer-reviewed research, that distorts how organizations understand, value, and deploy the marketing function. The gap is real, the consequences are measurable, and the root cause is more interesting than you may realize.
It comes down to familiarity and the ways familiarity can masquerade as understanding.
THE MYTHS
First, the Myths
From my perspective, the problem of marketing being inaccurately perceived is most frequently expressed in four main ways:
Myth #1: Marketing is fundamentally manipulative. Spin. Propaganda dressed up as storytelling. The ‘Mad Men’ concept of the profession, where a charming creative dreams up a slogan that convinces people to want things they do not need. This myth is durable because it is not entirely without historical basis. But it flattens a discipline that, at its best, is about understanding human behavior deeply enough to create genuine value for people and organizations.
Myth #2: Marketing lacks analytical depth and is primarily aesthetic and/or intuitive. Therefore marketing is the place where people who are not rigorous enough for finance or operations fit. This is perhaps the most professionally damaging myth, because it shapes hiring decisions, reporting structures, the talent that seeks marketing roles, and how seriously marketing insights are taken in strategic conversations.
Myth #3: Marketing and sales are the same. Marketing and sales are distinct disciplines with distinct methodologies, distinct time horizons, and distinct functions within an organization. Treating them as interchangeable, or treating marketing as merely a support function for sales, misunderstands both.
Myth #4: Anyone can do it. This is where I want to dive a bit deeper this week by exploring a psychological phenomenon that I believe is a root cause of the marketing profession’s PR problem.
► Myth #4 is where it gets interesting.
The Illusion of Explanatory Depth
Here is the thing about that last myth. It is not irrational. It follows a very predictable psychological logic and understanding that logic is the first step toward dismantling it.
In 2002, Yale researchers Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil published a study in Cognitive Science that gave a name to something many of us have experienced without being able to articulate it. They called it the Illusion of Explanatory Depth. Their central finding was this: people feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they actually do. And most crucially for the marketing profession, the illusion is strongest when the environment supports real-time exposure to visible outcomes.
Their methodology was elegant: ask someone to rate how well they understand how something works. Then ask them to explain it, step by step. Then ask them to rate their understanding again. Consistently, ratings dropped sharply after the explanation attempt. People discovered, in real time, that what they had was familiarity, not understanding.
The examples Rozenblit and Keil used were mechanical: zippers, bicycles, toilets. But the principle extends well beyond household devices. Philip Fernbach and colleagues demonstrated in 2013 that the same illusion operates powerfully in the domain of policy, and that forcing people to explain their positions reduced both their confidence and their extremity. The act of explaining, not just knowing, is what reveals the gap between what we think we understand and what we actually do.
Now consider marketing.
The average person is exposed to thousands of marketing messages every single day. They have bought things, made decisions, responded to campaigns, scrolled past ads, opened emails, chosen one brand over another. They have, in the language of cognitive psychology, been repeatedly exposed to the outputs of the discipline. And that repeated exposure does something very specific to the brain.
Robert Zajonc, a social psychologist, documented this in 1968 in work that became foundational to behavioral science. His research demonstrated that individuals tend to develop a preference for things simply because they are familiar with them. He called it the Mere Exposure Effect. The brain categorizes familiar stimuli as more favorable, and critically, as more understandable. Familiarity reduces the cognitive friction associated with something new or complex which gets misinterpreted as comprehension.
This is compounded by what researchers call processing fluency, the ease with which information is processed. When something feels easy to process, people infer they understand it. The feeling of cognitive ease, whether it comes from actual mastery or simply from repeated exposure, signals to the brain that the territory is known.
My boss recently explained that golfers call this “feel versus real” — what your swing feels like versus what it actually looks like on video.
Marketing suffers from the same gap. The outputs feel simple, so the process seems simple.
Marketing outputs are everywhere, and they are designed, by their very nature, to be accessible. They have to be. A campaign that no one understands does not work. A brand that is confusing fails. The very quality that makes good marketing effective, its clarity and accessibility, becomes the mechanism through which people mistake the output for the process. They see the ad. They do not see the audience research, the positioning analysis, the competitive landscape assessment, the message testing, the media strategy, or the attribution modeling that preceded it.
The very quality that makes good marketing effective — its clarity and accessibility — becomes the mechanism through which people mistake the output for the process.
No one watches a bridge being used and concludes they could have engineered it. No one reads a quarterly earnings report and assumes they understand the mechanisms of financial accounting. (Before ‘vibe coding’, at least), no one saw a line of code and thought, “I could build that system.” But everyone has bought something. Everyone has scrolled past an ad. Everyone has picked one brand over another. So marketing feels universally accessible in a way that structural engineering, accounting, and software development do not.
No one watches a bridge being used and concludes they could have engineered it.
This is the crux of marketing’s PR problem. Not a messaging failure (although I also suspect that exacerbates the core problem). A research-backed structural, cognitive phenomenon, the Illusion of Explanatory Depth, systematically distorts the perception of the profession.
THE RESEARCH
What the Research Says It Costs
The consequences of this perception gap are not abstract. They show up in incredibly sobering data.
Loss of Influence: A landmark peer-reviewed study by Homburg, Vomberg, Enke, and Grimm, published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science in 2015, confirmed empirically what practitioners have long experienced: the marketing department has lost significant organizational influence over the past two decades. Notably, the function that captured that lost influence was sales, which speaks directly to the conflation myth.
Board Blindness: Research published in the Journal of Marketing by Whitler, Krause, and Lehmann in 2018 found that only 2.6% of corporate board members across S&P firms have marketing experience. The primary reason the researchers identified: the perception that marketing is tactical and lacks strategic vision.
Firms with at least one marketing-experienced board member saw annual revenues increase by nearly six percentage points. The representation gap is not just a status problem. It is a performance problem for the organizations perpetuating it.
Misattribution of Impact: Key, Clark, Ferrell, and Stewart, writing in AMS Review in 2020, documented something even more structurally interesting. Part of marketing’s perception problem stems from a kind of organizational success. Marketing diffused its customer-centric perspective throughout organizations so effectively that every other function began to claim ownership of it. In doing so, marketing lost its identity as the source and steward of that perspective.
Marketing did its job so well that it became invisible as the discipline that did it.
Functions that generate tangible, technical outputs like programming code, financial models, and legal briefs tend to retain clear ownership of their work. Functions whose best work shapes culture, language, and strategic direction tend to see that work absorbed into the organization without clear attribution. Marketing lives in that space. And the Illusion of Explanatory Depth is part of what keeps it there.
THE ANTIDOTE
What Can Be Done About It
Rozenblit and Keil’s original research contained a finding that does not get discussed as often as the illusion itself, but it is arguably the most useful part. The illusion can be reduced through explanation. Not assertion, not advocacy, not louder claims about marketing’s value. Explanation. Or, as I have been recently describing it: marketing out loud.
When people are required to articulate, step by step, how something actually works, the gap between perceived and actual understanding becomes visible to them. Confidence recalibrates. Positions moderate. Understanding deepens.
Fernbach and colleagues confirmed the same mechanism in their policy research. The act of explaining changed how people thought about what they knew.
Here is what that looks like in practice. Instead of presenting a campaign as “We’re launching a LinkedIn campaign targeting mid-market CFOs,” you walk stakeholders through the mechanism:
“We identified that 68% of our pipeline stalls at the business case stage. Closed-won interviews revealed Directors of Centers for Teaching and Learning don’t have internal language to justify our ROI to their CTOs. So we’re creating asset templates they can use in their decks, distributed via LinkedIn because that’s where 43% of this segment researches vendor content according to our intent data. Success looks like a 15% reduction in time-to-close for deals that engage with the assets, measured via CRM stage velocity. If we don’t see movement in 90 days, we’ll know the hypothesis was wrong and we’ll kill it.”
That is explanation. That is showing the work. And that is what closes the gap between what marketing does and what people assume marketing does.
I know that when I show up in this way I am infinitely more influential. I am also guilty of not taking the time to consistently ‘market out loud’ or even more frequently over explaining in ways that non-marketing counterparts get lost in the details.
It is not a gap in our capability. It is a gap in our ability to communicate.
This is what I mean when I say I want to help marketers think more deeply and communicate their expertise more clearly (myself included). Not so we can perform depth. So we can close the gap between what we actually know and what the people around us assume we know. That gap is costing many of us influence, budget, authority, and career satisfaction. And in many cases, it is not a gap in our capability. It is a gap in our ability to communicate the inputs, analyses, and processes that lead to the final deliverables that our audiences interact with.
The work of making the complexity of marketing analyses and processes visible to ourselves and to the organizations we serve, is one of the deep dives that I am committing myself to as a steward of the profession. Not only in retrospect, after the strategies have been proven and the results are in. Instead, as often as possible, I want to market out loud in real time, as decision points unfold, as choices are being made, as conceptual frameworks are developed and deployed.
Because the most effective response to an illusion of understanding is always the same:
Show the work.
If that is the kind of exploration you are looking for, you are in the right place. Follow along for more deep dives like this one to understand the theories that shape the practice and how to communicate them to great effect for professional credibility and advancement.
REFERENCES
[1] Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521-562.
[2] Fernbach, P. M., Rogers, T., Fox, C. R., & Sloman, S. A. (2013). Political extremism is supported by an illusion of understanding. Psychological Science, 24(6), 939-946.
[3] Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2), 1-27.
[4] Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2009). Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13(3), 219-235.
[5] Homburg, C., Vomberg, A., Enke, M., & Grimm, P. H. (2015). The loss of the marketing department’s influence: Is it really happening? And why worry? Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 43(1), 1-13.
[6] Whitler, K. A., Krause, R., & Lehmann, D. R. (2018). When and how board members with marketing experience facilitate firm growth. Journal of Marketing, 82(5), 86-105.
[7] Key, T. M., Clark, T., Ferrell, O. C., & Stewart, D. W. (2020). Marketing’s theoretical and conceptual value proposition: Opportunities to address marketing’s influence. AMS Review, 10(3-4), 151-167.