Are marketing teams always this tense?

7 Comments

1. AnonymousFebruary 19,2025 at 4:21PM UTC

   I was in marketing for 12 years and have plenty of friends in marketing. Of the 4+ jobs I worked in, the marketing departments at all four were toxic. Like sent-me-to-therapy, questioning my sanity, bad communication, bullying kind of toxic. This was when I was a copywriter, when I was a content strategist, and when I was the director, so it didn't matter the level of my role. My co-workers all felt the same and turnover was high at all these places.

   At the same time, I have a few friends who work in marketing at a few places that have a better kind of balance. I personally feel they're lucky and in the minority, but I also know my experience colors that a lot.

   In my opinion, there are three main issues with a lot of in-house marketing teams.

   1) Marketing, as part of a company, is one of the few areas that SPENDS money, so it constantly needs to re-legitimize itself and that's a sort-of impossible feat because no company only experiences profits with zero losses over time.

   2) In particular, marketing needs to prove itself constantly to people who don't understand how marketing actually works (CEOs), so they make demands that aren't always realistic, and then department heads have to figure out how to get teams to do things are actually impossible.

   3) Managers/directors/CMOs in marketing are not well trained to deal with and #2 or how to set expectations correctly with the C-suite. And some companies simply do not want to learn how to support marketing properly, they just want to pretend like every time you spend money it will make money, and then are disappointed in the times when it doesn't. In reality, Marketing is more like science: you make a hypothesis, you spend the money on it, you see if it works, and then you adjust for the next spend. This is way too complicated for the C-suite to have patience with most of the time.

   If you stay in marketing, hopefully this just gave you a little help in which kinds of questions you might want to ask employers in the future. What Marketing's connection is to the C-suite and how communication flows up and down, how independent your team is at making decisions....these are all important in knowing if a place is going to treat you like a human or not, and if the top dogs "get" marketing.

2. AnonymousFebruary 20,2025 at 3:56PM UTC

   As someone who’s worked in marketing-adjacent roles my whole career (technical communications), this is a spot-on analysis of what I’ve seen in our marketing teams over the years. (A lot of this applies to tech comm, too.)

3. AnonymousFebruary 25,2025 at 2:22PM UTC

   This is accurate. I've had jobs when the C-Suite told me that marketing is nothing but fluff. Okay, be my guest to devise a strategy and take it from there. Let's see how far you get.

4. AnonymousFebruary 25,2025 at 6:18PM UTC

   I agree. I'll also add that the marketing team often gets hit with layoffs and budget cuts when sales teams don't make their targets. That puts extra pressure on the teams and creates a culture of competition rather than teamwork. I did marketing for almost 10 years and found it exhausting.

5. AnonymousMarch 14,2025 at 1:54PM UTC

   can I ask what you do now, if you don't work in marketing?

6. AnonymousFebruary 21,2025 at 3:22PM UTC

   Not a marketer myself but have worked with many both in-house and via agencies I think part of the problem is if the marketing lead or majority of team is brought in-house from an agency where there is definitely a not great culture. The homegrown marketing teams I have worked with for the most part seem better but here’s a question you can ask, “what was the big idea the team brought to market since you’ve been here and what was a big idea the company vetoed?” The interviewer will like that you have thoughtful questions but really you are unable to unpack some insights on corporate culture tolerance as well as team group think (are responses reasonable to you or was the idea vetoed super biased or offensive/never should have been pitched)?

7. Colleen HansonFebruary 27,2025 at 5:05PM UTC

   I have never worked in marketing but I can tell you that at my last job the marketing department was a revolving door of employees. It got to the point where I stopped even getting to know them because many of them left within a month or two.