Marketing Today: Doing It Your Way

Most of what gets described as market disruption isn’t something that happened to a business. It’s something a business did to itself, over a long period of time, and then one day the invoice arrived.

The comfortable version of this story is that markets shift because of forces that nobody saw coming. A recession perhaps, or the advent of some new technology, or maybe nothing more than a generation of buyers who think differently. These things are real, and they have consequences, but they rarely explain as much as we credit them for. What they tend to do is provide a plausible external explanation at exactly the moment we most want one. The more uncomfortable read, which is the more accurate one in most cases, is that businesses facing serious commercial difficulty usually built it themselves, through years of designing their operations around their own convenience rather than around the people on the other end of the transaction.

The model was never built for the buyer

For most of the twentieth century, commercial power sat almost entirely with the seller. Buyers had limited visibility and information into alternative purchase options, and no real way to coordinate with each other whenever things went wrong. So businesses, quite rationally, designed themselves to reduce their own friction, with processes built to be manageable from the inside and policies that protected the supplier.

Buyers tolerated all of it because they had no practical alternative, and the businesses on the other end generally took that tolerance as confirmation that things were fine.

The dissatisfaction manifested itself in how people talked about companies they dealt with, in the low expectations they brought to interactions, in the resigned acceptance that buying things was just harder and more aggravating than it needed to be. What was missing was the infrastructure to turn that sentiment into pressure. While often given the blame, we should remember that social media didn’t actually create any of this the frustration. It simply gave people a way to find each other and discover that their irritation was universal rather than personal. Once that happened, the tolerance for the underlying cause dropped sharply, and the threshold for switching, disengaging, or simply telling everyone they knew about a bad experience dropped with it. Behavior changed not because buyers becoming more demanding, but because the coordination costs fell to almost nothing and decades of accumulated resentment finally had somewhere useful to go.

The response from most businesses was to treat this as a trend to be managed. Customer experience programs appeared. Net Promoter Score became something everyone measured and almost nobody fundamentally acted on. The language shifted toward something called customer-centricity while the underlying architecture, which was still organized around the supplier’s logic, stayed more or less intact. Buyers, who don’t experience a business as a collection of separately managed departments but as a single thing they either find easy or difficult to deal with, noticed the gap between the language and the reality.

We’re misreading where the problem started

When markets get harder, the instinct is to look outward for the cause. There’s usually enough truth in whatever external factor we settle on to make it feel like a complete explanation, which is partly what makes it so effective at obscuring the more uncomfortable one. Forrester’s 2024 research into business buying found that 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with the provider they ultimately choose at the end of a purchasing process. Not with a provider they rejected. With the one they selected. And 86% of B2B purchases stall before completing. Those aren’t numbers that suggest a sudden deterioration caused by something recent. That’s what chronic misalignment between buying experience and buyer expectations looks like once it’s been running long enough to show up in the data.

The consequence of an external diagnosis is an external prescription. More marketing spend, a sharper competitive position, a refreshed brand platform, faster sales cycles. These things get worked on, sometimes with genuine effort and significant investment, while the actual source of buyer dissatisfaction, which is the accumulated friction of dealing with an organization that was still built around its own operational needs, stays exactly as it was. The numbers keep moving in the wrong direction and the response is to do more of the things that weren’t working in the first place.

When a business loses ground gradually rather than catastrophically, the quarterly numbers stay uncomfortable but survivable. Each review looks roughly acceptable because the decline is distributed evenly enough that no single metric triggers a real alarm. The operational decisions that created the problem get reviewed against a baseline that already incorporated the problem, so they look defensible. The cause stays invisible in any individual report because it isn’t a specific event. It’s a quality of the overall experience, and that’s not something that gets measured in most of the ways businesses measure things.

The loyalty question we keep asking wrong

We’ve been talking about declining customer loyalty for years, but don’t seem to have mad any real strides in addressing it. Historically, the question tends to get framed around what we need to do to earn more loyalty, which is assuming the problem stems from insufficient positive action on our part. But for most organizations a more accurate framing might be that loyalty erodes through a series of accumulated small failures that, individually, seem too minor to address. A sales or onboarding process that was slightly confusing, for example, or a response that took longer than it should have. None of these things register as a crisis. They just become part of the texture of the relationship. Research from EMARKETER and Bloomreach found that over 63% of marketers believe customers are less brand loyal than five years ago, with limited differentiation compounding the problem across categories. The differentiation point is worth sitting with, because differentiation gets interpreted almost entirely as a messaging challenge when the actual gap is usually in the experience.

Buyers don’t form their impressions of us in the moments we design for them. They form them in all the other moments, the ones we decided weren’t important enough to think carefully about. Whether things were easy or confusing, whether the reality matched the promise. Those impressions don’t get filed separately by department. The weakest element in the overall experience does more to shape perception than the strongest one, which means all the investment in getting the visible parts right is quietly being undermined by the parts we stopped noticing.

When buyers stop renewing or stop returning, we tend to reach for competitive explanations. A rival has better pricing, for example. Yes, sometimes that’s genuinely what happened. But more often the sequence is simpler. A buyer has finally stopped talking themselves into tolerating something that required more effort than it should. The offer that eventually won them over didn’t need to be exceptional. It just needed to feel less like work.

What finding our own way actually requires

The advice that follows a diagnosis like this is almost always some version of becoming more customer-centric, which is accurate enough to feel like guidance while being too broad to act on. Every business believes it’s customer-centric. The processes originally designed for the supplier’s convenience were defended, at the time, as necessary for serving the customer well. The framing was always there. The structural reality underneath it was different. And the people inside the business, who have adapted to the friction over years to the point where they stopped noticing it, aren’t well positioned to see the gap.

Edelman’s research on brand trust found that today’s buying behavior has become too dynamic for the traditional linear purchase funnel, with trust now functioning as the primary driver of purchasing decisions rather than awareness or promotion. Trust doesn’t get built through claims and it doesn’t get rebuilt through campaigns. It accumulates through repeated experience of a business behaving the way it says it does, at the level of the individual interaction, in the ordinary moments nobody is designing for. That’s an operational problem, not a creative one, and the tools we use to solve creative problems don’t reach it.

Finding our own way, in a market where every competitor has access to the same channels and broadly the same playbooks, means being willing to look honestly at what the experience of dealing with us actually is, as opposed to what we designed it to be, or what we assume it is because nobody has told us otherwise. The gap between those two things tends to be larger than we expect. Organizations optimize processes from the inside out, for manageability and cost control, and the person on the other end of the process only ever experiences the outside. Once a process gets embedded and people have built their routines around it, questioning it feels like questioning the organization’s judgment, so it persists while the gap quietly widens.

The businesses that get a handle on this tend to do something straightforward. They go and ask buyers directly, with questions specific enough to produce useful answers rather than the generalized satisfaction scores that tell us very little. Buyers are usually precise about what’s frustrating if they’re asked in a way that makes it clear the answer will be acted on rather than filed. What comes back is rarely what internal reporting surfaces. Some of it is uncomfortable. Most of it turns out to be fixable.

Adding a better marketing layer on top of a friction-filled experience isn’t a strategy. It’s just making the gap more visible.