In 1964, a Harvard professor published a paper that would define the early days of the marketing department. Neil Borden’s “The Concept of The Marketing Mix” listed twelve areas of responsibility for every marketing manager. It included advertising, branding, physical warehousing, pricing strategy, and product development.
Nobody thinks of the marketing department as the one responsible for a warehouse today. In many tech companies, any marketing department's attempt to influence pricing strategy and product development would quickly end up with a spat between product, finance and marketing... all in good spirit, of course.
Because over the past 60 years, those territories are now the bread-and-butter of another department. It’s important to keep in mind, as a marketing leader, when executives start to talk about differentiation and the idea of standing out.
When the warehouse left marketing
The best example was the function of physical distribution. As theory, it was actually formalized in 1961, by the marketing faculty at Michigan State. The marketers were the ones that would stress its importance. And over time, physical distribution went on to be known as logistics and supply-chain management.
The business world quickly took on, and the operations department found its core degree and certification topic. It was only in 2007, where Michigan State was soon to split its joint Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management. Because as times moved, marketing “became lost in the shadows” as people, unawaredly, associated us with pretty pictures and tactical channels.
Similar stories happened with pricing and product. The airline industry was known to have made fare-setting a concern of financial analysis, while software companies would soon popularize the concept of product management. Most of the pioneers of marketing, as a profession, saw this as “the decline of marketing.”
But Carraway & Willow’s stance is slightly different. Logistics was important, and so it deserved a full-time owner. The same is true for pricing and product. Because the promotions, alone, can take up the full week. Marketers should be stoked to have the space to fixate on distribution, diversification and performance. Because the pretty picture still matters... a lot.
The structural gridlock in marketing
But the surviving items of Borden’s List never made the department any easier. It takes some precision, and politicizing between departments, to get right. Because the dependencies of marketing’s breakout success often resides in the finance and product departments. It’s on the core question of: “Who gets to decide what’s worth saying, and how to say it, about the company’s core value proposition?”
The CMO Survey reveals the structural problem. In 2024, two-thirds of marketing leaders said that positioning was their job. The department is being held to a pretty clear mandate. But in B2B services firms, marketing owned pricing for about one in seven cases, and fewer than a third in product. Over time, it’s become an accepted fact that marketing is held responsible for the company’s perceived difference, while owning almost none of the systemic sources of said difference.
In a professional services firm, the core difference sits in how the work is done. The beautiful messiness is the seed, but the people who know and do the work, are not marketers. So, when marketing schedules a meeting and asks about differentiation, an expert’s response is always utilitarian and functional: “We’re faster, and will get the job done more accurately than the others.” The marketer knows exactly why it will fail, and yet has to publish it anyways.
And for sweet-effect, let’s claim that we’re number one. Because as a department, marketing has been structurally-pinned to being all-talk. And so, of course, to prove its worth, marketing is left to make its last-ditch effort in “honest-to-god" education content, channels, and numbers. But the issue of “differentiation” will always be the hammer that nails the coffin shut for an internal marketing team.
Why marketing should not differentiate
The obvious fix is for marketing to set another meeting with the experts. Let’s take up an hour of, at minimum, two people’s time. And whatever we’ll get out, will have no choice but to go out. This week’s calendar must be filled, and next month, you’ll still be sat across the table from that colleague. The simple risk: “It’s better to post generic content, than to be the face that pisses someone off, at this office.”
Under that kind of pressure, anyone with any survival instinct, will take what little they could get from the expert, and supplement with secondary research. And in today’s world, that secondary source is a chatbot. The outcome will be the fastest defensible draft. The kind of that mimics the speech of the category. If you’re using the same tools as everyone else, don’t expect it to produce much difference.
The better approach is to interview the experts, to record it, and to have somebody else write it down. The crucial part to get right is knowing what’s worth selecting, as the anchor, for what matters to the customer. Carraway & Willow specializes in that interview to first-polished article stage. The expert knows a lot, but what about that is worth saying before we even think about hitting the distribution button?
And even more, why is it that the internal marketing team is unable to carry out this duty themselves? Well, for the reasons already described. To achieve the kinds of breakout marketing success that they’ve been mandated with, internal leaders need room to selectively leverage the relational capital that they possess. If differentiation is something that marketing is structurally gridlocked against, then it’s worth making room for them to focus on the things that they’re good at.
Editorial is next to leave the department
When AI becomes a core part to marketing’s pipeline, it’s more important than ever to separate the craft of selection and framing away from distribution. This’ll be how companies get to protect the differentiation of their brand capital, while still allowing for the effective reach and exposure gains from AI-driven systems.
The world of content marketing has become a question of distribution, repurposing, and performance. The editorial department is a formalized desk, for something that used to be local, informed and implicit. That is, the selection of frame. It used to be that marketing executives, the kind assigned to channels (like Meta Ads, Instagram, LinkedIn), would, without intending to, be aligned to the leaders’ frame. There was no other source of conflicting "revelation".
But the moment a junior places a senior’s idea of what the frame should be, into a chatbot, the frame is now diluted. And so brand capital suffers. The solution here is to “encode the artifact” in a linguistically-locked form, before you introduce it to the distribution team. That way, marketing’s tokens are spent on starting from the seed of something real, thought-out and derived from the firm’s expertise.
When “the warehouse” left, marketing found room to get good at the work that it’s known for today — diversification, distribution and performance. And with changing times, the editorial department should be formalized as the steward of difference. It would mean that marketing starts with an idea that’s worth the budget. It would see more time, on its hands, to repurpose and distribute, to hit its mandate.
And marketing would remain to be the department that takes the credit, for where credit’s due... because the purpose of a good editorial department is to shield the marketing team from the cross-functional chatters of product, finance, operations, and the newest addition to the workplace; a junior's chatbot.
