Marketing leaders today face a crisis. In many organizations, especially those under pressure for short-term results, marketing has been reduced to performance metrics and lead generation, leaving little room for the broader discipline of the 4Ps: product, price, place, and promotion.
The consequence is a narrowing of skills, a marginalization of brand as a strategic asset, and a growing tension between short-term demand and long-term equity. At a time of heightened complexity and investor scrutiny, the real challenge is to restore marketing to its rightful role as a driver of clarity, growth, and enterprise value.
In the first of a series of conversations with marketing leaders, Alan Brew talks with Steve Patti–CMO, sales leader, startup founder, adjunct professor, and former BrandingBusiness client–for a candid conversation about the state of marketing today.
The challenge, as Steve puts it, is for marketers to “take back the 4Ps” and restore marketing as a true engine of growth, not just a service desk for sales.
Episode Transcript
[This is an edited version of the transcript. Listen to the full interview by clicking the player above.]
Hello again. This is Alan Brew of Branding Business and my guest today is Steve Patti. Steve is a CMO, sales leader, startup founder, and adjunct professor with 40 years of experience across a dozen industries. And for the past 15 years, he served in various CMO, CRO and executive advisory roles, and he is also a former client of BrandingBusiness and one from whom I learned a great deal. Steve, welcome to Expert Opinion.
Setting the scene. I’ve been following you very closely on LinkedIn and other social media platforms and it seems to me there is something significant taking place. I see a visible fault line running through the CMO role. It’s been mentioned over the past few years, but I think it’s even more pronounced in 2025. There is an obsession with performance marketing metrics, MQLs, etc. There’s a marginalization or outright misunderstanding of brand as a strategic asset and there’s a tension between short-term attribution and long-term equity building. This is playing out daily on LinkedIn in particular, and you’ve become a spokesperson and an evangelist in my view for real marketing based upon the four Ps which are promotion, price, product, and place. So Steve, tell me what the heck’s happening.
Steve: Well, Alan, your setup is well crafted because all those things are happening and if I were to answer the question in two words, it would be identity crisis. And that’s ironic given that one of marketing’s key roles is to create positioning, clarity for the company and the product lines for which it’s responsible. So, when I reference the identity crisis, your reference to a fault line I think is a great descriptor of the largely over-40s crowd in terms of age versus under 40. What we have seen is those of us who came up through the 1980s or 1990s through marketing, it was part and parcel to on-the-job training and mastering your craft.
The concept of brand not only at a corporate level, but brand management applied to product lines…those were areas of expertise that you were required to know and practice in your daily function. It would have been unheard of to staff a marketing department in the 1980s or the 1990s where marketing was reduced to a one P function in a four P world – i.e., promotion. However, with the emergence of social media with the explosion of marketing technology software, Martech as it’s referenced, beginning around 2010, people who got out of university or changed into another career in marketing got a very different narrative on what marketing is, what marketing does, and the job description and role they probably have found themselves in over that 15 year period looks very different from what Philip Kotler or Mark Ritson or anybody in between knows. And here is the rub and the tension that we find ourselves in today.
Alan: That is a very broad and rich overview, Steve, which begs a lot of detailed questions and I will jump in with the first one. The thing that stood out to me was your reference to the SaaS world in particular the ecosystem of software as a service platforms and users. And it sort of begs the question in my mind about a generational narrowing of marketing to a little more than a sales enablement and communications function. It’s maybe not a shift but a collapse. You have said today’s SaaS marketers have been misled and undernourished, trained only in promotion, not the full-scale scope of marketing. Am I right to say that and what is your point of view about that?
Steve: Yeah, absolutely. And ironically, about two hours before we jumped on this podcast, I talked to someone who is very visible on LinkedIn. She is a head of marketing for the SaaS company and she has reached out to me privately and said, “Hey, I’m essentially at a career dead-end because if I’m ever going to become great at my craft, I need to pivot and potentially leave the SaaS sector, maybe stay in broader technology or consider leaving the tech sector altogether.” And oh, I receive direct messages in LinkedIn on a weekly basis like this, including one yesterday from a guy that I spent an hour on the phone with in London. So yes, what is going on here?
So, going back in a little bit of a history lesson here, if we go back and look at around the time of 2005 to 2010 where software-as-a-service, led by Salesforce.com largely disrupted packaged software that you and I knew from our office days of 40 years ago with software delivered on CD ROMs and you bought licenses. What essentially happened is, as Salesforce and a lot of these companies grew, the VCs leaned in and said, “Hey, wait a minute, this is an explosive category where we can make billions of dollars collectively by making capital freely accessible.” We see this big disruptive trend in the way that software is purchased and the Capex requirement thresholds have been lowered significantly for entrants to flood the market.
I saw something published recently that said there is something like over 100,000 SaaS companies that have been created in the last 15 years. I know for a fact that in the CRM category, mentioning Salesforce, there are nearly 2000 CRM SaaS competitors in a single software category. So, we have category saturation.
Now, why is any of this significant? What does this have to do with branding, marketing and this reduction or stripping down of marketing? Because when VCs put money into companies, they do this with the intention of getting the money out – typically in a five-year time horizon. So when you have thousands and thousands of companies being started between 2008 and 2015 with VC money, one of the things we know about VCs that are building these types of companies is they’re not really interested in brand because when these companies get acquired, the brand is absorbed by the acquiring company, unless it has significant equity and then it gets added to the brand portfolio of the acquirer.
But by and large, if you’re talking about a billion dollar company acquiring a $50 million company, that $50 million brand probably goes away. So, when you look at the org charts and marketing in most SaaS companies, there is nobody who is responsible for brand, either a chief brand officer at the top having this explicitly written into the CMO job descriptions, or at the frontline manager or director level.
Very few have anybody responsible for brand. So there’s where some of the collateral damage has gone there 15 years in this sector, nobody really paying attention to brand. On the four P side of the business, promotion becomes the primary lever that VC investors want the marketing teams to focus on…everybody in the company needs to be 100% focused on revenue. So, it is all about revenue ramp and marketing gets reduced to, essentially, an extension of the sales organization to simply generate leads. Product and price that are historically under brand management do not get entrusted to marketing because technical founders tend to think they know more. And so, they say, “no, we will decide product features, product market fit, we will decide prices that will charge the customer in partnership with finance.”
So, you have marketing being emasculated of those two Ps – Product and Price – and that really leaves Place. Again, typically in these tech startups, the founders decide the paths to market and they use terms like PLG for product-led-growth or SLG for sales-led-growth. In lot of these cases, the decisions of path to market are taken away from marketing and they are either a sales decision, a technical founder decision or some combination.
What you have over the last 15 years is an overwhelming narrative that marketing is about Promotion – and brand is touchy feely, fluffy identity stuff that has no measurable impact on business outcomes. And none of these skills are being taught. None of these professionals are being coached and developed and now they are all VPs of marketing, CMOs, CEOs. What do they do? They perpetuate the cycle. They write job descriptions for today’s college graduates. They design the org chart for today’s 30-year-old frontline manager and they are repeating the same errors, the job descriptions, the reduction of the marketing function, the dysfunction in the way that marketing and sales interact, and the lack of strategic impact that marketing has on the enterprise.
And then the result of all this is a C-suite says this is the reason marketing has a credibility problem. This is the reason we don’t value marketing as a growth lever. This is the reason that marketing is a little more than email campaigns and Facebook posts and direct response. They don’t fully understand marketing’s impact across the enterprise because they don’t allow marketing to make an impact across the enterprise.
Alan: So, you have opened two very interesting lines of thinking there, Steve. One is what I am thinking of as “capital structure as destiny” and what you go into, and the blind spot, the brand blind spot. We’re in a world of brand versus demand now and this schism is not very helpful to the clients who want to really grow sustainably. But let’s focus on advice to marketers who are entering the technology world or coming out of the tech world. You have said that marketers should actively avoid VC and PE backed companies if they want to learn real marketing. What do you think VC and PE environments are structurally in terms of real marketing?
Steve: If I were recruited to a VC backed startup, I would have the experience and the skillset to go in and explain during the interview process – here is what marketing is, here is what marketing does, here is what a properly structured marketing organization looks like, and I believe I am qualified to lead that. If this aligns with your vision for what marketing will look like inside your company, we can have a second conversation. If not, whether you hire me or you hire someone else, you’re setting that person up for failure. I have very candid conversations like this on a quarterly basis, and it is probably why I am not employable. But the answer to that question is, as a generality, I would say VC funded companies are poor places for marketers to learn the skills.
In fact, I have two sons aged 23 and 26, 1 with a communications degree, the other with social media and digital content degree. And my advice to both is: do not go into SaaS or tech if you are going to master marketing before the age of 30 because they do not value marketing as a growth multiplier across the enterprise and, therefore, you are going to be constantly facing all the dysfunctional things we talked about.
So, are there exceptions to VC backed companies? Yes. Are there exceptions when someone can go in and have hard conversations and maybe have the technical founders and the VC say, look, if brand can help us grow revenue because it creates preference and shorten sales cycles, I am now on board with brand. If you are telling me marketing, particularly product marketing, could take some of the workload off founders to gather better market insight and research test pricing and feature sets to ensure that our products we are bringing to market are better fit to the needs of the target markets.
If you could do all that, then yeah, there is a chance you can have a successful VC backed marketing trajectory, but as a rule, it is an uphill battle all the way.
Move to PE. For most listening, I hope they understand the difference. VC is very speculative capital. Typically for startups, high risk of failure, you’re looking for unicorn wins. Private equity typically involves in later stage companies and its growth capital. So, they do not sign companies that are still trying to figure out product market fit and the basics. PE investments can be patient money, they could be five to seven years, five-to-eight-year time horizons. And because they invest in more mature companies and they understand in some cases the power of the brand.
If you have got patient money, PE partner investments that appreciate all the things I just talked about, there may be plays there. So yes, capital structure I believe has a lot to do with the patience, the appetite for the management team in those companies to make medium to long-term investments, not only in the function of marketing, but to then professionally develop the people.
A lot of people in B2B, including the gentleman in London I talked to yesterday who was essentially asking for career coaching, I tell them: do not rule out B2C, right? The best marketing category is always going to be B2C, where brand management disciplines are practiced, particularly in consumer-packaged goods. So, that is another big consideration as well.
Alan: And just to qualify, we BrandingBusiness do have some exceptionally good clients in the PE world, who do value branding. They do understand what brand is and how it plays into what they’re doing in terms of building long-term value, driving growth and building asset value in terms of brands. So I do agree that there are exceptions and noble exceptions to that kind of basic thesis
In those PE firms they are joyous clients to work with because as they make investments in multiple companies throughout their portfolio and they have the appreciation of how brand is a growth driver. Half of the battle is won, they already understand why brand is strategic and valuable, and now it is just about how to apply that to grow the business.
Which brings us to the brand issue. I think of it as brand versus demand, and it’s a sad state of affairs where we’ve got this kind of false dilemma of do we build brand or do we focus on demand? This is again a product of the SaaS world where brand is often dismissed as a veneer. Many founders or many SaaS founders treat brand as window dressing or something for later. So from your view, Steve, what’s the cost of that mindset and how do you explain the business value of brand to leaders who see it as soft?
Steve: Super question. And that is really where we’re seeing a significant amount of tension right now on LinkedIn and other places. Because to answer the question in two ways, the first part of this is one of the big problems that we have, particularly in technology sector, but SaaS is where it is exacerbated, is brand is confused with branding and brand identity.
And frankly, none of these technical founders have ever really had brand explained to them correctly and the benefits of brand explained to them correctly. I have been in these conversations and begin explaining the benefits of brand to the business, and the proverbial light bulb goes on and you get this look in their eye of dread when they realize that, for 10 years or more, they’ve completely misunderstood brand. So, in short, the biggest causal problem we have is that brand as a discipline is confused with visual identity, which is one of many components of brand strategy as you well know, right?
There are tone and personality, and there’s positioning, and there is a variety of things in terms of how you create and deliver on a brand promise. But in their mind when a marketer says, we need to invest in brand, a lot of these technical executives view that as, oh – color scheme, a logo, a tagline, how the hell is that going to contribute to revenue growth? It doesn’t matter whether our logo is blue, light blue, green, red, whatever. So, they marginalize and dismiss it.
I wrote a three-part series that you are probably aware of in the article section of my LinkedIn profile last year, and the second of the three article segments was called Building a Case for Brand Investments.
And I highlight in there the four or five critical areas that I remember you and I and one of your partners evangelizing back in 2013 after we had worked together in a client relationship.
So here it is in a nutshell, and people can read the article for a deeper dive, but in the interest of time – brand is becoming less of a blind spot if we can, as marketing and brand professionals, help connect brand to outcomes, particularly business outcomes. So, while there are many, here is four off the top of my head that I typically lead with.
I start with revenue because that is the one that the CFO and the CEO are most interested in. How does brand contribute to demand and ultimately revenue? Well, the very simple fact is this, there have been multiple studies published over the years, including three of them since Covid
All their data was independently done over a five-year period. These studies were five-year spaced. Nobody knew the other firm was doing the studies, but all of their data aligns perfectly. And the data says that in any B2B buying situation across all categories, from energy to manufacturing, electronics to software to medical devices, whatever, it is that in 90% of the cases, the buyer starts with an initial day-one consideration set of an average of three vendors, right?
So, nine out 10 starts not at the top of the funnel, but already at consideration stage, and in 80 to 90% of the deals were awarded to one of those vendors on that day-one consideration set.
So, if you are not in that consideration set as a category leader, you are fighting not for a hundred percent of the opportunity in your total available market, or service addressable market, you are fighting for twenty to thirty percent because the incumbents are going to win on average three out of four times.
Those odds are not good for any company, but particularly startups or early growth stage companies that have virtually no brand awareness and brand association with what are called category entry points.
So, when I ask CEOs and CFOs – hey, as you think about your demand gen efforts, are you interested in trying to appeal to 25% of the market or 100% of the market? Well, no, we of course want to appeal to a hundred percent of the market when we want to have an opportunity a hundred percent of the time when a buyer in market to compete for their business. Sales leaders will tell you the same thing when they typically do win-loss analysis and they lose deals. If you are talking about CRM, nobody is going to get fired for picking Salesforce.com. Buyers want safety and brands provide that perception of de-risking buying.
The first place I start is – if we can show you Mr. CEO or Mr. CFO, how becoming one of those three preferred brands on the day-one consideration set can dramatically increase your win rates in terms of closed business, they can significantly reduce your sales cycle because the buyer is coming to you already asking for a proposal. The lead is coming inbound. Is that interesting to you? If we can start there, but the other benefits that brand gives us, as we know, are retention benefits.
Switching to an unknown vendor is riskier than just working out the kinks or the strained relation piece or whatever with the vendor. So, in a lot of retention cases, the tiebreakers, the willingness to work through challenges or difficulties in the customer relationship, brand power gives you the ability to do that.
And we know that brand also helps with employer marketing or employer branding. Powerful respected brands sound a lot sexier to share with your friends and family than brands that have poor reputations. So not only do strong brands help to attract top talent, strong brands help to retain top talent. And then on the supply chain side, vendors want to work with strong, preferred, respected, revered brands as well.
And then I would argue the fifth one, which Alan, we have talked about for over a decade is M&A exit value. So, we know when valuations are being done for acquisition, one of the line items in the calculation is goodwill premium, and the premium is almost always the value of the brand equity that the company has built.
And we know, I published data on this, several recent multi-billion-dollar M&A transactions, literally as much as 30% or 40% of the final valuation was the goodwill premium. That is real, real money. So, five areas right there where brand has quantifiable financial impact on the enterprise, but I do not think enough marketers know how to talk the love language of the CFO and the CEO to explain this.
Before we move on from brand versus demand, there is data that shows that demand campaigns have higher conversion rates when the viewer of the ad, the recipient of the email recognizes and trusts the brand that sent it. And if you think about that, we all do that.
Brands that are known, liked, and trusted when they run demand campaigns see higher click-through rates, higher conversion rates, and then we go to the consideration part of converting to a close sale brand strengthens demand or performance marketing campaign results. So, it is a multiplier – brand multiplies and increases performance marketing results.
Alan: There is a lot of factors in the B2B world which determine buyer response. It is a common experience among technology platforms, clients who very successfully base their strategy in the B2B world and then develop products that are designed to respond to end-users, individual consumers. And the brand strategy has to stretch. It has to be configured, reconfigured around that particular world. I just wanted your quick, quick comments on that evolution because it is an inevitable evolution for growth. You want to look at how you can grow the business and when you have tapped out the B2C universe.
Steve: Yeah. So, to your point, the quick answer is this. When we think about positioning at a product line level, let alone a corporate brand, there are a couple ways that we can anchor positioning, we can position against competitors, we can position around use cases, and we can position around desired outcomes. Where I have seen this show up and companies successfully straddle B2B and B2C is less about saying we serve these types of companies or these types of consumers, but it is the use cases of problems solved and who has the problems?
Alan: Thanks for your spontaneous reaction to that question. It’s just something that came up as we, small business owners are virtually consumers too. They have a particular way of looking at brand and what they need out of it. Steve, I’m going to wrap this up. Looking at time, I do want to come back and deep dive into some of the issues we’ve exposed. But what you’ve offered today is more than a critique of modern marketing. It seems to be a challenge to the industry to remember what marketing was meant to be a strategic engine for growth and not just a service desk for sales. Would that be fair to say?
Steve: Yeah, a hundred percent. It’s really about returning to your first love, right? We’ve had a generation of marketers who have never been taught properly. It is just kind of my give back here at the end of my career.
For those of us that know better, we need to also be more vocal and we need to help the marketing leaders in these roles today take back the four Ps, empower them with the business case discussion points in terms of the benefits of brand, and really just be part of a renaissance that we restore the integrity of the discipline and we uplift and enrich the people practicing it.
Steve Patti is a CMO, sales leader, startup founder, and adjunct professor with nearly 40 years of experience across a dozen industry sectors. He has spent the past 15 years in various CMO, CRO and executive advisory roles in automotive, banking, technology, telecom, motorsports, and private equity.
BrandingBusiness is a global B2B branding agency dedicated to building powerfully effective B2B brands that lead with clarity and perform with purpose. For more than 30 years, we have helped forward-looking clients to navigate change, enter new markets, unify cultures, and drive sustainable momentum toward their growth plans.