Marketing seems to be developing a bit of a split personality.
The things everyone gets excited about tend to fall into one of two categories. They’re either highly visible or highly measurable. Everything else spends a surprising amount of time trying to justify why it’s in the room.
The visible stuff is easy. Sponsorships. Big partnerships. Brand campaigns. Executive thought leadership. The things people see, talk about, screenshot, and send to a coworker with a message that simply says, “Thoughts?”
The measurable stuff is easy, too. Leads. Conversions. Cost per acquisition. Click-through rates. Dashboards filled with enough charts and percentages to make everyone feel productive before lunch.
What seems to be getting squeezed is everything in the middle.
Maybe it’s because budgets have been under pressure for a while and accountability has become the corporate equivalent of a fitness challenge. Everyone wants more of it. Marketing teams are expected to prove impact, efficiency, ROI, and occasionally that they deserve oxygen. That’s probably an exaggeration, although if you’ve ever been asked to explain the business value of a campaign that launched three days ago, you know it’s not a dramatic one.
The problem is that people don’t make decisions the way spreadsheets would like them to.
Nobody wakes up one morning and announces that a LinkedIn post increased their likelihood of becoming a customer by 14 percent. Nobody maintains a detailed timeline documenting the exact moment they became aware of a brand. Nobody is sitting at home updating a spreadsheet that says, “Saw sponsored post. Mildly interested. Accidentally clicked ad. Still suspicious.”
Most of us hear about a company from a colleague, see something online a few weeks later, read a review at an unreasonable hour of the night, ignore several emails, click on one by accident, and eventually decide we came to the conclusion entirely on our own. Human beings remain deeply committed to the belief that every decision they make is arrived at independently, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Marketers spend an incredible amount of time trying to understand how people make decisions, while people continue responding by making decisions in ways that are remarkably inconvenient for reporting. If customers wanted to cooperate with marketing attribution, they would have started doing it by now.
That’s why I’ve been thinking about the middle.
Not because it’s some mysterious marketing concept. It’s actually where a lot of the things that influence decisions tend to live. Trust lives there. Familiarity lives there. Reputation lives there. The collection of interactions that make a company feel known before anyone is actively looking to buy something lives there, too.
A person sees your company mentioned online. They hear someone talk about your product. They come across an article. They watch a podcast clip. Maybe they see your CEO on LinkedIn. Maybe they see your logo at an event and immediately forget where they saw it. Then they see it again three weeks later and suddenly it feels familiar, which is both fascinating and mildly annoying if you’re the person trying to measure it. Nothing particularly climactic happens, but one day they need what you’re selling and your company doesn’t feel unfamiliar.
The funny thing is that familiarity is doing a tremendous amount of work in business, while being spectacularly bad at filling out reports. Familiarity might be one of the hardest-working employees in marketing and somehow it’s still impossible to get it to submit a status update.
It’s easy to understand why companies gravitate toward things they can measure. If you’re choosing between a spreadsheet full of numbers and a marketer explaining that people seem to know who you are now, the spreadsheet usually wins. One arrives with charts. The other arrives with vibes. It’s not a fair fight.
Meanwhile, people are still reading reviews at 11 p.m., asking their group chat for recommendations, scrolling LinkedIn while pretending they’re not scrolling LinkedIn, and generally behaving like people. They’re also conducting highly sophisticated research by typing a company name into Google, followed immediately by the word “Reddit.”
Maybe that’s why the middle feels like it’s getting squeezed. It’s not that trust, familiarity, reputation, or long-term visibility suddenly stopped influencing decisions. If anything, they’re influencing just as many decisions as they always have. The difference is that we’re increasingly trying to evaluate everything using the same timeline. We don’t expect trust to develop that quickly in our personal lives and most of us wouldn’t expect a customer relationship to develop that quickly either. Yet marketing activities designed to build familiarity over months often get evaluated against the same expectations as campaigns designed to drive immediate action.
That’s probably why the middle feels harder to defend than it used to. It’s not because it stopped working. It’s because explaining gradual influence in a world that loves instant results can feel a little like bringing a reputation to a spreadsheet fight, and spreadsheets have always been very confident.
