Chapter 1b: The Crime Scene
Place: The Boardroom, 2025 – A Crime Unfolds
The Investigation Begins
The room was full of suspects:
The Venture Capitalist, obsessed with hypergrowth and impatient for instant results.
The CFO, holding the purse strings, slowly starving Mary Marketing of oxygen (read: budget).
The Chief Revenue Officer who had seized power and reduced Mary Marketing to a sales support function.
The CEO who didn’t understand Mary Marketing and dismissed her as a “nice-to-have.”
The Institutions who had failed to train Marketing’s next generation, leaving it weak and ill-prepared.
This wasn’t a random act of violence. This was a systematic takedown.
Mary isn’t just wounded; she has been deliberately weakened, stripped of her influence, and left for dead.
But who has done it?
The investigator looked around the room. Each suspect had a motive. Each had played a role in bringing Mary Marketing to this state.
And one of them had pulled the trigger.
The evidence is everywhere:
Mary Marketing’s life expectancy had plummeted in the last few years. CMOs now have the shortest tenure in the C-suite, averaging just 3.3 years. Many haven’t lasted long enough to see the impact of their strategies.
Budgets have been drained. In 2024, marketing budgets as a percentage of company revenue dropped to 7.7%, down from 11% pre-pandemic.
Trust has been shattered. A staggering 80% of CEOs didn’t trust their marketers to drive growth.
The hunt for the killer begins. Ivor, the investigator, will, in turn, interrogate each suspect, the VC, the CFO, the CRO, the CEO, the marketing institutions, and the misguided industry movements.
Each will claim innocence. Each will point the finger elsewhere.
But the evidence won’t lie.
To be continued…
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