Chapter 8: The Final Chapter. Who Shot Mary Marketing?
Place: The Boardroom, 2025. The Final Suspect
The interrogation room was nearly empty now.
The lights dimmed, and the case files were scattered across the desk like bodies at a crime scene.
Ivor didn’t move at first.
He stared at the chair across from him - the one Magnus had occupied just moments earlier. The air still felt heavy with the metallic chill left behind by the AI bot’s final words.
“I do not assess talent. I match keywords. I do not see potential.”
The machine had no remorse. Magnus had no shame. And Mary? She had no advocate.
Every external suspect had been named. Their fingerprints were all over the weapon.
The VC who starved her of long-term nutrients in favour of hypergrowth.
The CFO who suffocated her with budget cuts.
The CRO who stole her authority.
The CEO who watched it all unfold.
The Professional Institutions who claimed to be guardians, but were asleep at the wheel.
Each of them had weakened her. Used her. Left her exposed. Yet, seemingly not one of them had actually pulled the trigger.
Ivor turned slowly to the final folder. It had no label. No timestamp and no case number. Just a thin smear of red across the cover, where someone, somewhere, had tried to wipe their hands clean.
The last suspect.
He opened it carefully, reverently. Inside was an array of evidential memories.
A flash of a young marketer, full of insight and fire.
A woman who had once held the map between business ambition and customer need.
A strategist. A translator. A leader.
Mary Marketing.
He paused.
“You don’t think she did it to herself, do you?” a voice murmured behind him.
It was Eliza, the assistant, who’d been quietly watching from the corner of the room the entire time. She had no title and no agenda. Eliza was just someone who noticed things.
“She wouldn’t,” she said again. “She couldn’t. Not Mary.”
Ivor didn’t answer. Because maybe this file wasn’t a suicide note.
Perhaps it was a series of blind turns, professional erosion by a thousand well-meaning cuts, concessions, and silence.
Not murder.
Not intentional.
But still… the result was the same.
He stared at the evidence in his hands and whispered:
“What if she didn’t realise the weapon was loaded?”
He turned the first page.
Because maybe this wasn’t just a murder.
Maybe Mary Marketing… had accidentally shot herself.
Exhibit A: The Influx of Unqualified Marketers
Ivor sat down to think.
In most professions, credentials are sacred.
You can’t call yourself a doctor without medical school.
You can’t step into a courtroom and announce you're a lawyer.
You don’t get the CFO title without mastering finance, forecasting, and fiduciary responsibility.
But marketing? Ivor realised that all you needed was Canva and a Wi-Fi signal.
A LinkedIn banner. A job title no one checks.A few buzzwords. And just like that, you’re a “marketer.”
There was no exam. No gateway. No code of conduct.
Just a slowly dissolving boundary between craft and convenience.
Marketing was once a discipline rooted in depth, curiosity, and strategic rigour, in the relentless pursuit of relevance.
And it meant something to be a marketer.
You studied human behaviour.
You understood brand architecture, customer segmentation, behavioural science, pricing dynamics, messaging strategy, and cultural semiotics.
It was a strategic command, business fluency, and leadership through insight.
But then…
The floodgates opened.
Digital exploded, and social media democratised reach. Platforms promised virality in exchange for volume.
And just like that, what had once been a professional craft was reduced to large-scale content production.
The title "marketer" became a free-for-all. It was a word worn like a costume, not earned like a qualification.
And Mary? She hadn’t protested. In fact, she welcomed them in, hired them, admired them, joined communities with them, reposted their content and believed that democratisation was liberation.
But it wasn’t.
It was dilution.
The Stats Tell the Story:
63% of marketers today hold no formal marketing qualifications.
Many say they “learn on the job” without any structured development. They boast how they have made millions in revenue without a qualification, casting cynicism over those who have dedicated a career to mastering the profession.
Only 24% can confidently define the 4Ps of marketing, the basic building blocks of the discipline.
However, there is no sense of brand architecture or pricing power, no customer lifetime value, just the 4Ps.
And into that void?
A new generation emerged. Skilled in tactics. Trained in tools. Fluent in trends. But unanchored in commercial strategy.
They knew how to build a Canva carousel, run a LinkedIn poll, automate an email workflow and optimise a TikTok soundbite.
But ask them to build a go-to-market strategy, analyse competitive positioning or lead a global market entry plan?
Silence.
They weren’t marketers.
They were executioners. Quite literally!
And Mary?
She handed over the keys, hired and promoted them, and then watched the strategic foundation get swept away as they called it progress.
Exhibit B: The Death of Strategic Thinking
Ivor scanned the next paper.
There was a time when Mary Marketing sat beside the CEO, not as a support act, but as a valued strategic co-pilot.
Mary didn’t just execute strategy; she shaped it, influenced product development, and guided business growth. She was the voice of the market and the customer, the translator of demand, and the architect of commercial opportunity.
She was indispensable.
But that seat? That voice? That influence? Gone.
Ivor went back through the case files from the investigation again. Today’s landscape was brutally clear:
80% of marketers say they spend more time executing than thinking.
Only 30% feel they have any real influence on company-wide decisions.
Fewer than 10% of CMOS own pricing, product or distribution, three of marketing’s original four Ps.
Pricing? Passed to Charlie, the CFO, and Ronnie, the CRO..
Distribution? Handed to Operations.
Product? Absorbed by Product Leads.
And Mary?
She was told to “make it look pretty.” To “make it go viral” To “drive leads.”
The marketing mix's pillars (product, price, place, and promotion) were dismantled and handed off. Market orientation investment was cut, and Mary was locked out of the strategy room.
All that remained? Campaigns, colour palettes, Canva decks and drip sequences.
Hidden amongst the files, Ivor found a quote from a Tech CMO in the company next door.
“We used to set direction. Now we build decks explaining why no one listened to us.”
Case File: The Strategic Vacuum
The boardroom was once a place of partnership.
But over time, Mary’s domain was quietly carved up:
Finance took pricing power, deciding margins without market insight.
Operations took distribution, routing product pipelines based on efficiency, not resonance.
Sales took demand, prioritising short-term targets over long-term brand equity.
Mary? She was handed the leftovers.
“Just run the campaign.”
“Just get us more leads.”
“Just do the comms.”
She had gone from co-creator of growth to executor of tasks.
From strategic leader to support function.
From business partner to brand decorator.
And the most painful part, Ivor quickly realised, was that she had just adapted to it. He picked up her CV. She had updated it to reflect these changes.
She had changed her LinkedIn bio to match it. She called herself a “growth enabler.” She celebrated her “campaign impact.”
She reduced her role to fit the shrinking box they’d put her in.
Strategic thinking didn’t die in a boardroom battle.
It had faded out quietly.
Under the weight of reorgs, misalignment, and resignation.
Ivor looked up with a moment of clairty. Mary didn’t just lose her seat at the table.
She gave it away.
Exhibit C: The Obsession with Vanity Metrics
There was a time when Mary obsessed over people. Not personas or pixels.
People. Her customers, her team, her suppliers and her agencies.
She had lived in their shoes, listened to their doubts, studied what they feared, what they desired, and what they couldn’t articulate themselves. She had been the conduit between the market’s whispers and the company’s ambition.
But now?
Mary was chasing dashboards like a gambler chasing the next high.
Website traffic.
Click-through rates.
Social media engagement.
MQLs.
Impressions.
Inputs all dressed up as impact.
The stories had disappeared.
The humans disconnected.
All that remained was the illusion of movement and busyness….like hamsters on a tactical wheel.
The more the numbers blinked, the more Mary believed it meant something.
But Iver knew from his investigation that blinking lights didn’t build businesses. They didn’t convince the boards. And they certainly didn’t translate to revenue.
Case Study: Boardroom Meeting Notes.
Ivor flicked through the copious meeting notes across the years and stopped as he found last month’s leadership meeting minutes.
Billy, the CEO, had pulled Mary into a meeting. He hadn’t been angry, but he seemed very confused.
“What’s our market position?”
“How are we perceived against competitors?”
“What makes us meaningfully different?”
“Are we building trust… or noise?”
Mary had smiled at Billy and launched her monthly metric dashboard.
“Engagement on LinkedIn is up 20%.”
The room has fallen silent.
Billy looked at Victor, the CFO.
Charlie looked at Ronnie, the CRO.
They exchanged that quiet, devastating look.
The one that says: She just doesn’t get it.
That was the moment the illusion shattered.
Mary no longer spoke the language of business.
She no longer translated marketing into strategic value.
She didn’t connect the brand to buyer behaviour.
She connected metrics to… more metrics.
They didn’t see her as wrong, but they saw her as irrelevant.
So Billy made his decision. He had handed the reins to Ronnie, the CRO.
“At least he knows the numbers,” he said.
Victor didn’t object. Charlie didn’t fight it.
And Mary hadn’t protested.
She never realised the mistake wasn’t in the metrics but in mistaking motion for meaning.
Exhibit D: The Jumble Sale of Job Titles
Ivor opened the following case file and squinted at the cover.
It wasn’t a traditional dossier. It was a stack of job descriptions, LinkedIn headlines, and internal memos - each more disjointed than the last.
“Chief Growth Officer... Chief Customer Officer... Head of Demand... VP of GTM Strategy...” he read aloud.
“Necessary? Maybe,” he muttered. “But none of them replaced Mary. They dismantled her.”
Once, “Marketing” had been one role. One seat. One vision.
Now? “We’ve turned her into a department store,” Ivor said. “Floor by floor, disconnected from the rest.”
What was once cohesive had become chaos. A Frankenstein’s monster of titles, buzzwords, and half-jobs.
Marketing was no longer one unified function.
It was brand in one corner, performance in another, customer in a third, and strategy (if you could find it) spread paper-thin between them.
Mary had once held it all. Brand, product, pricing, market, growth.
Now? That centre had collapsed. And with it, so had her influence.
The consequences were everywhere.
Each of these shiny new roles had its own metrics, dashboards, priorities, and even its own leader.
Marketers were rushing around like headless chickens, trying to reinvent themselves, rename themselves, reposition themselves.
Trying to become a Chief Something-Or-Other in the hope that a new title might unlock respect. Trying to squeeze into a box someone else had built for them instead of rebuilding the chair Mary had once sat in.
The irony Ivor realised was that it would take less energy to restore Mary Marketing to her rightful place than to keep inventing these fractured roles just to be heard.
But no one dared to say it.
The Emperor’s new clothes were firmly missing.
And the Emperor… was the entire profession.
No one had the clarity or the confidence to stitch the story back together.
Because no one was looking at the full system, and no one wanted to rock the boat for fear of being fired and replaced.
They were too busy trying to survive it.
“No wonder the C-suite stopped listening,” Ivor said under his breath.
“They’re not ignoring marketing. They just don’t know who the hell owns it anymore.”
He turned to a screenshot clipped into the file.
A recent LinkedIn post from a former CMO:
“The CMO title has lost its meaning,” it read.
“We should embrace a new era. The Chief Brand Officer. A leader of purpose, coherence and direction.”
They had even updated their profile.
Chief Brand Strategist.
Ivor stared at it.
“Well-intentioned?” he said. “Maybe. But that’s not evolution. That’s surrender.”
He jotted a note in the margin:
Mary didn’t reframe the problem. She compeltely dodged it.
Ivor was no marketer, but even he could see that renaming a role could not restore its value. It just hid the fact that the role had been allowed to erode in the first place.
Mary and her Marketing colleagues didn’t need a new title. They needed their teeth back.
This wasn’t innovation. It was erosion dressed as strategy. Swapping precision for performance. Coherence for chaos. And leadership for labels.
Mary didn’t just lose her role.
“She lost her name, her credibility, her value and her influence”, Ivor whispered. “And the profession helped her disappear.”
He closed the folder slowly, the final page landing like a verdict.
The silence in the room thickened. No one moved.
Around him, the remaining executives sat frozen, suits stiff, expressions unreadable, waiting for a nod, a signal, permission to pretend this never happened.
But Ivor didn’t look at them.
He looked past them.
“She didn’t stand a chance,” he said quietly.
“Not when even her own allies stopped recognising her.”
Exhibit E: The P&L Sheet
Ivor flipped to the next file. The paper was creased and had gathered dust.
Mary had been a rising star.
A marketer leading a high-growth startup, handpicked for her energy and edge.
She had tactical brilliance, a personal brand that dazzled, and a digital presence that made investors lean in.
She could build buzz in her sleep. But could she build business?
Inside the folder were performance reviews, investor memos, and Slack transcripts.
She’d delivered engagement, impressions, virality and even a few leads.
But when asked to forecast revenue contribution?
To map CAC:LTV ratios?
To defend long-term brand investment over a 12-month financial cycle?
Silence.
Mary had been lost.
She had no spreadsheet, no scenario plan and no commercial fluency.
Ivor was reminded of an earlier quote from Charlie, the CFO.
“She was amazing at building buzz. But couldn’t explain how it all connected to the business.”
That one line kept echoing as Ivor skimmed the rest of the notes.
Because without commercial acumen, Mary couldn’t earn trust. And without trust… she couldn’t lead.
She might have influenced her social media, but in the boardroom?
She was seen as high-cost, high-risk, and low-clarity. And slowly, quietly… they stopped inviting her in.
Exhibit F: The Rise (and Risk) of Fractional Everything
Ivor reached for the final case file, which was slim and almost an afterthought.
But as he opened it, he realised it contained more than a story—it contained a movement.
“Ah,” he murmured. “The great escape plan.”
With companies slashing budgets, freezing headcount, and restructuring at pace, a new model had taken hold:
The Fractional Marketer.
On paper, it made sense.
Hire an expert for a few days a month and get strategic support without full-time cost. So clever - it was agile, lean and economically viable.
But Ivor had seen what it looked like behind the buzzwords.
“Flexibility?” he said. “Maybe. But what it really delivered was fragmentation.”
Because there was little onboarding and a high expectation to “hit the ground running,” which often led to no strategic challenge or alignment, high tactical overload, and still no true seat at the table, fractional marketers were basically running task lists and ticking clocks.
Fractional roles offered reach, but not roots. A wave of brilliant marketers doing brilliant work… often in complete isolation.
They weren’t building functions but filling gaps.
And Mary?
She was now a series of part-time outputs.
Not a voice. Not a leader. Not a strategist.
Just a deliverable.
Worse still, the title itself had also lost meaning.
“Anyone,” Ivor muttered, “can call themselves a Fractional CMO now.”
Again there’s no regulation or standard and no vetting.
Many had never led a marketing team or sat at the C-suite table. The majority had never carried P&L responsibility.
But the market didn’t ask. It rewarded loud voices and slick positioning.
The buzz was rife.But the credibility was thin.
Executives like Billy and Charlie were left wondering who to trust.
They had no time to trawl through claims, no patience for smoke and mirrors.
So they leaned back into what felt safest: a warm recommendation or a known entity.
Magnus noticed, and so did the hiring managers. That’s why the annoying little bot Ivor met earlier was built.
To filter and automate. To make it easier to say no at arm’s length than to risk being fooled.
What began as innovation in the hiring market became a gatekeeper that froze out even the most capable leaders, just because they didn’t look right on paper.
Marketing’s most promising comeback vehicle had become another credibility trap.
“If they can’t define their role,” Ivor said, “how can we expect the boardroom to trust them with a strategy?”
The Final Exhibit: The Smashed Mirror
The last item on the table wasn’t a case file. It was a mirror.
Cracked. Jagged. Stained with fingerprints.
Mary Marketing had been complicit.
She had let go of strategy, stopped fighting for the customer, chased dashboards over direction, and allowed her name and profession to be reduced to job titles she didn’t even recognise or understand.
And the broader marketing profession, institutions, and societies? They had all stood and watched it happen. Ivor was frustrated. He had listened to so many podcasts over the years, all trying to be “thought leaders” discussing the issue, but not one person had stepped forward to make a change before it was too late.
And now it felt like it was too late.
While the profession was high-fiving its intelligent observation of Mary’s demise, Ronnie, Billy, and the rest, who once relied on her, started to override her.
Charlie stopped asking for business cases, assuming she didn’t know how to build them.
Mary Marketing had not known how to fight back.
The Accidental Shot
Ivor stood at the head of the room.
The files were all closed now. The evidence stacked. The stories laid bare. He was tired.
He looked at each suspect who had played their part - the VC, CFO, CRO, CEO, the Institutions, Magnus, the AI bot. All of them left their fingerprints on the weapon.
But only one had picked it up and pulled the trigger.
He turned to the final file again.
Mary Marketing.
She hadn't meant to do it.
There was no note. No declaration. No clean shot. Just… a thousand tiny cuts - missteps, concessions and blind spots.
She had walked into the boardroom with her voice and left with a checklist.
She let go of strategy, and she clung to execution. She forgot the language of business.
She chased dashboards instead of direction, diluting her own role.
She changed her title to fit in and stopped demanding a seat at the table.
She hadn’t shot herself all at once. She shot herself in slow motion. One decision at a time.
“So… is she dead?” someone asked from the back of the room. The question hung in the air.
Even the heartless bot’s eyes flickered.
Ivor didn’t answer at first. He walked to the centre of the boardroom, where the symbolic outline of Mary’s body had been sketched in chalk.
He looked down at it.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, she’s dead.”
Ivor closed his notebook.
The case was over, but now it was time for the reckoning.
THE VERDICT
The air in the boardroom had gone still. No one moved. Not even the AI.
Ivor stood alone now, shoulders heavy, notebook closed, eyes tired. He looked across the table at the silent suspects, each one caught in the spotlight of truth.
He cleared his throat, not with triumph, but with gravity.
He read the names aloud, slowly, deliberately, as if carving them into the wall.
“Victor,” Venture Capitalist”, he began, eyes narrowing on the corner seat.
“You drained her of patience and replaced brand-building with blitz scaling. You demanded speed without skill.
You are guilty of short-termism, non-investment in people and skills and your brutal approach to growth at all costs.”
“Charlie, Chief Financial Officer.” he turned to the man in grey with the spreadsheet.
“You reduced marketing to line items. You cut the long-term to save the quarter.
You asked for ROI without understanding the 'I'.
You are guilty of reducing marketing to a cost and slashing it to the bone”
“Ronnie, Chief Revenue Officer. ” he faced the man with the sales charts and loud voice.
“You seized power that you didn’t understand. You mistook the brand for brochures, and you prioritised pipeline over positioning.
You are guilty of arrogance, short termism, and taking the reins without the map.”
“Billy, Chief Executive Officer.” Ivor finally looked at the one who had been silent nearly the whole time.
“You watched Mary drown and called it accountability. You let others take her voice because she couldn’t speak your language, and you traded strategic partnership for political convenience. You were her boss, and you let her down. You failed to develop her, invest in her, and champion her talent.
You are guilty of abdication and negligence.”
He turned to the back of the room. No faces there, just names.
The Professional Institutions.
“You called yourselves guardians. But you were too busy protecting tradition to protect her future. You let qualifications go stale. You mentored the elite and ignored the rising. You became museums instead of movements. And only focused on selling qualifications rather than standing tall for a profession in collapse.
You are guilty of irrelevance, greed and neglect”
He paused.
The final two suspects.
Ivor turned to the pair in the corner. Magnus, The Recruiter.
And his blinking, silent accomplice. The AI Bot pulsed, unbothered.
“You built the filters,” Ivor said, voice colder now.
“You let the algorithms decide what talent looked like.
You closed the door on the unconventional, the overqualified, the unbranded brilliance, and you rewarded keywords over competence. You were too busy automating to understand.”
He stepped forward, unwavering.
“You are guilty of laziness. Of ignorance. Of incompetence. Of filtering out an entire generation of marketers, many of whom could have solved the very crisis we’re in.”
He let the words hang before delivering the final blow.
“And Magnus,” he said, “I also charge you with the crime of ghosting.
Of offering hope, you had no intention of delivering. Of using people as pipeline and padding. Of vanishing when it mattered most. Of advertising false roles just to build your pipeline. You promised access. You delivered silence.”
I find you guilty of filtering out potential, ghosting the credible, and failing the future.”
And finally… the folder with no name. The chalk outline. The silent figure.
Ivor stepped forward, his voice soft now.
“Mary. You were bold once. Brilliant. Business-minded and brand-led. But you forgot who you were. You stopped fighting. You let the noise in. You stopped leading.
He looked around the room, daring someone, anyone, to challenge him.
“And then… you stopped mattering. You lost your voice. You lost your seat. You lost your strategy.”
He let the silence stretch, then delivered the final line with a blow.
“And now... you’re dead.”
No one moved.
Not the CFO.
Not the CRO.
Not the bot.
Because everyone in the room knew:
Mary didn’t die all at once. She bled out slowly.
And they had all stood by and watched.
Ivor closed the file. Slowly. Finally.
“This was never a whodunnit,” he said. “This was a system failure. And if you all don’t fix it, this won’t be fiction. It’ll be a prophecy.”
The room stayed silent.
Mary’s chair remained empty.
But outside the boardroom, a new sound was rising, faint but unmistakable:
The sound of marketers everywhere… quietly picking up their notebooks.
THE LESSON
In reality, marketing isn’t dead. But it’s not safe either.
It’s currently disoriented, fragmented, questioned, overridden and outsourced.
It’s a profession of brilliant minds doing shallow work.
Strategy has been replaced with noise, and leadership has been replaced without commercial influence.
And if nothing changes? If no one steps forward to stop the bleeding?
The next time, this won’t be a work of fiction. It will be our obituary.
For those new to marketing or still unsure - Marketing is not social media management, ampaign execution, or pretty visuals and pithy posts.
Marketing is:
The commercial translation of customer needs into business growth.
The strategic connection between insight, brand, product, pricing, and performance.
The heartbeat of relevance, demand, and differentiation.
And unless we reclaim it… Unless we relearn the skills… Unless we build marketing leaders who know the difference between noise and narrative, we’ll keep looking for suspects and never see the reflection staring back.
But there is hope.
If Mary Marketing’s downfall was self-inflicted… Her comeback can be self-initiated.
We can remember that the next era of marketing isn’t about reinvention. It’s about restoration.
Bringing back strategic thinking, commercial fluency, and customer obsession. And building a profession that knows what it is and what it stands for.
The final case is closed. The lesson is clear. Now the question is:
Who is ready to bring Mary Marketing back to life?
Come and Join The Marketing Revolution.
Lost Your Influence? It’s Time to Fight Back.
If Mary’s story feels uncomfortably familiar...
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