The product is already defined. The market is assumed. The sales direction is agreed. And then someone turns to marketing and says: can you just make this visible?
It feels efficient. It rarely is.
Because when marketing enters late, it stops being a commercial discipline and becomes a communication function. A promo department with a decent budget.
This is older than you think
Part of the confusion comes from history.
Promotion has been around for centuries. Signs, ads, trade fairs, billboards. Nobody called that marketing, because it wasn't. It was advertising.
Marketing as a discipline is much younger. It showed up in the early 1900s, when companies and universities started looking at markets systematically. Not just how to promote a product, but how to define a market, read demand, set a price, build distribution. In other words, marketing started out much closer to business strategy than to communication.
That shift got sharper in the 1950s with what is called the marketing concept: start with the market, not the product. Understand the demand first, then build and sell into it.
Which is a nice story, and most companies would nod along to it. But the practical setup in many industrial tech companies still says something else entirely.
Two ways to run it
Step 0 thinking, market first
Define where we play. Define who actually buys and why. Define how value is created and captured. Then build messaging, sales motion and campaigns on top of that.
Step 3 thinking, execution first
The product is defined. The sales strategy is assumed. Then marketing is asked to communicate it.
In a step 3 setup, marketing sits downstream. It reacts to decisions taken somewhere else. In a step 0 setup, marketing is in the room while those decisions get made.
Most industrial tech companies say they want the second one. Most organisational setups keep forcing the first.
Why it shows up more in industrial tech
In software companies, marketing usually sits close to product and data. A CRM, product analytics, a marketing automation platform: those tools quietly force the positioning, the demand generation and the sales execution to line up, because they all feed the same system.
In industrial tech the distance is longer. Engineering, then product, then sales, then marketing.
That sequence works brilliantly for delivery. It also creates a gap in commercial logic, because by the time marketing gets a seat, the market definition is already locked in. And it is usually far too broad.
That is how you end up describing yourself as being in the "energy market", serving "industrial customers", or targeting "manufacturing companies".
Useful internally. Almost meaningless commercially.
What it costs
When marketing is structurally placed late in the chain, three things tend to happen.
Positioning goes generic, because it has to fit assumptions that were never going to be questioned.
Sales narratives drift, because there is no shared market definition to anchor them, so every senior person tells the story their own way.
Execution turns tactical, because strategy is considered finished and nobody is allowed to reopen it.
None of that arrives as an invoice. It shows up as a lot of activity with limited focus, and a team that works hard and can't quite point to what it moved.
One level earlier
The fix isn't better campaigns. It's starting one level before them.
Where do we actually compete. Which segments behave differently enough to be treated separately. Where is value really created and captured. And just as importantly: where are we deliberately not competing.
Answer those and marketing becomes effective in the ordinary sense, because now it has something to be about. Skip them and you are back to promoting into a market you have never actually defined.
The shift
Moving from step 3 marketing to step 0 thinking isn't a marketing upgrade. It's a commercial redefinition of how the business sees its own market.
Once that's in place, everything downstream, the messaging, the sales execution, the demand generation, gets simpler. Not easier. Clearer.
Because clarity in markets is rarely about doing more. It's about deciding less, but better.
If this feels familiar
If marketing in your company usually starts after everything else has been decided, you are not dealing with an execution problem. You are dealing with a market definition problem.
That is the work I do: Step 0, before the branding and the campaigns. If you'd rather talk it through than read about it, get in touch.