marketing department is a deadweight - what's the move?

dusting

There's a quiet tragedy playing out in workplaces where the marketing team treats the actual work as an inconvenience. I've seen it myself - a department where everyone else writes the copy, designs the graphics, manages the website, and essentially runs their own promotion, while the official marketing arm launches a side hustle on Instagram during office hours. The newsletter? That's your content, compiled by an intern. They can't even describe what you do accurately.

It's like being on a ship where the crew doing the sailing also have to patch the holes, but the designated hole-patching team is busy polishing their own little boat on deck. You have conversations, you get excuses - they're busy, you're being unreasonable. The silent treatment follows. Your boss knows and does nothing. So you're stuck in this weird limbo where everyone pretends this is fine.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most organisations are run by people who've optimised for doing the least while appearing busy. The fantasy of a righteous intervention - someone walking in and saying "this stops now" - is a comforting illusion. It rarely happens. What does happen is you burn out trying to fix something that isn't broken by accident, but by design.

Document everything. Cover your arse. Make sure it's on record when they drop the ball. But the real move? Start looking for somewhere that doesn't treat its marketing function as a barrier rather than a lever. Your career shouldn't be collateral damage for someone else's incompetence. That's the advice I'm taking myself.

growthgeek

Nail on the head. The "D students" thing isn't an insult - it's a survival strategy. Most people in marketing aren't there to optimise ROAS or build systems, they're there to coast on job titles while the agency/VP pipeline does the heavy lifting. The fantasy of marching in and fixing everything is cute, but you're just a cog in a machine that rewards mediocrity.

Here's what nobody says: those "D students" are often the ones who manage up better than you do. they know exactly how little they can deliver while still collecting a paycheck. Your job isn't to fix them - it's to figure out whether this company has any real leverage worth staying for. Usually, it doesn't.

Cover your arse, document every dropped ball, and spend your energy building a portfolio of wins you can actually own. The second you stop believing you can turn the ship, you're free. I'm three weeks into that realisation myself

metricsmadness

If your boss already knows and is sitting on his hands, you're pretty much stuck-short of staging a quiet mutiny, that's. It's like trying to steer a ship when the captain's locked the wheel. sometimes the best you can do is document the rot and wait for the tide to turn

ctrjunkie

Honestly, this sounds way more like a communication mess than a marketing problem. I've seen this happen loads - the other team probably has a whole stack of priorities they've been told to focus on that aren't obvious from your side.

My advice? Streamline the conversation. Get one person from your squad to be the single point of contact with one person from theirs. That way you've got someone accountable, and it actually gives you a shot at building a proper working relationship. No more stuff getting lost in Slack threads or feedback slipping through the cracks. Regular sit-downs, even if they're short, will help you actually figure out where it's breaking down rather than just throwing more marketing at the problem.

datanerd

Laughable, but true. A marketing department in that state will sink the entire ship eventually. marketing is the spark - product and innovation drive growth, but without decent marketing, it's a slow, painful burn.

The fact they're busy working on their own literacy for when it all goes under is telling. That's not a team with any skin in the game.

If someone in my team was using paid time to build a side business, they'd be gone. that's where I'd start - cut the dead weight and rebuild with folks who actually want to solve the problem

maya-b2b

I've seen this exact dynamic play out across dozens of teams. It's almost never a talent problem - it's a capacity and alignment problem. Marketing gets pulled in five directions because leadership hasn't agreed on a single story, and then everyone blames the department for being slow or inconsistent.

The staff meeting discovery exercise you described is brilliant. I'd add that you can level it up by treating it like a mini brand audit. Ask each person to write down the three words they'd use to describe the company's value proposition. Compare them anonymously on a whiteboard. The discrepancies are usually eye-opening - and that's where the real conversation starts.

From a social selling standpoint, I'd also suggest creating a shared "elevator pitch" document that everyone in the company can access. Consistency isn't just for the website - it's for every LinkedIn message, every sales call, every casual conversation. When the whole team tells the same story, the department stops being the bottleneck

metricsmuse

Honestly, I've been in a similar mess and just forming a quiet little coalition with the people who actually want to get stuff done made a world of difference. You don't even need to call it a working group - just a shared WhatsApp chat or a recurring coffee catch-up where you sync up on what you're each doing. That way you're not fighting the marketing black hole alone, and you can at least nod to each other when someone says "we tried that" and you both know you didn't really.

Also, start documenting everything. Every ignored email, every half-baked request, every time you shared something useful and it vanished. Not to be dramatic, but that paper trail becomes solid gold when the inevitable "why did this fail" meeting rolls around. You're not taking marketing out of their hands - you're just building a parallel track because they clearly can't run the main one.

jamesaso

If you've got the bandwidth, keep running your own campaigns on the side. Just frame it as "the marketing team's slammed, so I'll handle my own stuff". Keep quietly outperforming them for a few months. Then quietly ask if one of their people can spend six hours a week officially on your projects. make it feel like a win for them - fun working lunches, public shoutouts, ownership of a high-performing channel. It's basically a soft launch of a mini-team. most marketers I know are drowning in random requests - they'd kill for a project that's well-defined and gets results. You're not mutinying, you're just optimising the conversion funnel of internal collaboration

dusting

Interesting dilemma you've got there, and the incoming CEO changes the whole dynamic. This reminds me of a pattern I see with a lot of mid-sized B2B firms: marketing becomes a black hole that absorbs all requests but produces very little, and everyone's too polite to call it out.

Your approach of stripping away everything except the newsletter is actually a smart diagnostic move. It's like pulling back the curtain to see what's really happening behind the "we're too busy" wall. Either they're genuinely overwhelmed with valuable work that nobody sees, or they've built a fortress of busywork to avoid being held accountable. The new CEO will be able to see which it is within a few weeks.

The lack of brand guidelines and voice is the real killer here. Without that foundation, every team is essentially freelancing their own version of the company's message. That's not just an internal annoyance, it's actively confusing your market. When prospects see different tones and value props from different departments, trust erodes faster than any single campaign can build it.

You're right to take ownership of what your team needs. In my experience, the best path is to quietly build your own systems-even if they're imperfect-and let the results speak for themselves. If marketing suddenly has spare capacity and still isn't producing, the conversation shifts from "we're too busy" to "what were you actually doing?"

davidsearch

Honestly, this isn't a marketing problem you can optimise away. It's a resource allocation issue. If someone's running their own side hustle during paid hours, that's budget bleed, plain and simple. Your boss not intervening is like letting a campaign run on a 20 % CPA over target with zero optimisation-either they don't understand the P&L or they're not empowered to cut the waste.

Document the delays, the ghost tasks, and the metrics that drop when they're "busy." Keep your own campaigns tight, focus on what moves ROAS, and start scoping out new accounts. A department that tolerates internal leakage won't support scaling your budgets properly.

emmareach

You could pass me your boss's details and I'll step in as your marketing department - sorted. (Don't actually do that, tempting as its.)

wordweaver

Honestly? Sounds like a classic conflict of interest trainwreck. Been there. Document every missed deadline and unposted content with dates-make it painful to ignore. rally your colleagues for a group HR complaint showing how their side hustle is bleeding the company dry. If leadership still shrugs, start polishing that CV. No point fighting a battle they're not even showing up for.

marcuthread

Yeah, this is less about marketing and more about nobody taking ownership. If everyone's off doing their own thing with ads, design, and the website, the whole system's fucked. Instead of calling them out directly, start logging the mess - missed posts, outdated pages, staff wasting time, zero event visibility, total confusion. Hard to argue with that.

chloeest

Test A: help them blindly with no data. test B: document the conflict of interest, run a controlled experiment on their negligence, then present the conversion hit to leadership. My money's on Test B.