Considering the huge diagnostic leap forward, why hasn’t Marketing found the solution yet?

In the most serious professions, discipline compounds over time.

Medicine has centuries of accumulated clinical knowledge. Each generation of practitioners inherits a more precise understanding of the human body than the last. Diagnosis improves. Outcomes improve. The discipline moves forward at a pace dictated by the people of that profession.

Law operates the same way. Precedent builds on precedent. Methodologies sharpen. The standards of evidence, argumentation, and professional conduct become more exacting with each passing decade.

Policing, engineering, architecture, and finance — each follows the same trajectory. Methods are tested, refined, and passed forward. The profession, as a whole, becomes more capable than the generation that preceded it.

Marketing has been a serious commercial discipline for over a century. It has access to more data than any of those professions could have imagined at their inception. It has technology that can track human behaviour in real time, at scale, across every channel a consumer touches. And that’s without the outstanding contributions from AI.

So why isn't the success rate higher?

The Marketing Problem

The success rate issue is not a rhetorical question. It deserves a direct answer.

Every other evidence-based discipline benefits from what might be called compound rigour—the accumulation of tested knowledge in stable, transferable frameworks. A cardiologist in Bucharest and a cardiologist in London share a body of diagnostic certainty that transcends geography, culture, and individual style. The fundamentals hold.

Marketing has never achieved this level of clarity.

The discipline has failed to distinguish between what it knows and what it believes, although its people are capable. There is a clear distinction between what the data confirms and what the practitioner prefers. There is a difference between genuine insight and a well-presented assumption.

The result is a profession that continuously relearns the same lessons, repeatedly, at high cost.

What Other Disciplines Understood Early

Medicine did not become reliable by accumulating more doctors. It became reliable by insisting on methodology — controlled testing, peer review, documented outcomes, and the willingness to discard approaches that did not work, regardless of how intuitive they felt.

The law did not become consistent by producing more lawyers. It became consistent by building structures that forced reasoning to be explicit, challenging, and accountable to evidence.

The common thread is not intelligence or effort. It is the institutionalisation of diagnostic discipline— the professional obligation to understand the problem precisely before acting on it.

Marketing has the data to do this work. But for some reason, it appears not to have a culture.

Why Activity Replaced Diagnosis

The conditions under which modern marketing operates are not conducive to discipline.

Campaigns are launched quickly. Reporting cycles are short. Optimisations are continuous. The pressure to produce visible output is constant, and in most organisations, it arrives quicker than genuine understanding can.

In this environment, activity becomes a proxy for progress. Spend increases. Creative refreshes. Channels multiply. And performance, in many cases, remains stubbornly flat—because the underlying problem has not been correctly identified. This is not a resourcing issue. It is a structural one.

When speed is the primary operating value, diagnosis becomes a luxury. And when a diagnosis is a luxury, organisations spend considerable effort solving the wrong problems more efficiently.

The Variable That Other Disciplines Don't Face

There is a legitimate complication that medicine and law do not contend with in the same way.

At scale, human behaviour is not stable. Consumer psychology shifts. Culture moves. Competitive landscapes reconfigure. A method might fail in a new context, not due to its inherent flaws, but because the conditions rapidly changed. Market segmentation, clustering and profiling are excellent methodologies, but they are highly dynamic. The phenomenon is real. And it matters.

But it does not fully explain the gap. Because other disciplines face instability too. Pathogens evolve. Legal environments change. New technologies disrupt established frameworks across every field.

The difference is that these disciplines address instability through methodology. They update the framework. They document what changed and why. They build institutional knowledge that survives the individual practitioner.

Marketing tends to meet instability with a new campaign, at least in Romania.

What a Higher Standard Would Require

For marketing to close the gap—to move from a discipline of activity to a discipline of compound knowledge— several things would need to change.

Diagnosis would need to precede action, consistently and without exception. This approach should not be viewed as a theoretical commitment but rather as an operational standard. The question of what is actually causing the problem would carry more weight than the question of what we should do next.

Failure would need to be documented and shared, not quietly filed away. The professions that improve do so because practitioners learn from each other's outcomes, including the unsuccessful ones.

Marketing's institutional knowledge remains largely trapped inside individual organisations, often departing with the people who hold it. Success must be defined before campaigns launch, not retrofitted around whatever the results show.

The Question That Remains

A century of practice. Unprecedented access to data. The sophisticated tooling available today is beyond the imagination of previous generations of practitioners.

And yet the success rate across the discipline remains, at best, inconsistent. The honest answer as to why that is remains a mystery to me.

In my opinion, marketing has yet to hold itself to the same standard of diagnostic discipline that other influential disciplines consider non-negotiable. The data exists. The intelligence exists. The capability exists.

What has been missing is the professional obligation to use them with the same discipline that medicine uses as a differential diagnosis or that law uses as a burden of proof.

Until that changes, marketing will never achieve the recognition or the greatness it deserves.

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About the Author

Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.

Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.