The marketing vs communications debate feels like a question about job titles. It is actually a question about whether your organisation has a single coherent story – or two parallel stories that happen to share a name.
Most organisations that separate marketing and communications into distinct functions do so with good intentions and sound logic. The result is almost always a fragmented message that neither function can fix from inside the structure that created it.
Why the marketing vs communications separation feels logical but breaks your message
The logic is not unreasonable.
Marketing is commercial – demand, buyers, conversion, pipeline. Communications is reputational – narrative, stakeholders, perception, trust. Different orientations, different outputs, different audiences. So two separate functions, two separate briefs, two separate hires.
The problem is what happens next.
The organisation ends up with two versions of itself. The marketing version speaks to buyers in the language of benefit and value. The communications version speaks to stakeholders in the language of mission and credibility. Neither version is wrong. Both are the result of a unified message that was never built.
By the time the first campaign launches, two different versions of the organisation are already competing for the same audience’s attention – and neither team knows the other version exists, because each was briefed from a different premise about what the organisation is.
What buyers experience when the marketing vs communications story is split
A buyer reads a press piece about the organisation and then visits the website.
A prospect hears the organisation described at a conference and then sees a paid ad. A donor reads the annual report and then receives a fundraising appeal email.
In each case, they are meeting two entities that happen to share a name. The language shifts. The emphasis shifts. The sense of what the organisation fundamentally is changes depending on which door the buyer walked through.
This is not a campaign problem. It is not a creative problem. It is a structural problem built into the organisation before either team wrote a word – and it surfaces in the data as inconsistent conversion, marketing that works in some channels but not others, and buyers who need more convincing than the quality of the offer should require.
The organisation cannot fix it by briefing either function better. Both functions are executing correctly from the brief they were given. The problem is that the briefs were built on two different versions of the same story.
Why fragmented messaging is almost always misdiagnosed
The symptom is never “our marketing and communications are misaligned.”
The symptom is more diffuse and harder to name. The marketing is running but not building anything cumulative. The brand feels established but buyers still need significant convincing. The organisation has strong presence in some conversations and is invisible in others. Senior leaders feel the story does not quite match the commercial reality, but cannot put their finger on exactly where the gap is.
These are the signals of a unified message that was never established. The downstream result is almost always marketing spend that produces activity but not the commercial return it was designed for. It also produces exactly the kind of positioning problem that is hardest to diagnose because it looks like an execution failure.
The hiring decision that separated marketing from communications did not create two aligned functions working in parallel. It created two separate premises about what the organisation is – and left both functions to execute from their own version of it.
The one question most organisations skip before separating the two functions
Before the decision is made about whether to hire for marketing, for communications, or for both, there is a more fundamental question worth answering first.
What is the organisation actually saying?
Not the tagline. Not the mission statement from three years ago that has been quietly amended every time someone new joined the leadership team. Not the elevator pitch that changes depending on who is in the room.
The actual, examined, agreed answer to: who are we, who do we serve, what do we offer that no one else offers in quite the same way, and what should every person who encounters this organisation – through a campaign, a press piece, a conference conversation, a fundraising email – understand and feel?
When that answer exists and is held clearly, the marketing vs communications structural question becomes almost procedural. Both functions draw from the same source. A buyer who encounters the organisation through either route meets the same entity.
When it does not exist, the hiring decision does not solve the problem. It structures it. Two functions are now each managing their own version of an uncertainty that was never resolved. Every brief produced from that point encodes the uncertainty deeper into the organisation’s infrastructure.
If your marketing and communications are telling different stories
The fix is not to merge the two functions.
It is to establish the message before either function is fully briefed. What does the organisation stand for? Who is it for? What problem does it solve that no one else solves in quite the same way? What should every person understand and feel regardless of which version of the organisation they first encountered?
When those questions are answered with specificity and held consistently, both functions have something real to build from. The organisation stops presenting two versions of itself and starts presenting one – in every room, through every channel, to every audience.
That work belongs upstream of both functions. It is where the Strategic Direction Review starts – before the briefs are written and before the fragmentation gets built into another year of activity.
Find out whether your organisation has a unified story to build from
