As marketers, we all say we care about the customer.
We talk about customer journeys.
We obsess over funnels.
We sprinkle “customer-centric marketing” into decks like confetti.
But if we’re honest, a lot of our day is spent serving everyone except the actual customer.
Sales wants another landing page. A VP needs a deck “by tomorrow.” A business unit head is “really excited” about a feature nobody asked for. Legal wants three more caveats on the one line that actually pops.
Meanwhile, the people who might actually buy what we sell barely feel our work at all.
This is the quiet crisis at the heart of modern marketing.
And if we don’t fix it, we have zero chance of standing out in a world drowning in AI-generated slop and mediocre content.
Let’s talk about what happens when we lose the customer, how to get them back, and how Agile ways of working can protect truly customer-centric marketing.
I’ve coached a lot of marketing teams. Very few will admit, “We’re not customer-centric.” It’s not a good look these days.
So instead of asking, I look for symptoms.
Here’s what it looks and feels like when marketers have lost connection with their real customers.
When you’re doing real customer-centric marketing, you feel it. You’re energized. You care how that email lands. You’re curious about the data. You’re excited to ship and learn.
When you’re buried under internal requests that have nothing to do with customer needs, that joy disappears. Work becomes “stuff.”
The output gets flat and boring. And in modern marketing, boring is the same as invisible.
We are in a bare-knuckle brawl for attention.
If your work is “fine,” you’ve already lost.
Burned-out marketers who hate their jobs don’t create remarkable campaigns. They survive their inbox.
When we’re overrun by internal demands, our work stops reflecting the customer and starts reflecting the organization.
We create collateral that says:
Instead of:
Our work becomes an internal mirror – “Look how great we are!” – instead of a window into the customer’s world.
That’s how you end up with brand-safe, legal-approved, AI-assisted mush that no human remembers five seconds after they see it.
By the way, yes, Gen AI is a powerful tool. Use it. But it will not save you from bad priorities.
You cannot outsource genuine insight, empathy, and creative judgment to a model.
Customer-centric marketing still requires human marketers who are connected to…well, humans.
When marketing becomes an order-taking service, relationships suffer.
Suddenly it’s a tug-of-war: Their request vs. your priorities. Their timeline vs. your capacity.
You end up arguing about whose work “wins” instead of collaborating to create value for the customer.
And here’s the saddest part: in the chaos, you lose all the organic opportunities for reuse, smart sequencing, shared campaigns, and real cross-functional wins.
Everyone’s just lobbing requests over the wall.
Nobody is stepping back and asking, “What does the customer need from us right now?”
If all of this sounds uncomfortably familiar, I want you to hold onto one phrase:
If you can’t fix it, make it visible.
This is one of my favorite Agile coaching mantras, and it’s the starting point for reclaiming customer-centric marketing.
You can’t change what people don’t see. And right now, most organizations have no idea how much of marketing’s time is consumed by internal, non-customer work.
The simplest and most powerful tool here is a visual work board – usually Kanban-style.
On that board, every piece of work becomes a card. Then you tag or color-code each card based on who the work is for:
In a perfect world, the color that represents customer-centric work dominates the board. That’s how you know your capacity is pointed at the right target.
In the real world? I often see the opposite.
Wall-to-wall purple for internal projects. A sad little cluster of customer-focused yellow in the corner.
That’s your conversation starter.
Once the work is visible, you can bring it to leadership. Not as a rant. Not as a complaint. As neutral data.
For example:
“Right now, about 40% of our work is supporting internal business units, as you can see from these purple cards. That’s delaying the campaign that underpins our Q3 revenue targets. Those are the yellow cards here. Does this mix reflect our actual priorities as an organization?”
You’re not blaming. You’re not whining. You’re inviting a grown-up conversation about tradeoffs.
Visualized work turns “marketing is overwhelmed” into, “Here’s how our current demand profile is slowing down customer-centric marketing and business outcomes.”
That lands very differently.
Now let’s get clear on something foundational to customer-centric marketing: who actually counts as “the customer.”
Strictly speaking, your customer is:
Those are the people we exist to serve.
But in larger organizations, a lot of internal groups start acting like customers. And we start treating them as such, often without realizing it.
Here are four common “customer proxies” that are not actually your customer.
Sales is a critical partner for marketing. They’re on the front lines with prospects and customers. They have valuable insight.
But they are not the customer.
Their feedback should absolutely inform your customer-centric marketing. Their input should shape your backlog.
What you can’t do is let all of marketing’s attention collapse around what sales wants this week.
If what sales wants and what the customer needs conflict, the customer wins. Full stop.
If you’re in software, product often thinks of themselves as your primary customer. If you’re in financial services, pharma, or other complex industries, individual business units can play a similar role.
They built the thing. They’re excited about the thing. They strongly believe the thing is amazing.
That doesn’t make them your customer.
Marketing should be the neutral party between product and end users. We didn’t build the feature; we’re not the end user. That gives us a unique vantage point.
Our job is to translate, prioritize, and sometimes say, “I know we’re excited internally, but this doesn’t align with what our customers are asking for.”
Collaborators? Absolutely. Final authority on messaging and go-to-market? No.
This one is touchy, but it needs to be said:
Executives are not your customer.
You might need their buy-in. You definitely need their support. But their last-minute slide requests and pet projects shouldn’t override everything your team is doing.
You’ve probably run into the HIPPO effect: Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.
“If the CMO likes yellow, make everything yellow.”
“If the VP wants this report, everything else stops.”
That’s not customer-centric marketing. That’s ego-centric marketing.
Again, this is where visible work and clear priorities help. You can say:
“We can absolutely take on this deck, but it will displace one of these planned customer campaigns. Which one are you most comfortable delaying?”
You’re not refusing. You’re surfacing tradeoffs.
Legal and compliance play a vital role. They keep you from getting sued. That’s…kind of important.
But they are gatekeepers, not message architects.
If legal and compliance dictate your voice, you end up with risk-free, emotion-free, impact-free content. And in a crowded, noisy market, “legally airtight but forgettable” is a losing strategy.
Customer-centric marketing is about balancing:
Your job is to walk that line—and push back when needed.
So how do you stop being a 24/7 internal request machine and move back toward true customer-centric marketing?
Here are two practical tools you can use.
Your backlog is the engine of Agile marketing – and the backbone of customer-centric work.
It’s not just a to-do list. It’s:
Ideally, at the quarterly level, your backlog ladders to 3–5 big priorities or OKRs:
When someone brings you a new request – “We need a landing page for this one-off event,” or “Can you spin up a quick email?” – you have a simple response:
“Thanks for bringing this. Which of our current priorities does it support?”
If it clearly ladders up, great. You add it, prioritize it, and maybe bump something of lower value.
If it doesn’t, you say:
“This is important, but it’s not more important than our agreed customer-focused priorities. We’ll put it in the backlog, but we won’t start it until higher-priority work is done.”
That’s not you being difficult. That’s you being disciplined.
Backlogs make the cost of “just one more thing” visible – and help you keep customer-centric marketing at the top of the list.
The second tool is more about people than process: a heat shield manager.
This is the leader who stands between the team and the chaos.
If you have one of these leaders, treasure them. Send them this post. Let them know how much their protection enables better marketing.
If you don’t have a heat shield, your next-best option is to become one – for yourself and for your team.
That doesn’t mean you slam the door on every request. It means you:
One simple phrase can change your day:
“Yes…and not right now.”
You’re not the “no” team. You’re the “focused on what matters most for our customers” team.
Customer-centric marketing isn’t a feel-good slogan. It’s a survival strategy.
There is more content than ever. More tools than ever. More AI than ever.
The only teams that will break through are the ones who:
That’s what makes marketing matter in the organization.
You are not “the people who make pretty things.” You are:
But you can’t do any of that if your day is consumed by internal noise.
So make the work visible. Clarify who your customer really is. Stop treating every internal stakeholder like they’re the center of your universe.
You do important work. You deserve respect. And your customers deserve your best – not whatever scraps of energy are left after everyone else has had their turn.