We’ve all seen it. Marketing launches a high-gloss campaign promising the world, the leads pour in, and then the CX team is left holding the bag when the actual product experience doesn’t match the hype. From a customer’s perspective, the brand feels like it has a split personality.
If we want to influence our marketing colleagues, we have to stop just pointing out the friction and start providing a roadmap to fix it. When you look through a customer’s eyes, a lot of traditional marketing tactics don’t just feel intrusive—they feel nonsensical.
Here is how we, as CX professionals, can help marketing teams pivot toward a strategy that actually respects the customer journey.
Stop Thinking in Campaigns, Start Thinking in Continuums
Marketing teams are often trapped in a cycle of “starts” and “stops.” They have a Q1 push, a holiday promotion, or a product launch. But for the person buying from you, there is no “start” or “stop.” There is only their experience with the brand.
When marketing operates in a vacuum, they create “broken” journeys. A customer sees an ad for a feature that’s still in beta, or worse, a loyal subscriber gets bombarded with “new customer only” discounts. To a CX professional, this is a glaring red flag. To a marketer chasing a monthly conversion goal, it’s just a line item.
We need to push marketing to adopt a framework to structure their campaigns that accounts for the post-purchase reality. If a campaign is going to generate a 20% spike in support tickets because the messaging is vague, that campaign isn’t a success, it’s a failure in coordination.
When Marketing Amplifies the Breakdown
In 2018, TSB Bank in the UK experienced a catastrophic IT migration failure after separating from Lloyds Banking Group and being acquired by Banco Sabadell. Millions of customers suddenly couldn’t access their accounts.
The technical failure was the trigger. But what amplified the crisis was continuity of promotion.
While systems were unstable, marketing communications and product messaging continued. Customers were still being encouraged to log in, switch accounts, explore features. That “business as usual” signal drove even more traffic into a broken experience.
Support lines were overwhelmed. Complaints surged into the hundreds of thousands. TSB crashed to the bottom of banking customer service polls.
The issue wasn’t that marketing caused the outage. It’s that marketing noise continued while delivery capacity had collapsed.
From the customer’s perspective, the brand wasn’t just failing. It was shouting promises into a void.
That is what misalignment looks like in real money.
The Data Disconnect: Moving Beyond Clicks
The biggest barrier to alignment is usually data. Marketing lives in the world of Attribution Models and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). We live in the world of Customer Effort Score and Sentiment Analysis.
To influence the marketing agenda, we have to translate our “pain points” into “profit points.” When we show that a specific marketing message is driving churn or increasing service costs, we’re giving them the intel they need to optimize their spend.
It’s about moving them away from the “click” and toward “retention.” A marketer who understands that an honest, clear message reduces churn is a marketer who becomes a CX ally. We should be inviting them into our world—showing them the actual transcripts and recordings where customers express confusion over a specific ad. Real human feedback is a much better teacher than a spreadsheet.
Consistency as a Competitive Advantage
There is a massive opportunity for marketing to move from being “noise” to being “value.” The article that inspired this shift points out a fundamental truth: looking through the customer’s eyes makes most marketing feel like a nuisance.
Why? Because it’s often inconsistent. The tone of the email doesn’t match the tone of the support agent. The promise in the brochure doesn’t match the reality of the software.
As CX professionals, we are the guardians of consistency. We should be helping marketing develop an integrated approach where the “brand promise” is something we can actually deliver on. When we align the “shouting” (marketing) with the “doing” (CX), the customer doesn’t feel like they’re being sold to: they feel like they’re being supported.
Taking the Lead
Ultimately, marketing teams want the same thing we do: a brand that people love. But they are often incentivized to focus on the short-term win.
Our job is to provide the long-term vision. By introducing a more structured way of looking at the customer lifecycle, we can help them move away from “campaign madness” and toward a sustainable growth model. It’s not about telling them what to do; it’s about showing them a better way to achieve the results they’re already chasing.
When marketing and CX finally start looking through the same lens, the results aren’t just “better”: they actually make sense to the customer.