Tactical skills are important. But marketers who invest in building trust, access and influence with stakeholders deliver compounding value, says WPR’s James Chen.
Marketing has become depressingly tactical. We send eDMs that resemble digital junk mail, obsess over social content with declining engagement and present reports full of “awareness” metrics that bear little relationship to revenue. Dashboards look impressive. The P&L often tells a different story.
In 2018, Philip Kotler updated his definition of marketing as: “The process by which companies engage customers, build strong customer relationships and create customer value in order to capture value from customers in return.” The key words are engage, relationships and value. They are deceptively simple – and increasingly neglected.
Execution has never been easier. AI helps us ideate faster, write faster, analyse faster. Campaigns that once required serious agency budgets can now be produced in-house at a fraction of the cost. Data flows constantly, giving us measurable outputs and quick dopamine hits that suggest progress.
But when a modern marketing role spans writing, design, coding, analytics, PR, paid media, social and web management, something inevitably gives. More often than not, it is relationship depth. When everyone is responsible for everything, no one is responsible for stakeholder strength.
It’s a commercial risk, masked by output.
One of the most underused frameworks in marketing is the ‘six markets model’: customers, internal markets, referral markets, supplier and alliance markets, influence markets and recruitment markets.
Most businesses fixate on customer acquisition, maybe retention if they are disciplined, and treat the other five as someone else’s problem.
What the other five markets are for
Internal relationships determine whether strategy survives contact with reality. If your people do not believe in the brand or understand its direction, no campaign will compensate.
Supplier relationships matter more than most marketers like to admit. When timelines slip or costs rise, strong relationships create flexibility that transactional arrangements do not.
Referral markets – particularly non-customer referrals such as professional partnerships and reciprocal alliances – can drive revenue without additional media spend.
Influence markets – including industry bodies, media, regulators and shareholders – shape your operating environment long before a consumer sees an advertisement.
Recruitment markets determine whether you can attract and retain people capable of delivering the strategy in the first place.
This isn’t theory or academic puffery. It’s designed to drive commercial decisions.
For younger marketers entering the profession with exceptional technical capability, the risk is assuming that output equals impact. Tactical excellence matters. Being able to ship work quickly, iterate based on data and produce polished content is valuable. But without stakeholder thinking, it limits your ceiling.
The marketers who progress are those who understand how decisions are shaped inside organisations and industries, not just how content performs. Learn who holds influence. Understand competing priorities from their perspective. Build relationships before you need them, because when budgets tighten or priorities shift, tactical skill alone will not protect your strategy.
Articulate the value
For experienced marketers, relationship marketing will feel familiar. Many built their careers on it.
The shift required now is not rediscovery, but articulation. Relationships must be linked clearly to revenue growth, cost management, risk mitigation or talent acquisition. If their commercial contribution cannot be explained, they are too easily dismissed as “soft”. A coffee with a potential partner only matters if you can explain what it unlocked. An industry membership only matters if it shaped an outcome. A professional network only matters if it improves the quality of hires or reduces cost to serve.
If you want to test whether your marketing function is genuinely strategic, conduct a simple exercise. Map the six stakeholder markets and list the key groups or individuals within each. Score the strength of each relationship on a scale from one to five. Then answer three questions: how does this relationship increase value, how does it reduce risk, and what would a genuinely strong version of this relationship make possible for the organisation?
If you cannot answer those questions clearly, the relationship is transactional, not strategic.
Pick a relationship to improve
Assign ownership. Relationships that belong to “everyone” typically belong to no one. Then deliberately invest in at least one non-customer stakeholder group over the next quarter.
That might mean formalising a referral partnership, strengthening dialogue with an industry body, collaborating more closely with recruitment or addressing an internal credibility gap. None of these actions will produce an immediate spike in impressions. All of them compound in value.
Not everything that matters shows up in a dashboard.
AI will continue to compress the cost of execution. It will not compress the value of trust, access and influence. As content becomes easier to produce, relationship leverage becomes the differentiator. Marketing was never meant to be the Canva department. It was meant to engage stakeholders, build relationships and create value. Marketers who remember that will not only run campaigns more efficiently, they’ll build more resilient and commercially effective organisations.
This article was part of our colouring-in cover story in the March-May 2026 issue. You can read the rest of the series here:
- Marketing: What’s compelling and what’s colouring-in?
- Why marketing needs a wider lens
- Future Demand: exclusive extract from James Hurman’s new book
This story comes from NZ Marketing magazine issue 86, March-May 2026. Why not subscribe? Get four issues a year for just $50 (including delivery) if you autorenew.
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