Today’s episode of Two by Two is about how the marketing function has been eating itself from the inside.

Historically, in companies, marketing has always been about the long term, while a function like sales was about the near term. Marketing owned the customer—what they wanted, their dreams, their fears, and their vanities. It was supposed to tell stories of customers back to the organisation and, in return, tell stories of the company back to customers.

Today, in company after company, the marketing function has been getting sliced away, cut into parts and becoming something else altogether.

Marketing is eating itself from the inside. To discuss what changed, we had two wonderful guests: one who has been teaching marketing for decades and one who has been practising it for decades. Our first guest is Professor YLR Moorthi, who teaches marketing, brand management, and marketing strategy at IIM Bangalore. These days, Professor Moorthi’s work is focused on the impact of branding in different domains like IT and B2B marketing.

Our second guest is Deepali Naair, who is currently the group CMO of CK Birla Group. She’s had a long career in marketing across varied functions as CMO for India and South Asia at IBM, and prior to that, she was CMO at IIFL and Mahindra Holidays.

In this episode, the hosts ask two simple questions: Why is marketing dying, and how can we bring it back?

Welcome to Two by Two.

We published the full, subscriber-version of this on 28th November. It ran an hour and ten minutes. Today, we’re carrying a tightly edited 30-minute version of the same episode. We’ve tried to ensure that you get all the key parts of the full conversation in a tighter format.

If you’d like to listen to the full version, including all the meandering side conversations, banter and background, I’d urge you to become a subscriber. You can subscribe to just Two by Two on Apple Podcasts at a really great monthly price, or subscribe to The Ken’s Premium plan to get Two by Two bundled with the rest of the original feature stories, newsletters, infographics and podcasts we are known for.

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode.

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You can write to us at twobytwo@the-ken.com with your thoughts and suggestions.