In my twenty-plus years as a marketer (six-plus as a Fractional CMO), I’ve often been parachuted in when a business feels stuck.
The brief is usually the same: “We need to sell more. Let’s spend more on marketing. Can you fix our brand?” As a Chartered Marketer and Fellow of the CIM, I understand the urge to tweak the marketing machine, but I’ve also learned that when a business feels out of control, the real issue can often run far deeper than marketing.
I’m not one for jargon or quick-fix slogans, and I can smell marketing spin and corporate waffle a mile off, but time and time again, I’ve found myself less a marketer and more a crisis firefighter, uncovering underlying problems that no advertising budget or rebrand can solve. In truth, many companies don’t have a marketing problem at all; they have a business crisis in disguise.
The Real Problem Hiding Behind “We Need More Marketing”
Usually, by the time I get the call, the company is under pressure. Sales are dropping, confidence is wavering, and the instinct is to “just do more marketing.” It’s an understandable reaction. Marketing is visible and relatively quick to dial up: launch a new campaign, refresh the logo, pump more budget into ads. It offers a reassuring sense of action, but it can be a plaster on a bullet wound. I’ve walked into situations where the board’s push to “get the brand right” was masking a business teetering on the edge of a deeper crisis.
One client brought me in, convinced a shiny rebrand would turn around their fortunes. In reality, their service delivery was so inconsistent that no new logo could paper over the customer exodus. It reminds me of the WHSmith high street saga I wrote about recently, a classic case of cosmetic change without real change. Simply changing the signage does not fix those issues. In other words, you can repaint the façade, but if the structure is unsound, the cracks will soon show through.
Signs of a Deeper Business Crisis
How can you tell when the problem runs deeper than marketing? Over the years, I’ve noticed common red flags when a company’s core issues are being misdiagnosed as marketing failures. Here are some tell-tale signs I often encounter:
Falling revenue despite increased marketing
Campaigns have been ramped up and promotions are running, yet sales keep declining. This usually signals an underlying value or operational problem, not just a weak marketing effort. If customers aren’t buying even when you’re in front of them, the issue might be product fit, pricing, or trust, things marketing alone can’t fix.
A disengaged team
The marketing department (and often others) are demoralised or spinning their wheels. Good people have mentally checked out. This is more than a morale issue; it’s a symptom of deeper leadership and cultural cracks. When your team has lost faith, no marketing plan will ignite true growth.
Poor delivery and customer experience
Leads might be coming in, but operations can’t deliver on promises. Projects are late, quality is inconsistent, and service is slipping. No amount of advertising will save a business that’s letting customers down at the delivery end. This isn’t a marketing failure; it’s an operational crisis wearing a marketing mask.
An unclear value proposition
Ask five team members what the company actually offers or why it’s different, and you get five different answers (or blank stares). If your value proposition is fuzzy internally, your customers certainly won’t grasp it. This points to a strategy issue at the core of the business. It’s not about crafting a clever tagline; it’s about deciding what you stand for.
Internal misalignment and silos
Sales, marketing, operations, and finance are each chasing their own KPIs, and they rarely sit in the same room. Initiatives collide or stall because departments aren’t on the same page. I often find that bad internal alignment is both a cause and an effect of crisis. It’s hard for marketing to tell a coherent story when the business itself is fragmented.
Chasing activity instead of strategy
There’s a flurry of tactical busy-work: launching social campaigns, redoing the website, signing up to every new marketing fad. It looks like progress, but it’s really panic. When a company is throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks, instead of following a strategy, it’s a sign of deeper leadership paralysis.
Each of these symptoms tends to trace back to one thing: the business is in trouble, whether anyone has admitted it yet or not. They are not marketing problems; they are warning signs of a company at risk. In fact, a true business crisis is usually a collision of issues across the organisation: financial pressures, operational breakdowns, leadership gaps and reputational cracks all hitting at once. If you’re seeing several of these signs, you’re likely dealing with a systemic problem that no solo marketing campaign will resolve.
One Executive Won’t Fix a Systemic Crisis
A common response I see (and experienced myself) is the “saviour executive” strategy: hire a single senior leader, a CMO, CFO, CRO, you name it, to come in and turn the ship around. The thinking is seductive: “We’ve got a sales problem, let’s get a star Chief Revenue Officer in here.” Or “Marketing is failing, let’s bring in a heavy-hitter CMO (even fractionally) to sort it out.” I’ve been that hired gun, and I can tell you it’s usually an impossible ask if they’re operating in isolation.
Why? Because these crises are cross-functional by nature. A new CMO can overhaul the marketing strategy, yes. But what if the real bottleneck is cash flow and the CFO is overwhelmed? What if the product has quality issues that alienate customers? What if there’s a legal/regulatory headache looming that’s eroding confidence? No single executive, no matter how talented, can single-handedly cure a company that’s bleeding from multiple wounds. At best, they put a finger in the dam; at worst, they become a convenient scapegoat for problems beyond their remit.
I’ve seen this play out: a company hires a marketing lead expecting miracles, but gives them no support to address the non-marketing issues undermining growth. Three months later, nothing has improved, and now everyone is frustrated. including that new hire, who’s wondering why they were brought into a low-key crisis with no backup. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
The broader point is that trying to solve a systemic business crisis by appointing a single exec is like trying to fix a broken engine by replacing one spark plug. You might get a brief improvement, but the engine will still splutter if the real issues lie in the cylinders, the fuel, and the oil. As I noted when reflecting on past crises, fragmented or siloed approaches only add to the chaos as nobody is aligned, nobody is owning the full picture… just more noise when what was needed was clarity and direction. In a crisis, having one person on the case is not enough; you need all hands on deck, working from the same plan.
Why an Integrated Crisis Team Is the Answer
The alternative, and frankly, the solution I’ve come to champion, is bringing in an integrated crisis management team. Instead of plugging one hole at a time, you bring in a senior-led advisory squad that can cover all the bases: financial, legal, operational and yes, marketing/communications. That’s essentially the model we built at Arx Nova: one team, one plan, no silos.
Here’s why this approach works better for a business under acute pressure:
Unified diagnosis
A cross-functional team will assess your company’s situation holistically. They’re not looking at just sales or just ops; they’re looking at the full picture of what’s broken. This means the root causes get identified faster, without departmental blind spots. As we put it at Arx Nova, crisis management is a team sport. You need the lawyer, the accountant, the operator and the communicator all working in sync from day one.
Immediate coherence and action
When you get everyone in the same war room, decisions happen faster and with more clarity. There’s no lag waiting for one consultant to check with another, no conflicting recommendations coming at the CEO from different angles. An integrated team operates with a single chain of command. We arrive on site, divide and conquer the workstreams, and execute a coordinated plan. financial triage, legal risk control, operational stabilisation, and communications management all at once. That kind of immediate, all-fronts response simply isn’t possible when you hire one exec and hope they coordinate a patchwork of others.
No passengers, all leaders
In an integrated crisis team, every member is a senior operator. There’s no hand-holding or lengthy onboarding. At Arx Nova, for example, directors lead every engagement; it’s senior-only, no juniors learning on your time. This matters because in a crisis, you don’t have the luxury of time or error. A seasoned team hits the ground running and commands credibility across the organisation. They don’t get caught in internal politics, and they’re not there to polish their CV; they’re there to solve problems.
Cross-functional fixes
Because the team covers all functions, they can actually implement solutions in parallel. While the CFO-type is renegotiating with creditors and shoring up cash flow, the operations lead is fixing the delivery issues, the legal counsel is handling regulators, and the comms lead (people like me) is stabilising the narrative for employees and customers. Compare that to a lone hire trying to make sense of areas outside their expertise, there’s no contest. A unified crisis response buys you precious time and headroom, containing the bleeding on all fronts so the business can breathe again.
One voice externally
An integrated team ensures the messaging to stakeholders is consistent and strategically aligned with the legal and financial reality. I can’t overstate how crucial this is. In a fragmented approach, you often get mixed messages, a lawyer advising silence while a PR agency urges transparency, which can paralyse leadership. A cohesive team will agree on the narrative and communication strategy that protects the business’s long-term value while keeping stakeholders informed and reassured. It’s a balancing act, but when all disciplines work together, you can control the story rather than the story controlling you.
An integrated crisis team provides something a single hire cannot: immediate coherence and collective firepower. It’s the difference between a group of soloists and a well-conducted orchestra. When a business is staring down a crisis, you want the orchestra.
Recognise the Signs and Act Decisively
If there’s one thing I hope you take from my experiences, it’s this: don’t wait. By the time the instinct to “just do more marketing” kicks in, you likely already have a fire smouldering. Denial and delay are how small issues become existential threats. If your business is under pressure, don’t wait for the situation to worsen.
Recognise the early signs of distress for what they are, early warning alarms. Acknowledge when things are beyond the scope of any one team or executive, and act decisively. That could mean assembling an integrated crisis response team internally, or more often, bringing in external specialists who have dealt with these situations before. In my case, I co-founded Arx Nova precisely because too many mid-tier businesses were left to figure it out alone, with piecemeal help. It doesn’t have to be that way.
When revenue is spiralling, customers are unhappy, and your leadership meetings have turned into endless firefights, the answer isn’t to double down on marketing or sales gimmicks; it’s to bring in a no-nonsense crisis team that can stabilise the whole ship. Get those experienced, cross-functional minds around your table as early as possible. They’ll confront reality head-on (no ego-protecting or sugar-coating) and help you triage the situation across all fronts. That kind of swift, integrated intervention is often the difference between a contained incident and a full-blown collapse.
So, if any of this feels familiar, if you’re ticking off more than one of the “signs” above, I urge you to take action now. Don’t wait for the quarterly results to crater further or for the crisis to announce itself in the headlines. Act while you still have options on the table. In practical terms, that means calling in an integrated crisis management team (yes, like the one we’ve built here at Arx Nova) to assess and stabilise your business before the damage escalates. It’s not a comfortable call to make, I get that. Admitting you need help is hard, but I’ve sat in those boardrooms, and I can promise you: the sooner you bring in the right expertise, the better your odds of a successful turnaround.
At the end of the day, marketing is a powerful tool, but it works only when the fundamentals are sound. If you fix the fundamentals first, the marketing will finally have something solid to stand on. If you suspect your company’s issues run deeper, trust that instinct. Bring in the cavalry, align every critical function, and regain control. Do that, and you’re not just putting out fires, you’re giving your business its best shot at long-term survival and recovery. That’s real leadership in action, and it beats any quick marketing win on the metrics that truly count.
Be proactive, be honest about what’s really going on, and don’t go it alone. Your company’s future might depend on it. And if you need a partner in steadying the ship, you know where to find us. We’ll be there, sleeves rolled up, ready to lead, one team, one plan, no nonsense.
Who’s behind this post?
Simon Larkin
Director & Co-Founder
Simon Larkin is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and a Chartered Marketer. As Co-Founder of Arx Nova, he brings over 20 years of experience in crisis communications and marketing. Simon works with leadership teams to manage reputational risk, control the narrative, and restore stakeholder confidence during periods of uncertainty.
