Marketing is one of the most misunderstood activities in business. For many founders, it sits in an uncomfortable category. Necessary, but resented. Important, but postponed. Money spent on marketing is often experienced as money lost unless it produces immediate returns.

This relationship creates hesitation. Marketing becomes something to justify, optimise aggressively, or delay until the product feels perfect. Underneath this behaviour is a deeper assumption about what marketing actually is.

This article challenges that assumption by shifting the conversation from tactics to metacontent.

The Default Mental Model of Marketing

In the default mental model, marketing is treated as promotion. It exists to draw attention, drive traffic, and generate leads. Value is assumed to live primarily in the product or service, while marketing is tasked with pointing people toward it.

From this orientation, marketing feels external to the real work. It becomes overhead. A cost that must be controlled. An activity whose worth is measured narrowly through short term metrics.

This explains why many founders feel friction around marketing. If marketing is simply about getting attention, then it can feel noisy, performative, or misaligned with care and integrity.

The discomfort is not accidental. It reflects a misalignment between the founder’s values and the mental model they are operating from.

A Metacontent Shift in How Marketing Is Held

Most marketing advice operates at the content level. Channels, formats, funnels, copy, optimisation. What is rarely examined is the metacontent, the way marketing itself is being understood.

Metacontent refers to how we relate to the foundational components of a situation. In this case, what marketing is for.

When marketing is held purely as promotion, pressure follows. Attention must be captured. Messages must cut through. The focus narrows to conversion.

This article invites a different metacontent. Marketing as contribution.

Marketing as Contribution and Trust Building

When marketing is approached as contribution, its role expands. Marketing becomes a way of creating clarity in the world. Of helping people understand problems they are already living with. Of offering language, perspective, and orientation.

From this stance, marketing is not about convincing. It is about making sense. It becomes a primary mechanism through which trust is built over time.

Trust forms when people repeatedly encounter accurate language, relevant insight, and genuine care. This happens long before any transaction occurs.

Seen this way, marketing is not separate from value creation. It is one of its most powerful expressions.

Marketing Often Has More Impact Than the Product

For many businesses, the largest impact they have on the world does not come from their product or service. It comes from their marketing.

Every article published, video shared, event hosted, or message sent shapes how people think, decide, and act. These interactions influence far more people than those who ever become customers.

This is often overlooked. Founders focus intensely on refining what they sell, while underestimating the influence of how they communicate.

Marketing is the surface area of your values. It is how people encounter your way of seeing the world. Treated responsibly, it becomes a multiplier of positive impact.

The Scale of Digital Noise and Its Human Impact

The volume of digital communication that people are exposed to each day is difficult to fully grasp. Current estimates indicate that approximately 160 billion spam emails are sent globally every single day, accounting for close to half of all email traffic worldwide.¹

This means that for many people, the dominant experience of marketing is interruption. Inboxes are crowded with unsolicited messages, exaggerated promises, and irrelevant offers. Over time, these conditions people to filter aggressively, distrust quickly, and approach unfamiliar communication with caution.

If we become present to this lived reality, how our fellow human beings are actually experiencing the market, scepticism starts to make sense. When someone encounters your message, your email, your post, or your brand, they are not meeting it in isolation. They are meeting it after years of accumulated noise.

This scepticism is not necessarily a response to your messaging, your integrity, or your intent. It is a natural adaptation to the environment people are operating within. It is the cost of being exposed to relentless volume without corresponding care.

Seen from this perspective, marketing’s first role becomes clear. It is not persuasion. It is not conversion. It is connection.

In a market saturated with noise, the primary function of marketing is to reestablish human contact. To signal relevance. To demonstrate care. To show that there is a real person, with a real understanding of a real problem, on the other side of the message.

Only once that connection is established does trust become possible. Only then does value have somewhere to land.

Authenticity as a Being-Level Distinction in Marketing

Within the Being Framework, authenticity refers to alignment between language, action, and responsibility.

In marketing, inauthenticity shows up when messaging stretches beyond what the business is prepared to stand behind. Claims inflate. Promises drift. Attention is prioritised over accuracy.

Authentic marketing remains grounded. It speaks to real problems. It offers realistic value. It respects the audience's intelligence and autonomy.

This way of relating to marketing and follow through builds trust precisely because it avoids manipulation. People feel when communication is rooted in contribution rather than extraction.

The Question That Reorients Marketing

A useful way to reorient marketing is to ask different questions.

Have you experienced trust forming with a brand over time? What did they consistently provide? How did their messaging align with your values? What made you feel understood rather than persuaded?

These experiences rarely come from clever tactics alone. They come from sustained clarity and care.

When founders relate to marketing from this place, effort feels purposeful. Content creation feels meaningful. Marketing becomes an extension of service rather than a necessary evil.

Conclusion

Marketing feels heavy when it is treated as overhead. It becomes expansive when it is understood as a multiplier of value.

This shift does not require more tactics. It requires a change in metacontent. When marketing is approached as contribution, trust building, and sense making, it becomes one of the most impactful things a business does.

The question worth holding is simple.

How is your marketing contributing to the people who may never buy from you, yet are still shaped by your message?

References

¹ EmailToolTester, Spam Statistics 2024, estimates of global daily spam email volume and proportion of total email traffic.