Marketing Has Become a Performance… And Everyone’s Exhausted

There’s the version of marketing people talk about online, and then there’s the version that actually exists inside real companies. Lately, those two feel like completely different worlds. Somewhere along the way, marketing stopped being a craft and started becoming something a little more… performative.

Everyone is performing expertise. Performing confidence. Performing “I have a take on this.” Performing strategy. Performing authority they definitely haven’t earned yet. It’s like we decided the appearance of knowing things mattered more than actually knowing things.

And honestly? It’s exhausting.

Especially in the beginning stages of your career. There’s this pressure to sound smart all the time, to make everything a thought leadership moment, to have a polished opinion on every update, to prove you’re informed and strategic and “in the know.” It feels like your value comes from how convincingly you can talk about marketing, not from the quality of the work you’re doing.

But real marketing, the kind that happens off social media, is nothing like that performance. It’s not aesthetic or perfectly articulated. It’s messy. It’s contextual. It involves actual constraints, actual people, actual stakes. It looks like problem solving, compromise, testing, adjusting, trying again, and hoping you read the moment correctly.

None of that is glamorous. None of it fits into a viral tip list. And none of it is something you can perform.

The irony is that the louder marketing gets online, the less grounded it becomes. Everyone feels pressured to have a take immediately, even if they don’t fully understand the issue. Everyone feels like they need to posture as an expert before they’ve even had enough real-world experience to form an informed opinion.

The performance rewards volume over depth, certainty over curiosity, and being first over being accurate. But the best marketers I’ve met, the ones whose work actually moves people, aren’t performing anything. They’re listening. They’re thinking. They’re paying attention. They’re asking better questions instead of shouting quick answers.

Shifting out of “performer mode” feels uncomfortable at first, because it means admitting you don’t know everything. But the moment you stop trying to sound impressive and start actually learning, everything feels lighter. You permit yourself to grow at your own pace, to explore, to be thoughtful instead of loud.

Marketing doesn’t need more noise. It doesn’t need more performative hot takes. It doesn’t need more people acting like they’ve solved the entire industry. It needs more people who are willing to think. Really think.

If the pressure to perform has been weighing on you, consider this your sign to step back from it. You don’t have to have a public-facing opinion on everything. You don’t have to “act like an expert” to be taken seriously. You’re allowed to do your work quietly, carefully, and intentionally.

The industry has enough performers. It could use more thinkers.