Why cutting marketing never feels like a mistake—until it is.

There’s a moment most startups and scale-ups reach.

Revenue tightens. Pressure creeps in. Forecasts start wobbling. Somewhere in that stretch, marketing gets called into a room and you these words. Unfortunate. Budget. Cuts.

I’ve seen this happen enough times for it to stop feeling situational. Different founders. Different sectors. Same reflex. Marketing is treated as optional the moment certainty disappears. That decision is usually framed as discipline. It isn’t. It’s a misunderstanding of what marketing actually does.

Marketing is not output. It’s not activity. It’s not “growth hacks.” It’s narrative control. It's your life's story.

Marketing Mistakes

When marketing stops, the story doesn’t. The company just exits the conversation. Your story doesn’t stop. It gets outsourced, to customers, competitors, former employees, forums, comment sections, and private WhatsApp groups. Silence creates a vacuum, and vacuums are never neutral. They fill with speculation, doubt, and simplified narratives that are almost impossible to reverse once they harden.

The world will start interpreting your Silence.

This is beyond random one off situations. It’s observable. Every major downturn has produced the same data: businesses that maintained strategic visibility recovered faster and retained stronger market positions. The ones that went dark didn’t collapse immediately, they drifted. Relevance eroded quietly. Trust thinned. Momentum leaked.

That’s why cutting marketing feels safe at first. Nothing breaks overnight. Pipelines don’t instantly die. But confidence starts to decay internally, then externally. Your sales team is explaining what you offer, not selling. Hiring slows. Partners hesitate. Customers delay, because the brand no longer feels present.

Executives often think marketing is about momentum. It isn’t. It’s about continuity.

Startups and scale-ups assume they’re too small or too established for this to matter. Both assumptions fail under pressure. Early-stage companies rely on marketing to shape perception before reality has fully formed. Growing companies rely on it to hold coherence while everything else is still unstable.

The irony is that the more pressure a business is under, the more executives demand certainty — and the faster they cut the one function designed to manage ambiguity, perception, and trust.

This isn’t about protecting spend. Most marketing budgets have waste. Noise should be cut. Activity without intent should be cut. But that isn’t the same as cutting marketing. That’s refining it.

From a strategic standpoint, withdrawing visibility to “save money” usually costs more later. Rebuilding trust is expensive. Reintroducing yourself to a market that has moved on is harder than staying visible while things are uncomfortable. Those costs rarely show up in the same spreadsheet, which is why the mistake keeps repeating.

When organisations stop narrating themselves, the system does it for them — and the system has no obligation to be kind.