Marketing in the Age of Noise: Authenticity as Competitive Edge
When the Message Becomes the Medium:
Moving on with our climb, digital enterprise requires people leaders to have a sharp mindset, staying ahead of the game with curiosity and strategy. With an evolving landscape of new professions, career agility is redefining talent in Global Business. Adaptability redefines what is being measured and evaluated, and cross-cultural fluency is key. At the convergence of Technology and Leadership, people look for meaning, reclaiming their agency in an age of intelligent systems and companies need to find their own pace, not only to manage what they can see and forecast but to address things which were not predicted.
Now we must continue our journey and talk about processes. With new roles and professions appearing every day, leaders need more than ever to become entrepreneurs, and embed that mindset on their workforce. Processes are run in big companies by people, and that creates data. There’s multiple control points and infrastructure required to make transformation happen, but usually in big companies it always starts with people and processes. Process outputs can be interpreted through intelligence, but the impact created with digital transformation relies on leader’s ability to become not only the carriers of institutional messages, but to infuse authenticity in everything they do.
Moving to London with no contacts and no certainty got me alert, and wondering constantly how to build up on digital marketing in this new environment. Posters in the Underground, storefront displays in Chinatown, flyers tucked into Sunday newspapers. Pubs with wooden signs carefully painted, billboards in Piccadilly Circus, video installations, and streets filled with people from all countries in the world, red double deckers promoting products, new ideas everywhere and it was more vibrant than any other in Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, Spain or France. I had entered a city where communication wasn’t simply a function but part of life. Taking the tube was a bliss, because I could hold in my hands the London Underground pocket map, not very different from the first designed by Harry Beck in 1931. His elegant model was inspired by electric circuit diagrams, and it is still used in the Journey Panner maps which people can access online on their mobile devices. For a designer, London was the place where tone mattered as much as timing, extending far beyond the screen or the page.
Looking back, what I encountered wasn’t just a new kind of marketing, more like a new way to think of meaning. There I could see clearly a well-defined process through which organizations define who they are, what they stand for, and how they relate to the world.
Forget about the old marketing of radio jingles or promotions, that was of course built on that since war times and appeared as something weaving its way across the town, way more layered and less linear. Over time, it revealed itself as a blueprint for changes I would incorporate in the way I started to create as a designer, and to my surprise, I’d soon witness similarities in how global companies operate, engage, and grow.
The Collapse of Control, and the Rise of Conversation:
The early 2000s were a peculiar time to be learning about marketing; we’ve all been learning lessons after a dot-com crash, which left a residue of skepticism. David Bowie was an enthusiast about this new thing, the Internet and gave an interview in 1999 stating that the impact on society would be unimaginable, but that didn’t happen so fast. Legacy firms were pulling back budgets and there was a quiet resurgence forming among creatives, digital designers, and small agencies who believed the internet was indeed still worth exploring, not just for scale but for substance.
There was an interesting shift from "target audiences" to a more nuanced way to look at consumers, as part of bigger ecosystems. Brand experiences never just end with the sale but extend into service, feedback, and renewal. However, this time these weren’t just new formats but new processes and new frameworks being adopted. Which means campaigns were becoming living processes, and communication was no longer an outcome but a continuous design loop where Customers, End Users, and Employees had separate, although integrated experiences. Twenty years later, that’s still a central topic at every conference I attend about Global Business Services and Human-centric design.
This new way to look at things mirrored what was beginning to happen in shared services and enterprise operations, although in a different language. Across the Enterprise, we start to realize that Business Acumen and Value Articulation were key, so we came along equipping teams with specific training on how they perceived strategy, what is a financial outcome and how the magic is happening, how to communicate and champion innovative ideas, that’s the language which people need to speak to stay accountable and navigate challenges. Companies were no longer focused solely on output. They were starting to care about input quality, sequence timing, and cross-functional alignment. Marketing, like business services, was moving from a task to a flow, from action to architectural challenges.
Central to this transition was the idea of authenticity, as a response to overexposure. Consumers had grown weary of being spoken to, they wanted to be seen, heard, and acknowledged. That’s not different from employees, and highlights how important communication is for internal and external stakeholders. Internally, communication teams began to adopt the same tools they used for customers in order to engage their own people. Companies started asking what stories were being told unofficially, and this became data points, rich to elaborate journey maps. What symbols were shaping culture, what policies could become aligned with diversity and inclusion, with environmental, social, and governance aspects. That was like a new age where people selling products and services began to understand that authenticity was not a tone of voice, and it had to go through a process of inclusion to be validated.
From Message to Meaning:
During that time in London, many national museums with art collections have been free to enter because of a new policy aimed at increasing access to culture and heritage. There were also writings on the Wall, quite literally, and I found Banksy's first works on walls close to Hoxton Square. That’s probably when I started to think that all forms of communication, including marketing, were successful when they managed to translate the zeitgeist, rather than only pushing some agenda. In due course, people don’t buy this or that; they are craving for meaning.
The same would become true in enterprise services. As operations became more complex, teams needed interpreters, individuals who could connect strategy with frontline behavior, who could translate a new process into a shared understanding, and who could communicate change in ways that people could not only understand but believe in.
This is where marketing, often dismissed as superficial or empty, demonized for making society more consumerist, found its deeper relevance. That became a bridge between intention and experience, between what leaders hoped to achieve with their end-to-end processes and how teams made sense of those ambitions day to day.
And like most bridges, it had to be maintained with systems connected, just like stations in my pocket map. Think of marketing not as a department, but as a process, a mindset that can be used for creating a rhythm of sensing, shaping, sharing, and adjusting. A loop that requires not just creativity, but consistency and above all trust. There’s not only companies using marketing, countries do it, and any big organizations where people need to find a sense of belonging.
Building Trust at Scale:
Authenticity, when scaled, becomes trust. Trust, unlike brand equity, cannot be manufactured; it must be earned, protected, and rebuilt continuously. In Global Business services, where teams stretch across symbolic layers involving their own countries, beliefs, and layers of legacy systems and things they used to do, trust is the magic element that makes integration possible. That’s what allows new processes to land, new tools to be adopted, and new leadership to emerge.
Then there’s another thing to talk about, which certainly does not come from instruction. Making sure that ideas resonate depends on how decisions are communicated, how changes are framed, and how meaning is shared across borders. In my early years working with multinational teams, I saw firsthand what happened when big process changes were communicated through cold dashboards or sterile internal memos, or worse, not communicated at all. When that happened, adoption slowed, friction increased, and eventually, someone would be forced to create a workaround, a quick fix that would never last long enough.
When marketing becomes an empty way to boost performance rather than a process based on culture, people don’t take that very kindly. They respond not to the message, but to what looks out of place, and in contrast, when communication is rooted in understanding and backed by systems, transparency and responsiveness are increased, trust grows even across complexity.
This is where many enterprise functions are headed today; they are learning, often the hard way, that communication is no longer a support activity, and make no mistake, that's a central driver of business resilience.
Communication as an Operating Layer:
Marketing, in this expanded sense, is about operating systems rather than good storytelling and touches everything from change management to user experience, from policy design to internal culture. That helps shape how people feel about their work and whether they believe in the structures that support it.
As I began taking on more responsibilities inside larger companies, I found myself returning to those lessons. The way a campaign made you feel, the way a poster used whitespace, or an interaction didn’t just tell you what to do but invited you to consider why it mattered. These were not soft skills but part of a deeper design ethos that connects process and emotion, clarity and care. Companies like IBM use that, and there’s legions of design teams driving that kind of philosophy, increasing not only P&L margins but adoption of new technologies, products, and processes everywhere, from Customers to Employees.
In shared services, that ethic is still being written with AI and automation moving fast, and creating the need for hybrid models to evolve. The need for process-based communication only grows; people like you and me don’t just want to be updated, we deserve to be understood, know how to fit into a system, and whether that system sees them as contributors or compliance points. Otherwise, you are not joining a company, but a religious cult.
This is why marketing, at its best, now resembles a feedback loop more than a one-sided way to plan campaigns. That listens before it speaks, adapts based on what it learns, and recognizes that influence does not come from visibility alone, but from credibility.
Marketing as a Process, Not a Pitch:
By the time I left the islands and began building a new life in the continent, I no longer saw marketing as something you do after the work is done. That started happening while the work was being shaped, part of every good architecture, rhythm, and way in which systems could be perfected and come to life.
This is especially true in global operations, where clarity can be lost quickly across functions and cultures. Marketing in this environment becomes a form of cultural integration connecting systems to stories, and people to purpose.
The lesson from those early years remains clear. Marketing is not about noise, perhaps more about narrative flow, visibility with intention, and not a pitch. That is a well-defined process, which integrates business strategy with organizational behaviour, management, and leadership.
The Age of Authentic Marketing:
Marketing has evolved into a core operational layer for every big company, a system that adapts to a new AI era and enables coherence with people across functions, instead of just working on campaigns. That’s how organizations build internal alignment, surface intent, and translate complexity into shared meaning. This shift has been going on for decades and demands structure, not just the ability to engage people with good storytelling.
Business Service leaders should put an additional effort into designing not only good digital content but also communication architectures that amplify trust, that can integrate diverse voices, and respond in real time to the nuances of both internal and external ecosystems. After all, the way people adopt new ways to work, how they build resilience over constant shifts, and integrate culture depends on authenticity: how organizations manage the rhythm and clarity of their narratives, not as a performance, but as a continuous process. To gain more insights from our SSO Network, please join us for our upcoming Process Mining and Intelligence Virtual Summit.