This may not be much of a hook, but it is a subject that matters, and I want to tell you my story.

Asking that one question is what finally showed me what had been there all along, invisible to the eye. And how value actually reaches the people it is meant for. That is why EMESKA came to be.

EMESKA is not only a brand and a business decision. It is about identity and doing things the right way. It took shape the way a rock does, under years of wind, rain and sun. Something that was always there and has only now taken a clear form.

What people think marketing is

As someone who studied economics and spent years working in marketing, I’ve come across a remarkable range of interpretations of that word.

Marketing as running social media. Marketing as ads on television and radio. Marketing as a side item that eats budget. Marketing as something everyone knows a little about. The person telling you this has no time for it, of course, because there is so much else to do, but understands marketing very well and knows exactly what a marketing person should be doing. On a minimal ad spend, with expectations of remarkable results. Quality ones, naturally.

One conversation has stayed with me more clearly than the rest.

In a job interview, the owner of a company tells me he needs someone to run his marketing. All of it. I try to understand what he actually means, so I steer the conversation towards strategy and goals. He tells me he wants the posts boosted so more people see them, the direct messages answered, and a new website built.

All of that is marketing, or part of it. But it is not the point.

The question I asked myself then, and did not ask him, was a simple one. How does he know a post needs boosting? How does he know what kind of website he needs? And why any of it at all? What if the whole decision is wrong, and the money is gone before anyone finds out?

The fair side of the story

Do not misunderstand me. It is not as though I am the only person who has ever read Kotler.

There have been plenty of good experiences too. Many of the people who run companies are acutely aware of what marketing does, and how much it matters for whether a business survives, performs and competes. Working with people like that is a pleasure. It opens up thinking, it invites better ideas, and above all it produces results worth having.

The difference between those two kinds of work was never the budget. It was always whether someone had answered the question why before the work began.

Who makes the decisions, and on what basis

Marketing does include the advertising I mentioned, on radio, on television, in print, on social platforms and across every other digital channel. But before a campaign can go live at all, a series of decisions has to come first.

Who makes those decisions, and on what basis?

That is where the answer to why EMESKA exists actually lies. It was built to be a strategic partner to businesses. Someone who will show you which way to go, why that way, and how, all in service of what your business is trying to reach. That is the only thing that justifies marketing in the first place. Only when you reach your goal can we say the work has done its job.

This is not a new idea. Peter Drucker wrote it down in 1973. "Marketing is so basic that it cannot be considered a separate function. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view."

Half a century on, it is still treated like the department that makes the posts.

Goals deserve a conversation of their own, and that is a separate subject. But one thing is worth saying here, because it is rarely said out loud. A strategy is not a list of everything you are going to do. Michael Porter put it in one sentence. "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." Many of the companies I have worked with had plenty of activity and very few decisions.

Why marketing is the bridge

Why is marketing such an important bridge between the person who offers a product or a service and the person who receives it?

Imagine you have a product that is genuinely good, and almost nobody knows you exist, or only the circle closest to you does. How is any return supposed to grow out of that? Now add a single competitor who does advertise, and ask yourself whose product people will end up choosing.

I am saying all of this because it matters that we are honest about what marketing actually is. Because what you have built, your product or your service, has to become a competitive advantage and the first choice of the audience it was made for. Marketing is not smoke and mirrors, and taking that idea apart is part of why EMESKA exists.

The data suggests this is not only a local problem. Seventy one percent of marketing teams define success differently from their own chief executive and chief financial officer, according to research among more than six hundred marketers in 2026. When marketing and the leadership team are not measuring the same thing, marketing looks like a cost, because what it actually delivers never shows up anywhere.

A sea of advertising

There is too much advertising, in too many forms, in too many places.

Step away from social platforms for a moment and think of a city like Tokyo or New York. A sea of advertising, flashing at you all day long. Will you really notice one particular ad, the one that somehow stands apart? Try to remember a single one you saw there.

Howard Gossage, one of the few people from the golden age of advertising who spoke plainly, put it like this. "Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad."

The market is saturated, and that is exactly where the appeal lies. In finding the right way through to your particular audience, and explaining, as well as it can be explained, why yours is the product they can trust.

To do that, you have to understand how people behave and why. Their habits, how they decide, what they believe, what they prefer, how they live. The customer, the audience, is the most valuable thing a business has.

They have to recognise something of themselves in the brand, and feel they belong to something. That shapes how they engage, on the platforms and away from them. Which is why the way you show up has to be authentic and thought through, because that is the only way to be noticed and accepted.

What matters now is building a real relationship with the people you serve. Being honest with them. Understanding what troubles them and why. Not being seen as one more brand trying to sell them something. That is what lasts, and it does not end with a single purchase.

A false shortcut

There is one more subject none of us can avoid.

Artificial intelligence has become a false shortcut. Not only for marketers, but for business owners who assume that a marketer, as one more person on the payroll, is no longer necessary.

We already know that a conversation with a chatbot is an endless loop. It cannot hold a view of its own. It cannot invent an approach that did not exist before. It cannot know what you know from having been there. No matter how much you feed it, it still will not be you, and it will not be able to tell right from wrong in one specific situation.

But something else worries me more than that.

A good share of the research available to us, the research that is supposed to be the measure of truth, is now itself written with the help of artificial intelligence. That is where the loop closes, because we can no longer tell whether what our tool is analysing rests on verified information, or on something another tool wrote, in a way nobody checked.

This is not a hunch. An analysis of more than fourteen million scientific abstracts, published in Science Advances, found that at least ten percent of papers from 2024 carry the linguistic traces of machine processing, and in some fields that share reaches thirty percent. The loop has already closed. It simply has not been measured all the way through yet.

In 1974, in a talk about how false science comes about, Richard Feynman said something that reads today as though it were written for this. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

There is a second cost, and this one can be measured. When consumers notice that a brand's content is machine made, thirty one percent trust that brand less, and only seven percent trust it more. That comes from research among eight thousand people across eight countries. What you save in time, you pay for in trust.

The marketer is the one who pulls all of it together. The research, everything inside the company and everything outside it, the audience, what has been tried before, what worked and what did not, and who then works out what is likely to happen, from knowledge, experience and, yes, intuition.

That is why EMESKA exists

Let me go back to that conversation.

The owner was not wrong to want a boosted post and a new website. He may well have needed both. He was not wrong for being unable to answer why, either, because that is not his job. His job is to run the company.

It is someone's job to answer that question before the first euro is spent. When that someone is missing, the decisions still get made. They are simply made by a person who does not know enough, or they are not made at all, and the company runs on whatever everyone else is doing.

That is why EMESKA exists. We start from your truth, the product or the service you have actually built, we shape a strategy that fits your business, and we carry that value to the audience it belongs to, in a way that builds lasting relationships and growth that holds.

Marketing does not begin with a campaign. It begins with the value you have already created.