Marketing’s Second Chance

Germany thinks in products. Its industrial backbone, engineering, automotive, the Mittelstand, its hidden champions, is shaped by a deeply ingrained principle: the product makes decisions that, in other markets, are made by the brand.

“Made in Germany” once stood as a self-explanatory promise of quality. In that worldview, marketing was a support function rather than a leadership discipline. The product sold through its quality. Communication was little more than decoration.

Anyone who has ever had to justify a marketing budget inside a German corporation knows that, structurally, not much has changed.

Product differentiation is eroding, and from several directions at once. Catch-up competitors from Asia have long since mastered the same manufacturing technologies. Global supply chains are levelling out quality differences. And for the digital part of the economy, there is another powerful driver: in Code Crash, Matthias Schrader describes how AI is dramatically reducing the cost of digital product development. What required months of development work yesterday will be created in hours tomorrow.

Paul Graham recently distilled the consequence of this development into a simple formula: “Brand is what’s left when the substantive differences between products disappear. But making the substantive differences between products disappear is what technology naturally tends to do.”

In his essay The Brand Age, he uses the Swiss watch industry to show how sectors move through this transition: from an era in which engineers focused on what mattered most to a brand age in which distinction becomes the decisive currency. This transition arrives as a necessity, not an invitation.

For Germany’s industrial core, this is not a question of if, but when. The question marketing must ask itself is: are we ready?

That a product culture can make this shift is demonstrated by an example that is cited far too rarely in our industry: Samsung.

In the early 1990s, Samsung was a solid Korean electronics company, respected for its manufacturing capabilities but barely perceived as a brand. Lee Kun-hee, the founder’s son and chairman since 1987, wanted to change that. He embarked on a world tour to inspect his markets. In an electronics store in Southern California, he saw what he did not want to see: Samsung televisions gathering dust at the back of the store, while Sony and Panasonic dominated the shop windows.

In June 1993, he was staying at the Falkenstein Grand Kempinski in Frankfurt, the European stop on his tour. He gathered 200 executives and held a three-day meeting that would go down in the company’s history as the “Frankfurt Declaration”. Its core message was clear: no more prioritising volume, quality comes first. “Change everything except your wife and children.”

After the Asian financial crisis in 1997, a new leadership team took over. Chief Marketing Officer Eric Kim consolidated Samsung’s 55 advertising agencies into one, pulled its products out of discount retail channels, and launched the company’s first global brand campaign. This, too, was not a marketing strategy but a leadership decision.

In 2006, Samsung overtook Sony to become the world’s largest TV manufacturer. In 2011, it surpassed Apple to become the largest smartphone vendor.

A product culture can take this path. What Samsung shows is that it usually requires two decisions, not one, and both came from leadership, because marketing was part of that leadership. That is precisely where the chicken-and-egg problem lies that Germany now has to solve.

Whether marketing in Germany seizes this opportunity is not a question of external conditions. Marketing has not only allowed itself to be diminished from the outside, it has also diminished itself: through an overemphasis on measurability and performance, through the quiet acceptance of a service-provider role, and through its withdrawal from strategic debates in which it felt insecure without hard numbers.

In a product-driven culture, that may once have been rational. If you have a seat at the table but nothing decisive to contribute, silence can feel like the safer option. But it created a habit that is now becoming a liability.

The 2025 CMO Study by Evergreen Media, which surveyed 548 marketing decision-makers across the DACH region, shows that marketing suffers not primarily from insufficient budgets, but from a lack of structural integration. The gap between corporate objectives and marketing objectives is significant. Above all, this is a positioning problem, not merely a communication problem.

When product differentiation erodes, the brand decides. And when the brand decides, marketing has a seat at the table, not as a supplicant, but as a strategic core function.

This constellation has never existed before in the history of the German economy. The structural conditions under which marketing has operated for decades are now changing fundamentally. What that means in practice is this: marketing leaders who think in brand platforms rather than campaigns, who challenge product decisions rather than merely communicating them, and who measure their work in market share and pricing power rather than reach and engagement. And agencies that stop waiting for the next briefing and start asking strategic questions before the client does.

Those who act now gain a seat at a table that, historically, was never available. That requires marketing to stop waiting for permission and start claiming responsibility.

In 1993, Lee Kun-hee did not wait for the market to force Samsung into quality leadership. At the end of the 1990s, his successor did not wait for the market to force Samsung into brand leadership. Both decisions were made before they became necessary. That is the lesson, and the invitation.