Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit

by Joe Pulizzi, Robert Rose

Killing your current marketing structure may be the only way to save it!

Two of the world’s top marketing experts reveal the next level of breakthrough success—transforming your marketing strategy into a standalone profit center.

What if everything we currently know about marketing is what is holding us back? Over the last two decades, we’ve watched the entire world change the way it buys and stays loyal to brands. But, marketing departments are still operating in the same, campaign-centric, product-led operation that they have been following for 75 years. The most innovative companies around the world have achieved remarkable marketing results by fundamentally changing their approach. By creating value for customers through the use of owned media and the savvy use of content, these businesses have dramatically increased customer loyalty and revenue. Some of them have even taken it to the next step and developed a marketing function that actually pays for itself.

Killing Marketing explores how these companies are ending the marketing as we know it—in favor of this new, exciting model. 

Killing Marketing provides the insight, approaches, and examples you need to understand these disruptive forces in ways that turn your marketing from cost center to revenue creator. This book builds the case for, literally, transforming the purpose of marketing within your organization. Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute show how leading companies are able sell the very content that propels their marketing strategy. You’ll learn how

* Transform all or part of your marketing operation into a media company

* Integrate this new operation into traditional marketing efforts

* Develop best practices for attracting and retaining audiences 

* Build a strategy for competing against traditional media companies 

* Create a paid/earned media strategy fueled by an owned media strategy

Red Bull, Johnson & Johnson, Disney and Arrow Electronics have succeeded in what ten years ago would have been deemed impossible. They continue to market their products as they always have, and, through their content-driven and audience-building initiatives, they drive value outside the day-to-day products they sell—and monetize it directly. 

Killing Marketing rewrites the rules of marketing—enabling you to make the kind of transition that turns average companies into industry legends. 

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Audiobook

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 24, 2013

About the author

I'm a traditionally published and indie author. My latest is

Burn the Playbook: Are You Made for More? Build a Life on Your Terms - (2025, Tilt Publishing) - ORDER NOW.

Before that, I wrote Epic Content Marketing, second edition: Break Through the Clutter with a Different Story, Get the Most Out of Your Content, and Build a Community in Web3 - (2023, McGraw-Hill) - ORDER NOW with Brian Piper.

In 2021 I published the #1 Amazon marketing bestseller Content Inc.: Start a Content-First Business, Build a Massive Audience and Become Radically Successful (With Little to No Money) - (2021, McGraw-Hill) - ORDER NOW

My other nonfiction books include:
- Killing Marketing (2017, McGraw-Hill)
- Content Inc. (2015, McGraw-Hill)
- Epic Content Marketing (2013, McGraw-Hill, Named Best Biz Book, Fortune Magazine)
- Managing Content Marketing (2011, self)
- Get Content Get Customers (2009, McGraw-Hill)

My novel:
- The Will to Die (2020, Z Squared Media) --- ORDER NOW

Visit me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JoePulizziAu...

Visit me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joepulizzi/

Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joepulizzi/

Get my random thoughts on content, marketing and life 2x per month here: https://www.joepulizzi.com/signup/


I've founded four companies including The Tilt (for content entrepreneurs) and Content Marketing Institute (CMI). In 2014, I received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Content Council (although I still feel pretty young).

My podcast series, This Old Marketing with Robert Rose has generated millions of downloads from over 150 countries.

My foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to children in over 35 states.

Reviews

[Alyssa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulizzi and Rose argue that marketing is in the midst of a massive sea change. It should no longer be based on advertising and campaigns, but focused on building an audience and delivering what that audience wants through content, sometimes at a profit. I'm totally bought into the developing an audience concept and delivering relevant content, but still mulling over the profit center implications. I'm not sure that's a model that can or will work for all companies, but I love all the fodder they've given me to consider.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Business example and interview-heavy look into what the future of marketing might look like if businesses decide to own their content creation and turn it into an audience-building center. Plenty of real world cases for marketers to use as inspiration.

Maybe too reliant on quotes and examples at times, but if you're looking for a "big picture" overview of the next 5-10 years in content marketing, this is a great resource that will elevate your business' content strategy.

[Anne Janzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're looking for easy answers to content marketing conundrums, or three things you can do tomorrow to make an incremental change, then this isn't the book for you. But if you're passionate about the possibilities of marketing and genuinely want to contribute to business strategy, then this is absolutely the book you should read.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Take your company’s marketing activities to the next level and explicitly profit from it, instead of marketing just being viewed as a cost to be endured, such as an electricity bill or office costs. That is the core aim of this book, noting that possibly everything we know about marketing can be outdated and holding us back!

A strong claim, but do the authors do it credit? Possibly, albeit by focussing on the use of content as a tool for marketing. Maybe it won’t account for everything, yet in any case a substantial amount. It may require a major sea change in the minds of many. The core is the greater use of content through so-called owned media, trying to get potential and actual customers to visit your own media platform(s) to consume content you have developed that is more than just advertising. For some companies it has led to them creating a specific media product. For others it might just be creating useful content that can be also shared on social media channels or provided to other media, but it offers authoritative commentary, branding and association benefits to your company nonetheless.

The authors seek to introduce this sea change before offering advice, insight and real-world examples to aid implementation. It is an interesting proposition and whilst not every company can be or will be suddenly their own media hub, as well as contributing to others around the world, elements of the advice can also be used in more traditional content-driven marketing opportunities and social media communications. You reap what you sow. There is a risk that it can appear a little too over-ambitious, but sometimes it is good to aim high and think a little outside-of-the-box too. Temper it will realism and remember your core business though!

In any case, the result is this interesting, accessible and engaging book, touching on a pertinent subject that should be keeping marketers busy. It is written in a clear, narrative style that can be picked up and put down if you can only snatch a few minutes here and there, although you may be advised to set aside a bit of quality time and do some deep, considered reading. It can be a very good investment.

[Glenn Schmelzle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book's main argument, as put by Robert Rose, is "What if we actually killed marketing and restructured it completely? What would happen if we completely flipped the idea of marketing on its head? What if, instead of starting by figuring out how the features and benefits of the product that we offer for sale, we approached the whole structure and function of marketing by leading from our media strategy?"

10 Monetization Strategies
DIRECT

Advertising
Conference and events
Premium content
Donations
Subscriptions

INDIRECT
Products – win revenue
Services – win revenue
Keep revenue (Loyalty/Retention)
Yield increase – grow revenue
Cross-sales – grow revenue


Nailing the messages our funnel is like having insider information, because with it, we know better than our competitors how to solve them.

[Brian P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose’s Killing Marketing, proposes interesting concepts and ideas on the future of marketing strategies and the abandonment of traditional ones. The author’s ask readers a few questions in the book, primarily regarding the accuracy of what we know about marketing today. The book opens with a very aggressive and thought-provoking question “What if everything we know to be true about marketing is actually what’s holding back our business?” and goes on to argue that perhaps we begin to kill the marketing we know in effort to develop a new one. Throughout the book, both Rose and Pulizzi offer various different marketing strategies that all attempt to achieve a very distinct change in the function and outcomes of marketing today. According to both Rose and Pulizzi, marketing as it exists today is flawed and costly. They argue that, if the current form of marketing were to be “killed,” a new reward of marketing is born, inherent profit.
The concept behind the Killing Marketing was incredibly thought provoking and despite the title, it has very little to do with killing marketing but rather restructuring and rebuilding it in a better way. The purpose of marketing has not changed, and according to Rose the purpose is “as Peter Drucker said 60 years ago, ‘to create and keep a customer.’” Rather than the purpose, it is a change in the function of marketing and how it works that Killing Marketing attempts to argue. Rose and Pulizzi offer various strategies that all work to remove marketing from the cost side of financials and instead develop marketing into profit centers by both drawing in customers and establishing the value of their product while simultaneously creating individual value for the customer in the marketing itself. They argue that marketing today and its ROI-driven evaluation is not an accurate representation of the returns of marketing. The authors support this point with an anecdote about a company that saw 650% growth despite all of their individual marketing campaigns showing as failing to make a return on the investment or cost of the campaign. This leads them to the conclusion that success in marketing cannot be measured individually but rather as a whole and how the cost can provide benefit for the money spent despite campaigns lacking individual success.
The book continues on to discuss the benefits of various strategies that are more conducive to the marketing environment today, strategies that increase a new metric “Return on Audience.” In effort to maximize this return a firm must please said audience by building their competency, campaign value, customer value, and cash returns. By building a smarter company, running more engaging and personal campaigns, and increasing customer value through means such as data acquisition, it opens the opportunity to work on perhaps the most novel return, cash, recently possible due to mass developments in content marketing. This is well supported with various examples such as Nike creating “more valuable customers” by collecting data from 28 million active app users and using it not to aggressively market existing products but to develop products that suit their needs and make them more likely to remain loyal to the brand and purchase more merchandise. The concepts of building a smarter or more competent company and maximizing campaign value are very easily supported by the authors’ example of Schneider Electric’s e-learning resource. The company made this resource available in 12 languages and got it endorsed by multiple organizations leading them to a wide userbase that offers an immense amount of data about consumers. The remaining possible return is one that has only developed recently. The concept of cash as a return on costs of marketing is one very unique to the modern era, it is only with the emergence of company’s as early as salesforce or as massive and modern like Red Bull and their media house profit center.
The concept of cash as a potential return on the cost of advertising is not completely new, but the accessibility to it has grown immensely in the modern era. For example, the authors bring up an early indicator of the new trend discussing George Lucas, who took merchandising rights in exchange for the Star Wars film rights, a decision looked upon as quite foolish when it was made. However, Lucas was one of the first to see the cash value behind marketing and the merchandise sales that came as a result of the inherent advertisement that came from the production of the movies. This is then connected to the general concept of how to propel ones marketing strategy into a profit-based marketing method. The films served both as advertisements but they also had inherent value for the consumer, allowing profits to be seen both in what was “advertised” and the advertising process itself. This paved the way for future ventures like the aforementioned Red Bull Media House, which is now referred to as the Red Bull model. In the simplest of terms, Pulizzi and Rose establish a basis with these various examples that assert that “as [companies] focus on creating valuable and engaging content,” the model of marketing as a profit center becomes entirely achievable. The most important development making this a possibility? According to Killing Marketing, this is in an immense part due to recent democratization of media distribution.
In the modern social media era Rose and Pulizzi both acknowledge the accessibility both for users to push content they agree with as well as for users to encounter content tailored towards what they wish to see. In today’s age, nearly anyone can publish information and market products and services and the like on social media. One must be quick to clarify that this does not mean that marketing has become entirely democratized, as the skill behind the creation of content still plays a large role in the success of campaigns, however, the distribution of this content has moved to be almost entirely decentralized by a majority of people. It is with proper utilization of this freedom and the creation of quality content with inherent consumer value that enables marketing to no longer be considered a cost, but rather as a source of revenue when properly strategized.
This book intrigued me both in the various aforementioned ideas and examples but also in the general concept itself. Poluzzi and Rose began the book with the goal of proving that what we know as marketing today should be “killed” in favor of moving to new methods to create profitability not solely due to the results of marketing campaigns, but also to profit from the campaign itself. Traditionally, marketing would be a cost with no return on the project itself but rather a return in the form of increased sales for that which has been marketed. Through the use of various different potential methods and examples of those who have capitalized on said methods, Rose and Poluzzi successfully prove that marketing today is not functioning to its optimal ability. This entire concept was incredibly intriguing as the idea of profit center marketing is one that seemed incredibly foreign, as advertising almost always seems to be a form of “investment” that is meant to pay out at the point of sale. Killing Marketing was a riveting book to read that I could not suggest more to those interested in learning many methods to maximize the profitability of their business and steer the goals of their marketing further towards creating value for the customer in order to receive value in the form of revenue in return.

[Jeffrey Trull · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book! Really insightful research without unsupported fluff. I devoured it in one day, and I feel invigorated in how I can apply what I learned here. Highly recommended.

[Ibrahim Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

For all the marketers of tomorrow.
Own your content
Build your audience
Evolve the entire practice of marketing from being a cost center to a profit center.

[Mattia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm sold to the model, now I just have to convince management lol

[Carlos Dieter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Change is here and we cannot be deny this fact,

One of the main things I agree with os the fact that we, as companies cannot be at the mercy of the media gatekeepers. It always boils down to the media provider agenda and not truly to the advertisers objective. We have seen it with it this last year with the scandals of FB and the US elections. I recently wrote an article about how Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, influence consumer behavior to pursue their own agenda. If you want to tell the truth about your brand, you got to be honest and do it yourself. Your audience will keep you honest. Why because you can say whatever you want about your brand, it does not matter. You do not control the narrative over your brand, your audience does. So the best thing you can do is join their conversations and built your brand by being truly engaged with both, the audience that hates you and the audience that loves you.

[Jacob Sanders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely essential reading for anyone in marketing - Joe and Robert have been laying it down smooth for years, their podcast "This Old Marketing" is EXCELLENT, and this book is a chance for them to stretch out their legs and really dig into the problems facing marketing and advertising models today.

Applicable information, actionable insights, inspiring examples - This book is required going forward.

[Katie Johnstone · Rating 2 out of 5]

An aggressive "meh." Interesting perspective but lacks foundation in testing and measurement strategies. For anyone who has tried content marketing, you know how difficult it is to measure indirect business impact of particular initiatives, or even to meaningfully convert an aggregated audience. Perhaps an idea for a sequel...

[Deniz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it but I can see people may see it as nonsense. Writers argue that creating quality content should be & will be the main driving force behind all the marketing processes because marketing should also be generating revenue too. This might come as nonsense because making the marketing department a content division does not mean abolishing the original marketing department but creating another division inside the marketing department to do the "real" marketing. A weird and yet intriguing concept to be sure.

[Ross Jaynes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe it's just me, or maybe I've read too much on content marketing but I didn't find anything new here. I'll re-read it and comb back through it but there's no strategy, no great insight that can't be had by just googling Content Marketing.

[Yoric · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is about reinventing Marketing. Maybe it targets medium and large companies, I don't feel concerned after reading the Introduction.
Sure, things have changed, Internet has scrambled the rules, we need to reinvent ourselves, and any business. Adaptability is key.

[Diogo Guerner · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fresh and exciting new way of looking at Marketing. In a straight forward and easy to understand writing, Joe details the importance of creating a loyal audience and the strategic rule that content can and should play to bring your marketing strategy to the 21st century. Highly recommended.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a blueprint for exactly what I've bee championing to clients for years. It's a scary prospect that businesses are becoming media outlets, but it's a good guide on how that content they create can be actually useful to consumers.

[Anas Safar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Businesses must resist the urge to be everywhere all the time and instead focus on being in the right place at the right time

[Jessica Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poorly written but brilliant ideas. This made me rethink everything I thought about marketing.

[Buddy Scalera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart stuff that will drive the future direction of marketing for the next few years. A must read for modern marketers.

[Rene Cizio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Basic of you have any experience at all

[Anthony Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting outlook but lacks examples on how to leverage the insights from content marketing.

[Lucas Doornhein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a media company, whatever industry you're in

[Tobin L Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read!

The book gives you a lot of to to think about. It won't be easy for marketers to try what this book suggests, but it may be a way to a more profitable future.

[Seemy · Rating 3 out of 5]

If your familiar with the authors work, and this being my 3rd book about content marketing from them - the content can somewhat begin to sound slightly repetitive and rehashed - but nevertheless this is an important and worthwhile read about the reality of marketing, and how specifically content marketing is the future - more importantly how to approach it the right way

To Our Continued Success!
Seemy
Waseem.tv/Blog

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[Bruno Rio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everybody sees and feels the evidence that Marketing is changing but not every company or organization is changing at the same pace.

Killing Marketing illustrates several business cases of brands that have led the way of embracing Content as the way to ensure relevance, audience and even return from Marketing Investments such as Disney, Red Bull and Nike.

I think the book is totally worth it mainly for the introduction of this issue and the final reflexion Which sums it up even addresses the lacks and faults of their own framework.

They may not be totally right but they're damn sure not totally wrong! so read it and think about your business Marketing and what you will do and, more importantly, what you will not...