This article was published in 2026 and references a historical event from 2024, included here for context and accuracy.
- Tension: Marketing leaders face mounting pressure to drive growth while budgets stagnate and acquisition costs surge by over 200%.
- Noise: The industry responds to complexity by adding more channels, more partnerships, and more tactics without questioning the underlying assumptions.
- Direct Message: The hardness of marketing isn’t solved by more solutions but by recognizing when additional complexity masks strategic clarity.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
In 2024, impact.com’s CMO Cristy Ebert Garcia declared what every marketing leader already knew but few were saying out loud: marketing is harder than it’s ever been.
The article pointed to shrinking budgets, rising customer acquisition costs, and an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
The proposed solution was partnerships: affiliates, creators, influencers, and brand collaborations that could help marketers navigate these challenges more efficiently.
A year later, the diagnosis remains accurate. Marketing budgets flatlined at 7.7% of company revenue in 2025, with 59% of CMOs reporting insufficient funds to execute their strategies.
Customer acquisition costs continue their relentless climb, rising roughly 40% between 2023 and 2025 for ecommerce brands, with the average merchant now losing $29 per new customer versus $9 in 2013. That’s a 222% increase in just over a decade.
But the prescription (add partnerships to your marketing mix) deserves closer examination.
Not because partnerships lack value, but because the instinct to solve complexity with additional channels might be perpetuating the very problem it claims to address.
When solutions become symptoms
The partnership economy emerged from a genuine insight: consumers trust third-party recommendations more than brand messaging. This isn’t new. Word-of-mouth has always outperformed advertising.
What changed was the industrialization of that insight into a measurable, scalable channel complete with management platforms, performance tracking, and ROI dashboards.
The appeal is obvious. Instead of spending more on diminishing-return paid advertising, brands can leverage existing audiences through affiliate relationships, creator partnerships, and influencer collaborations.
The model promises efficiency: pay only for performance, tap into authentic voices, reach engaged communities.
Yet here’s the uncomfortable question: if partnerships are the answer, why does marketing keep getting harder?
The 2024 article reported that nearly half the marketing leaders surveyed lacked any partnership program. It positioned this as an opportunity, a gap to be filled.
But consider the alternative interpretation: these leaders might be exhibiting restraint rather than neglect. They might recognize that adding another channel to an already fragmented landscape requires infrastructure, management, and strategic coherence they don’t currently possess.
The article mentioned that marketers cite tracking and reporting as necessary capabilities before implementing partnership programs. That’s not just a technical requirement. It’s an admission that measuring the incremental contribution of partnerships amidst everything else already running is genuinely difficult. It suggests that partnerships don’t simplify the attribution problem, they compound it.
The complexity spiral
Marketing’s increasing difficulty stems partly from proliferation, not scarcity. Consider what the typical B2B marketing organization now manages: paid search, social advertising across multiple platforms, content marketing, SEO, email nurture sequences, account-based marketing, events, direct mail, retargeting, lifecycle campaigns, and now partnerships spanning affiliates, micro-influencers, brand collaborations, and customer advocacy programs.
Each channel has its own logic, metrics, management requirements, and vendor relationships. Each promises efficiency in its own domain while requiring investment in expertise, tools, and oversight.\
The result is not simplification but fractal complexity: every solution spawns sub-problems that require additional solutions.
The partnership economy follows this pattern. Yes, you might achieve lower cost-per-acquisition through affiliate relationships. But you’ve also added partner recruitment, relationship management, compliance monitoring, commission structures, fraud detection, and the strategic challenge of maintaining brand consistency across dozens or hundreds of independent voices.
The 2024 article cited impressive results: Sephora experienced 101% partner growth and 3x revenue growth, Solo Stove saw 72% revenue increase with 7% decreased ad spend, Homage achieved 485% ROI.
These numbers are real and meaningful. But they also reflect something important: success required not just adding partnerships but likely optimizing the entire marketing apparatus around making partnerships work.
That’s a different proposition than the implication that partnerships are a plug-and-play solution to marketing’s hardness.
The brands succeeding with partnerships aren’t just executing tactics differently but have made strategic decisions about where to compete and how to organize their marketing function.
What marketing’s difficulty actually reveals
Marketing became harder not primarily because budgets tightened or costs increased, but because the underlying business model of customer acquisition shifted.
The cheap early days of digital advertising created an expectation that growth through paid acquisition could scale indefinitely. When those channels saturated and costs normalized, rather than questioning the dependency, the industry searched for the next efficiency frontier.
Partnerships became that frontier. And they do offer genuine advantages for companies positioned to leverage them. But the pattern repeats: find the underpriced channel, exploit it until it normalizes, move to the next opportunity.
The hardness isn’t in the tactics but in the strategic paradigm that treats customer acquisition as primarily a channel optimization problem.
The difficulty of modern marketing isn’t solved by identifying the next underpriced channel but by building organizations that compete on dimensions beyond acquisition efficiency.
This might mean investing more heavily in product differentiation that justifies premium positioning. It might mean developing retention and monetization strategies that reduce dependence on constant new customer acquisition. It might mean accepting lower growth rates in exchange for more sustainable economics. Or it might mean embracing partnerships not as an acquisition channel but as a strategic model for how the business itself operates.
The distinction matters. Partnerships as a channel means you’re still playing the same game (optimize, measure, scale) just with different mechanisms.
Partnerships as a strategy means fundamentally rethinking what you sell, how you go to market, and where your defensibility lies.
The path forward isn’t simpler but clearer
Marketing will continue to be hard. Acquisition costs will keep rising as platforms mature and competition intensifies. Budgets will remain constrained as economic uncertainty persists. Attribution will stay messy as customer journeys span more touchpoints and channels. Privacy regulations will make targeting less precise.
Adding partnerships to your marketing mix might help. For some companies in some contexts, it represents genuine strategic advantage.
But the decision to pursue partnerships should follow from clear answers to harder questions: What is our sustainable competitive advantage? Where do we add unique value? What customer relationships justify our existence beyond convenient access or competitive pricing?
If the answers point toward community, advocacy, and authentic third-party endorsement as core to your value proposition, then partnerships aren’t a marketing channel but a business model, and your entire organization should orient around making them successful.
If the answers point elsewhere, partnerships might be helpful tactical augmentation, but they won’t solve marketing’s fundamental hardness.
The real difficulty isn’t finding better channels. It’s maintaining strategic clarity while managing tactical complexity.
It’s knowing which problems matter and which are noise. It’s resisting the industry’s constant pull toward doing more when the answer might be doing less, better.
Marketing is hard. It will stay hard.
The question isn’t how to make it easier but how to ensure the difficulty you’re experiencing is the productive kind: the friction of creating genuine value rather than the exhaustion of optimizing an unsustainable approach.
