It’s quiet. It’s invisible. And it’s probably happening right now in your organization.
I call it shadow marketing: the phenomenon where everyone except the marketing team starts doing marketing.
You know you have a shadow marketing problem when…
- The CFO announces in the leadership meeting that he has no idea how marketing contributes to revenue—and mentions that his cousin “crushed it on TikTok last weekend.”
- People stop you in the hallway to pitch campaign ideas that have already been executed by someone else.
- Product, HR, and Customer Success quietly reallocate part of their budgets to run their own ads, events, or email campaigns.
- Sales goes rogue with a WhatsApp blast full of random GIFs downloaded from Giphy because “it feels more human.”
- The intern launches a viral Twitter thread that gets 400k impressions—without ever talking to marketing.
- A developer asks in an all hands meeting that we are aren't doing marketing.
Shadow marketing isn’t sabotage. It’s a symptom. It means the rest of the company no longer trusts, understands, or feels included in what marketing actually does.
Shadow marketing = the silent vote of no confidence in your marketing team.
How to kill shadow marketing before it kills your relevance
- Treat internal reputation like your most important brand.
Run internal PR the same way you run external PR. Weekly wins, hero stories, quick-hit Slack updates. Make the CFO the hero of the revenue story, not the skeptic.
- Stop reporting activity. Start reporting business outcomes in everyone else’s language.
Finance cares about pipeline acceleration and CAC payback. Sales cares about shorter sales cycles and higher win rates. Tie every campaign to those numbers—and put the slide in their deck, not yours.
- Host open “Marketing Office Hours” and legendary lunch-and-learns.
No agenda, no approval required, just show up with coffee and curiosity. The goal isn’t to collect ideas—it’s to let people see how you think.
- Invite yourself to their meetings (and invite them to yours).
Send a rotating marketing rep to Sales stand-up, Product sync, and Customer Success retro. Ten minutes of “here’s what we’re seeing in the market” prevents ninety minutes of rogue campaigns later.
- Build a one-click way for anyone to get marketing support.
A simple Notion form, an Airtable request board, or a #marketing-help Slack channel with 1-hour response SLA. Make it easier to ask marketing than to do it themselves.
- Celebrate the healthy shadow.
When someone outside marketing does something brilliant, amplify it, credit them publicly, and retroactively bring it into the official strategy. Turn rogue energy into collaborative energy.
The bottom line
Shadow marketing doesn’t appear because people love doing extra work. It appears when marketing feels distant, mysterious, or irrelevant.
Bring your work into the light—relentlessly, transparently, and collaboratively—and the shadows disappear.
Your move: Which of the six prevention tactics will you try first this quarter?
Drop a comment below and let me know. I read every single one.
— Shashi Bellamkonda
