The chaos cascade: why B2B marketers keep making things worse — and what coherence can do about it

B2B marketing is caught in a chaos cascade — and most of the conventional responses are accelerating it rather than resolving it. TMP’s Cost of Chaos report, drawing on research with over 1,000 marketers and tech buyers, makes a compelling case for a different approach entirely. I spoke to Alastair Hussain, Chief Strategy Officer at TMP, for the latest episode of the Trust & Influence in B2B podcast

The chaos most B2B marketers are experiencing isn’t bad luck, and it isn’t simply the result of external turbulence. It is the predictable output of operating models that were already fragile before the pressure arrived — and that have been pushed well beyond their limits by a world that has shifted faster than the organisations within it.

That’s the central argument Alastair Hussain makes in TMP’s Cost of Chaos report, and it’s an argument that carries more weight for being grounded in data rather than instinct. More than half of marketers describe their working environment as chaotic. 77% of buying journeys are now described as complex or difficult. And nearly three-quarters of marketers report poor sleep — a number that speaks not just to professional pressure but to something more corrosive: the sustained psychological toll of operating without clarity or control.

“It’s quite the cocktail,” Hussain observes, with characteristic understatement.

The chaos cascade

To understand why chaos has become so pervasive, Hussain introduces the concept of the chaos cascade — a framework for tracing how macro-level instability filters down into organisational behaviour, buying patterns, and ultimately commercial performance.

At the top of the cascade sit forces that are genuinely large and genuinely fast-moving: geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty, the accelerating pace of technological change — AI most visibly, but with quantum computing already visible on the horizon. These aren’t background conditions to be managed around. They are active, ongoing disruptions that collide with one another and with the organisations trying to operate through them.

From there, the cascade works downward. Uncertainty drives risk aversion. Risk aversion triggers budget consolidation. Consolidation means that every significant buying decision attracts more scrutiny, more stakeholders, and more friction. Buying takes longer. Fewer decisions actually get made. Customer acquisition costs rise, net revenue retention drops, and businesses pivot from growth to profitability — restructuring, cutting costs, and placing short-term thinking at the centre of strategy.

For marketers, the cascade ends somewhere uncomfortable: being asked to deliver more, in more difficult conditions, with less. As Hussain puts it, “marketers are being asked to identify durable target segments amongst all this rapidly shifting market activity and volatility, to meet constantly changing objectives, whilst dealing with siloed internal teams and misaligned incentives.”

It is worth noting — as Hussain does — that much of this predates AI. A great deal of dysfunction that gets attributed to artificial intelligence is better explained by structural fragility that was already present. The chaos cascade was building before the latest wave of technology arrived to accelerate it.

Why the obvious response makes things worse

When faced with chaos, the instinct is to move faster. To invest in technology. To add more capability, more tools, more process. It is an understandable response — and, according to Hussain, almost entirely counterproductive.

The analogy he reaches for is vivid: “If everybody is running in different directions, then giving everyone a rocket pack and booster skates is probably not going to help people move forward to the place that you want them to get to.”

The problem isn’t speed. The problem is direction. And giving misaligned teams the ability to move faster doesn’t resolve the misalignment — it amplifies it. Hussain’s word for what happens instead is instructive: technology can “calcify” silos and misalignment rather than dissolve them. Organisations that expected Martech to act as an integrating force often found themselves with more platforms, more complexity, and the same fragmentation they started with — now harder to unpick because it has been built into the infrastructure.

Doing more of the wrong thing, faster, is not a strategy. It is an acceleration of the problem.

What coherence actually means

The alternative Hussain proposes is coherence — and he is careful to define it in terms that a CMO would recognise immediately, rather than as a consultancy abstraction.

At its most fundamental, coherence means things fitting together rather than pulling apart. “Chaos is literally things being pulled apart,” Hussain explains, “and coherence is things fitting together and being pulled together.”

In practice, this means asking a set of diagnostic questions that most marketing leaders can answer honestly if they’re willing to. Does your creative output — everything you’ve produced as a brand over the past year — look like it comes from the same organisation? Are your four Ps operating in concert, or are pricing, product, place, and promotion each running on separate tracks with separate owners? Are marketing and sales working from the same target segment definitions, or are they effectively speaking about entirely different customers without realising it?

Hussain identifies product as a particular pressure point. The Cost of Chaos research found that product was the most disconnected area within marketing functions — a finding he describes as “such a shame” given how central it is to the marketing mix. He attributes part of this to an over-rotation in B2B away from product as a result of the push towards demand generation and brand-led marketing: “Product almost became a slightly dirty word for marketers for a little while, which I don’t really agree with.” The correction, he argues, has gone too far — and buyers, who may spend 80% of their working week using a product, notice.

Coherence also has an internal dimension that matters as much as the external one. It requires clarity about how marketing creates value for the organisation, what metrics tell that story, and how those metrics are communicated to leadership. Without that clarity, marketing remains permanently reactive — “wafted by the wind,” as the conversation puts it — responding to whoever is loudest rather than driving the agenda.

Coherence is legible to buyers

The commercial case for coherence isn’t just logical — it’s empirical. One of the most striking findings from the Cost of Chaos research is that 97% of buyers noticed a difference when vendors operate coherently. That number is worth pausing on. It suggests that internal alignment — or the absence of it — is not invisible to the market. Buyers can tell.

Hussain connects this to the reliability component of trust. “One component of trust that pops up in most definitions is this idea of reliability,” he explains. “Do you do what you say you will do constantly? Do people say the same thing if I ask them the same question twice?” A chaotic brand, almost by definition, fails that test — because buyers encounter different stories, sometimes contradictory ones, at different touchpoints along the journey.

He goes further, introducing the concept of cognitive fluency — the psychological ease with which a message or brand can be processed. The evidence base here is substantive: there is a causatory link between cognitive fluency and perceived trustworthiness. When a brand is easy to process — consistent in its identity, coherent in its messaging, predictable in its behaviour — buyers are more likely to trust it. Coherence, in other words, is not just operationally efficient. It is a trust-building mechanism, whether or not it is consciously designed as one.

“Chaotic brands are less trustworthy,” Hussain states plainly, “because you are hearing different stories, sometimes contradictory stories, at different touchpoints along the buyer journey.”

The vendor trust issue also plays out on the buyer side of the research. Buyers cited too many decision makers, inconsistent messaging, and lack of vendor trust as their top barriers. Not all of these are within vendors’ control — the size of a buying committee is partly a function of the deal, and customer conversations online cannot be fully managed. But the messaging and trust dimensions are squarely within reach of any organisation willing to treat coherence as a discipline rather than a by-product.

Marketing leaders need to own the conversation

The pressure on CMOs right now borders on the paradoxical. They are expected to drive growth while managing fragmentation, budget constraints, and a buying environment that grows harder to navigate each quarter. Hussain’s view is that the way out of this paradox is not to wait for conditions to improve — it is to get on the front foot.

“Marketing leaders should absolutely be going ahead of the planning process with a view on what the budget is that they should be getting, the investment and support required in order to achieve the objectives that have been set,” he argues. “If you’re in a situation where someone else is telling you what resources you need and yet also setting the objectives and you don’t get any say in that, then you’re already on the back foot.”

The broader point is about where marketing sits in relation to the organisation’s understanding of the market itself. In a period of extreme volatility, customer and market intelligence is the most valuable input a business can have. Marketers — if they are doing their jobs — are the people who hold that intelligence. The CMOs who thrive in this environment, Hussain suggests, will be those who position themselves accordingly: not as owners of a tactical function, but as the people who understand what is happening in the market and can shape the conversation about what the business should do as a result.

It is a subtle but significant reframe — and one that coherence, internally as well as externally, makes possible.

Practical takeaways: five questions to diagnose your coherence gap

The shift from chaos to coherence doesn’t begin with a restructure or a new technology platform. It begins with an honest assessment of where things are currently failing to fit together. These five questions are a starting point:

1. Does your creative output from the past twelve months look like it comes from a single, distinctive organisation — or does it tell multiple stories that happen to share a logo?
2. Are marketing and sales working from the same target account or segment definitions? If you asked each team independently to describe your primary buyer, would you get the same answer?
3. How connected is marketing to product? Is the product team’s roadmap an input to marketing strategy, or something that arrives as a surprise?
4. Can you articulate, clearly and concisely, how marketing creates commercial value for the organisation — and is that story shared with and understood by leadership?
5. Is your team leading the planning conversation — bringing a view on objectives, investment, and what’s achievable — or receiving instructions and working backwards from them?