The Three Layers of Marketing (And Why Most Teams Only Manage One)

I recently sat down with Fes Askari, Senior Strategy Consultant, Advisory Services at DemandScience, to discuss how marketing actually works right now, not how the slide decks say it works. What came out of it was a simple framework: three layers of marketing that every company is running, whether they realize it or not.

Most teams only manage one layer well. That’s the problem.

Layer 1: Brand and Executive Marketing

This is the layer that reaches decision-makers before they’re in-market. It’s not just about generating a lead today. It’s about making sure that when the buying trigger finally hits, your name is already sitting in their head as the obvious call.

Most B2B teams underinvest here because it doesn’t show up in a pipeline report this quarter. Then they wonder why a competitor with a worse product wins the deal. The answer is usually simple: the competitor was already known. You weren’t.

Fes backed this up with data.

“I can show in the data accounts that have engaged with marketing. Brand awareness campaigns have 20 to 50 percent higher deal values than accounts that haven’t been involved in brand campaigns … The average deal value is 30 to 45 percent higher than those accounts that haven’t been exposed to marketing in that way.” — Fes Askari

“Accounts that have been exposed to brand marketing and that second layer of product marketing also have 27 percent faster deal cycles.” — Fes Askari

That’s the return on being known before the deal starts.

He also called out the channel most teams still treat as optional: connected TV.

“I don’t think enough brands are taking advantage of channels like connected TV … you can engage with audiences when they’re not in work mode and you build that brand salience and recall with them because they’re watching the World Cup or their favorite Netflix episode.” — Fes Askari

Most budgets are still siloed: a little brand here, a little lead gen there. The teams winning right now stop siloing and plan brand, product, and demand as one motion, often mapped a full year out against the events and moments that matter to their buyers.

Layer 2: Product Marketing

This is where the buyer actually touches the value. Product-led growth, trials, solution consulting, whatever your model is. This is where thought leadership either earns its keep or gets exposed.

If my executive narrative says one thing and my product experience says another, buyers notice. That gap is where deals stall. Sales calls it “buyer indecision.” It’s usually a messaging problem, not a buyer problem. Strong thought leadership with weak product clarity still loses the deal. The agent, or the human, that finds you doesn’t stick around if the follow-through doesn’t match the pitch.

Layer 3: Business-to-Agent Marketing

This is the layer nobody had ten years ago and everybody needs now. Fes calls it business-to-agent, or B2A: influencing the AI agents now doing research and shortlisting on a buyer’s behalf, and using agents internally to sharpen your own marketing output.

These agents aren’t browsing at random. They get fed a business outcome first, something like “$50 million in pipeline at a 20 percent conversion rate,” then go research and shortlist against it. They apply the same competing priorities a real buying committee would: a CMO optimizing for coverage, a CRO for conversion, a CFO for efficiency. And they pull their evidence from what’s publicly indexed: my thought leadership, my product content, whatever AI-optimized signal I’ve put into the world. If I’m not well represented there, I’m not on the shortlist. The human buyer never even gets the chance to disagree.

Ignore this layer and you’re marketing to a buyer who no longer makes the first move alone.

Why Orchestration Is the Real Bottleneck

None of these layers work in isolation. The hard part isn’t picking a layer to focus on. It’s getting brand, product, and agent-facing efforts to say the same thing at the same time, especially once you’re past the size where one person can hold the whole message in their head.

Most orchestration failures aren’t strategy failures. They’re coordination failures. Social says one thing, content says another, and sales is still running last quarter’s deck.

Fes also pushed back on the flywheel metaphor everyone reaches for here.

“The power of multi-channel is still undervalued. People aren’t really connecting the dots between connected TV, display advertising, social, lead generation… Instead of having everything in siloed budget, it’s like, let’s put it all together.” — Fes Askari

A flywheel implies momentum you can coast on. These three layers don’t work that way. Each one needs active, deliberate investment, or it stalls. That’s coordinated, funded effort across channels, tracked back to the accounts it touched.

Where AI Actually Fits

AI didn’t create these three layers. It just made the gaps between them more visible, faster.

Fes made a point worth sitting with: AI is only as useful as your data is ready. Most companies want the AI output before they’ve done the unglamorous work of getting their data structured and validated. That order doesn’t reverse.

He frames the right operating model as a sandwich:

“The sandwich model, which is essentially, you have the human, which sets the parameters, the guard rail. Then you have the workflow, this agent driven by the AI. And then the last piece is the validation with the human. So that sandwich model, human, agentic workflow, then AI. I think that’s a really strong use case for a lot of work that we do.” — Fes Askari

Skip either human layer and you get a fully agentic workflow with no one checking its work, which is exactly how hallucinations propagate undetected. The point worth keeping: AI in the loop, not AI instead of the loop. It’s a force multiplier for the people making decisions, not a replacement for the judgment behind them.

The Takeaway

Three layers. One message across all of them. AI as an amplifier, not a shortcut around the data work.

Companies that get this right aren’t doing more marketing. They’re doing marketing that doesn’t contradict itself by the time it reaches the buyer, the agent, or whoever’s doing the shortlisting these days.