Here’s the modern marketing conundrum: On the one hand it has become ridiculously sophisticated, and perhaps even over-engineered, -segmented and -specialised. And yet at the same time it’s ridiculed and its status with the consumer and rest of the business has never been lower.

Perhaps over successive decades it’s gradually lost real significance, has been chipped away and has become separated from the business. Gradually pieces of the strategic marketing role have been landgrabbed by CSR department, corporate affairs, HR and even finance.

Technology means that interested consumers can often hold more information than the marketeer about their company finance and reputational issues.

Marketing has almost become a dirty word, not just with consumers but with marketeers themselves. In one meeting I was at recently a marketing client used the term ‘too marketing’ – meant in this case as a derogatory statement implying that there was no evident truth to the idea or the campaign. Marketing has also become synoymous with the veneer that brands employ to hide dirty truths about themselves and the company behind them, or to fool us into thinking they are something they’re not.

And finally as if this wasn’t enough it also obviously suffers from the backlash against consumerism. Nowhere better summed up than by Jonathon Porritt: “The cumulative impact of billions of corporate dollars spent marketing their products, year after year after year, stimulating, reinforcing and exacerbating people’s consumerist fantasies, is almost wholly pernicious.”

Ask people randomly what the definition of marketing is and you’ll get a variety of sales, communication or even getting people to buy stuff the don’t need or want. As the business environment gets tougher it’s even harder to persuade business people that marketing is worthwhile. Marketing is struggling to justify its role and position at the top table.

But marketing is not just about offering more choice than is needed and persuading people to consume more. It also offers us a salvation and, in doing so, a way to be seen as value-creating again. To dispute the claim that marketeers ‘don’t understand other parts of the business’.

Marketeers of the future will excel by taking a stand – and more importantly an interest – in business. We have to avoid thinking myopically about category and promotion and think big about the context of this business in the world, and therefore the potential significance of marketing. The only way that marketing will succeed is in connecting business with a higher purpose, thereby creating enchanced value.

The definition of marketing needs to evolve from being language wholly associated with transactional elements, to take into account its new role in society and peoples lives as well as business.

Try this: Introducing new, improving marketing. All the consumer insight that you are used to but now with added strategic function. Not only does marketing stimulate and fulfil consumer demand, it helps broker change in people’s lives and in society as a whole. New marketing has the power and desire to turn consumption into a creative act.

We’re not talking about just another smoothie here folks. Finally it is something that the world needs.