Every marketer I know is exhausted. Not from the work itself, but from redoing it every time marketing leadership panic sets in. And lately, that panic seems to hit faster than you can say "pivot strategy."

Here's what marketing leadership panic looks like in real time: One competitor posts something shiny on LinkedIn, and suddenly the entire strategy must change. Campaigns that took weeks to develop get scrapped mid-launch. Teams are told to "move faster" without ever being allowed to finish what they started. It's often positioned as agility, but it's not agile. It's anxiety from the top, raining down in an all-hands monsoon while marketing's still trying to find a dry spot to think.

The stats back this up. 7 in 10 professionals across the media, marketing and creative sectors reported experiencing burnout in the past 12 months, and the marketing industry experiences the highest burnout rate of any industry, with a staggering 83.3% of marketers reporting burnout at some stage in their professional careers.

We're not burning out from creating. We're burning out from trying to build in perpetual chaos.

The Scroll-and-Pivot Disease

At one healthcare EHR I worked at, our CEO would scroll through LinkedIn and pivot our messaging weekly. Sometimes hourly. He called it "being responsive." What it really was: reactive, erratic, and like watching someone play whack-a-mole with a marketing budget.

We never built enough momentum to see what could've worked because nothing lasted long enough to prove itself. It was like planting seeds and then digging them up every three days to check if they were growing. Spoiler alert: they weren't.

At another company (a direct competitor of that same EHR), we spent hours analyzing other brands' content after it went live, trying to replicate the same ideas. Our own campaigns were strong, but they never saw daylight. As soon as someone else launched something "better," our work was shelved so we could shift gears and chase it.

It was demoralizing. Every strategy felt like déjà vu. Every brainstorm felt like a rerun of last week's panic meeting.

When I first posted about this on LinkedIn, it took off. 66,000 impressions and hundreds of comments later, it was clear this struck a nerve. Marketers weren’t just agreeing, they were relieved someone finally said it out loud.

When "Agility" Becomes Anxiety

Marketing leadership panic has transformed what should be strategic agility into something closer to organizational whiplash. The pattern is everywhere now, and it's killing great marketing while burning out the people capable of producing it.

It's firefighting a thousand fires before lunch because leadership saw a paid ad from a competitor in their LinkedIn feed. It's being asked for "fresh ideas" while simultaneously being told to "do what they're doing." It's the cognitive dissonance of being a creative professional in an environment where creativity goes to die.

Over half of the more than 3,500 marketers surveyed have felt overwhelmed (58.1%) and undervalued (56.1%) over the past 12 months. Half of the respondents (50.8%) have experienced emotional exhaustion. These aren't just feelings, they're symptoms of systemic marketing leadership panic infecting entire organizations.

The Real Cost of Leadership That Can't Hold Steady

When marketing leadership panic becomes the operating system, three things die:

Creativity evaporates. You can't innovate when you're constantly looking over your shoulder to see what everyone else is doing. The best ideas need space to breathe, room to fail, and permission to be weird. Marketing leadership panic creates the opposite environment: one where only safe, derivative work survives.
Trust disintegrates. When direction changes hourly, teams stop trusting leadership to mean what they say. Why invest in a campaign when you know it'll be killed before launch? Why pitch bold ideas when you know they'll be watered down the moment someone posts something tangentially related?
Every brand starts sounding the same. When teams are forced to chase instead of build, differentiation becomes impossible. Everyone's responding to the same stimuli, creating the same reactive content, chasing the same trends. It's like a high school cafeteria where everyone's desperately trying to sit at the cool table—and nobody realizes the cool table doesn't actually exist.

The data tells us that over half of marketers aged 25 to 34 are already concerned that they may burn out in their current role. These are people who should be hitting their stride, not already planning their exit strategy because marketing leadership panic has turned their dream job into a stress factory.

The Leadership Mirror Test

Let me be clear: if your marketing team is burning out from "creating content," you're diagnosing the wrong problem. People love to say marketers are burning out from creating, but I don't think that's true. We're burning out from trying to build in perpetual chaos caused by marketing leadership panic at the top.

I've watched brilliant strategists reduced to glorified order-takers. I've seen creative teams stop pitching their best ideas because they know those ideas won't survive first contact with leadership's LinkedIn scroll. I've witnessed entire departments develop learned helplessness because nothing they build gets to stand long enough to matter.

And you know what's wild? Marketing teams have learned to just nod along to the chaos while quietly keeping their résumés updated.

What Actually Fixes This

I don't have a perfect answer, but I know this much: if leadership and investors want real results, they need to take a hard look at their own behavior and recognize when marketing leadership panic is running the show. I’d start with these three things:

Stop chasing whatever's trending. Your competitor's viral post doesn't invalidate your strategy. Their success doesn't mean your approach is failing. Different doesn't mean better, and newer doesn't mean more effective. Let your work develop its own trajectory instead of constantly redirecting it.
Stop rewriting the strategy because another brand had a good post. Marketing isn't a game of Simon Says. Just because someone else zigged doesn't mean you need to zag. In fact, when everyone zigs together, that's usually when the brand that held steady and kept zagging wins.
Stop mistaking speed for success. Fast isn't a strategy. "Move faster" isn't actionable feedback. "We need this by EOD" doesn't magically create better work—it just creates work that looks like it was done by EOD. Marketing leadership panic loves speed because it feels like action, but velocity without direction is just chaos with a deadline.

Your marketing teams know how to build momentum. Three-quarters of marketing professionals agree that more time for focused work would alleviate their burnout. They understand compounding. They get brand building. But only if you let them.

Trust them. Give them time. Let the work have time to breathe and grow.

Momentum Comes From Trust, Not Panic

Marketing doesn't collapse from lack of effort—that's just not true. Marketing collapses when marketing leadership panic becomes policy, when anxiety masquerades as agility, and when leadership refuses to stand still long enough to see what could've worked.

Your best campaigns are probably already written. They're sitting in a deck somewhere, waiting for permission to exist. Your most talented marketers already know what would work. They're just waiting for leadership to stop scrolling, stop pivoting, and start building.

Because here's what I've learned watching this pattern play out across SaaS for years: the companies that win aren't the ones moving fastest. They're the ones moving with intention. They're the ones whose leadership can hold steady when the anxiety hits. They're the ones who trust their teams enough to let ideas mature past the first competitor post.

So here's my question: Has "agility" at your company turned into constant reaction? Is marketing leadership panic masquerading as responsiveness? What's it doing to your teams?

Because if we're being honest, you already know the answer. The question is: are you ready to stop scrolling long enough to fix it?

The Cult of Agility: How Marketing Leadership Panic is Burning Marketers Alive