The marketing function has become a factory for titles, acronyms, and unaccountable “strategy” that fails the only test that matters: measurable impact on claims, utilization, and outcomes. Too much work is optimized for decks, meetings, and vanity metrics—and not nearly enough is grounded in basic insurance fluency, network reality, or results you can defend in the data.
The org is so aggressively matrixed that responsibility evaporates. People “own” a narrow slice of a slice of a business, yet can’t clearly explain what they own, what the product actually is, what the acronyms mean, or how members are supposed to find in-network care. When ownership is that diluted, execution becomes guesswork and accountability becomes optional.
Meanwhile, member outreach is a chaotic pile-on. Digital sends emails. Marketing sends emails. MDLIVE sends emails. Express Scripts sends emails. There’s no single orchestrator, no shared plan, and no one accountable for the member experience end-to-end—just overlapping blasts and conflicting messages. Cigna doesn’t have a marketing organization; it has a fragmented broadcast system optimized for internal theater, not results.