Defence consultancies who decide to invest in marketing usually start the same way. They evaluate two or three agencies. They pick one with reasonable credentials. Six months later, the campaign has produced little, the spend has been substantial, and the consultancy quietly concludes that “marketing doesn’t really work for us.”

This conclusion is wrong. Marketing didn’t fail because it doesn’t work in defence. It failed because the agency was running a playbook calibrated for a different market. Generic agencies are not bad at their jobs. They are bad at defence, for three specific reasons.

They optimise for addressable audiences, not named accounts.

The dominant model in modern B2B marketing is audience-based. Define an ideal customer profile, target the addressable population through paid and organic channels, convert some percentage into pipeline. Generic agency skills, tools, and metrics are all built around this model.

Defence does not work this way. The buyer set for a defence consultancy is a small group of named organisations: a handful of primes, a slightly larger group of integrators, a defined set of national MoDs and EU institutions, and the consortia that form around each procurement. The total addressable buyer set across the EU is not in the millions. It is in the dozens.

This changes everything. Audience marketing assumes value comes from engaging many people cheaply. Named-account marketing assumes value comes from engaging a small number of specific people expensively. The two require different skills. Audience marketing needs creative, paid media, conversion optimisation, and analytics. Named-account marketing needs deep research, personalised outreach, multi-touch sequences, and patience.

A generic agency given a defence brief will instinctively try to make the engagement larger. They will propose LinkedIn campaigns targeting “defence procurement professionals in Europe.” None of this reaches the people who actually decide. The actual targets are the BD lead at Airbus for a specific capability area, the programme manager at Leonardo for a specific contract, the director at the EDA responsible for a specific work programme. These are people, by name. They cannot be reached by audience targeting because they are not an audience.

They use channels that don’t reach defence buyers.

Generic agencies are channel specialists. LinkedIn ads, programmatic, paid search, content syndication, email nurture, webinars. These channels work because they scale, and they scale because the audiences they target are present on them.

Senior defence buyers are not. Senior people at primes and integrators have communications functions that filter inbound. Their personal LinkedIn presence is often deliberately minimal. They are not on the public-content side of the internet because their work requires discretion. Decision-makers inside MoDs and EU institutions operate under tighter constraints still.

The channels that do reach them are different. Direct outreach through professional networks, sometimes through trusted introductions. Presence at the specific events where they engage with industry. Relationships built across multiple procurement cycles. None of these are channels a generic agency runs at scale. They are forms of patient, individual engagement that don’t fit the agency’s operational model.

When a generic agency is given a defence brief, they propose what they know. LinkedIn campaigns, content production, paid promotion. The campaigns produce impressions on the wrong people. Content gets downloaded by junior researchers and competitor consultancies, not by buyers. The agency reports the campaign metrics; the metrics look defensible; the consultancy spends six months waiting for them to translate into pipeline. They never do, because the people who would generate pipeline were never reached.

They treat conversations as conversions rather than as the start of long buying cycles.

The B2B marketing playbook is built around the conversion funnel. The goal is to move prospects through efficiently. The agency’s success is measured by how many conversions happen in a given quarter.

Defence procurement runs on different time scales. A consultancy meeting a senior person at a prime for the first time is not converting them to a near-term opportunity. They are entering a relationship that may, eighteen months from now, produce consideration in a specific procurement round. The “conversion” is the moment that senior person agrees the consultancy should be considered when the next relevant procurement opens, which might be a year away. None of the standard funnel metrics capture this.

A generic agency, trained on funnel optimisation, doesn’t know how to operate here. They drop relationships that don’t convert within their measurement window. They push for the meeting, then for the proposal, then for the close, on time scales that don’t match how defence procurement works. The push damages the relationship, because senior defence buyers can tell when they are being moved through a funnel by someone who doesn’t understand their world.

The deeper issue is what generic agencies do with the long quiet periods. In a defence buying cycle, there are months where nothing visible happens. To a generic agency, this looks like a stalled lead and triggers their re-engagement playbook. To the defence buyer, it looks like a marketing program that doesn’t understand them. They disengage permanently. A relationship that could have been worth a serious project two years later is killed by the agency’s inability to wait.

What this means for choosing a marketing partner

Generic agencies are bad at defence for the same reason an agency built for hospitality is bad at industrial machinery: the methodology was built for a different market. The skills that win in one market actively misfire in another, even when the agency is talented and well-intentioned.

Three diagnostic questions cut through the noise.

Ask what their unit of work is. If they describe their approach in terms of campaigns, audiences, or channel mix, they are calibrated for audience marketing. If they describe it in terms of named accounts, named decision-makers, and account-specific engagement plans, they may be calibrated for the market you operate in.

Ask which defence events they have worked around. The specific names matter. An agency that has run pre-event campaigns into EDF info days, NEDS, NATO Industry Forum, or EUDIS events knows how the timelines compress, when attendee lists publish, what the response patterns look like. An agency that has not, no matter how confident they sound, will learn at your expense.

Ask how they handle long quiet periods in a buying cycle. A generic agency will describe their re-engagement playbook. A defence-calibrated partner will talk about waiting, judgment, and the specific signals that justify re-engagement versus continued patience. The answer reveals whether they understand the rhythm of the market.

Marketing works in defence. It just works differently, and the firms that figure this out, often by hiring partners who already have, win the senior projects that the firms running the SaaS playbook watch from outside.