I went to my local car dealer the other day. “Make me the fastest chick in town!” I cried, pointing to the ridiculously shiny beast of a car, growling at me from the corner of the yard. “Certainly,” said the dealer, “that will be £25,000.”

“Well,” I said, “I have £10,000.” The dealer’s face began to darken. “No, wait!” I said cheerily, “you haven’t heard all of it yet! I want to add a few things. Now – let’s see. I want some nice new alloys on it. And a new paint job – metallic pink obviously. And a satnav system. Thing is I don’t want to pay any more for any of that, but I would like it all done this afternoon. Oh and I’m sure I’ll add a few more bits and pieces later on. I take it that’s all OK?”

I left the dealership rapidly and not by my own propulsion.

It’s a fanciful tale but a familiar one. Every day we cope with projects that grow and grow, budgets that stay rock tight, and timescales that are to say the least demanding. Every business wants to be the fastest chick in town, and some have the insight to see what exceptional marketing can do for them. But when it comes to the reckoning, do businesses really value marketing? Or, and it’s hard to believe we are still having this debate, is it still seen as an overhead, a place to cut costs, a place to scrimp rather than invest?

Perhaps we marketers ourselves are to blame. It’s a troubled profession, famed for its bullshit and rightly so in many cases. Marketing has been raised to a religion, the true path to bottom line bliss, and like many religions can be taken over by the wily, the loquacious and worst of all, the incompetent. With most companies having been the victim of some bad marketing at some time or other, it puts us in a difficult position. The real bottom line is, it’s difficult for a marketer to gain trust. Difficult to convince people that a decent, strategic marketing approach takes a bit of time – time you’d pay your mechanic for, time you’d pay your lawyer for, but time you’re somehow loathed to pay your marketing agency for.

And so – a constant need to justify ourselves. No harm in accountability mind. I’m a great fan of Peter Doyle and his value-based marketing philosophy. Marketers, he argues, are increasingly marginalised in business because of their abject failure to measure, or even produce, financial results. But inspired marketing really can bring results – just ask clients like Menu Shop, Audience Systems and 3Sphere.

Smaller companies are often scared of spending their marketing budgets. After all,  the smaller the marketing budget, the more every penny spent has to count. But those pennies do have to be spent. A website for instance may look like a bunch of words and pictures on a page but leading up to that point are hours and days of planning, design, copywriting, image manipulation, coding, checking, changing, changing, and inevitably, changing again. And every change sparks off more planning, more redesign, a tweak to the copywriting, a change to the image, more coding and – well you see where I’m going.

With web projects in particular, there’s usually a point sometime in the development of a project when the client sees its true potential. Of course, they saw potential from the start, or they never would have commissioned it. But suddenly the imagination goes wild. “We could do this! And this! And maybe even…. could you….. is there any chance of…. [hushed tones] that?” This we blame ourselves for, and we’re proud to have ignited the spark that fired the imagination. But this takes an hour. And that – a day. And sometimes, just sometimes, we just can’t squeeze it all into your budget.

Look, I know we marketers are a strange species. We say “brand” a lot, we like lining things up and we get weird thrills from your web stats. But please just try to understand us. Just as you understood the car dealer who gave me the boot earlier in our tale. We can double the number of products on your website half way through its development. We can help you exploit a crazy new opportunity by totally rewording your brochure a day before it’s due to print. And we KNOW it will give you the results you crave (else we’d tell you not to do it). But please don’t make us apologise for billing you just a little bit more for it. After all there can only be one fastest chick on this block – and we love it to be you.