Marketing in Greece isn’t dead, but it’s not alive either
Walk into any business meeting in Greece or Cyprus today and you’ll hear the same words: content, branding, funnels, engagement.
Ten years ago those words belonged to specialists. Now they belong to everyone. Agencies multiplied, like coffee shops. Social media created an army of instant experts. Owners everywhere rushed to build content strategies and brand stories.
Beneath all the surface noise, the same patterns kept surfacing. Companies investing serious money in digital marketing without being able to tell whether it’s working. Entrepreneurs piecing together their understanding of what marketing does from scattered social media posts, e-commerce influencers, and the occasional underprepared consultant they are hiring.
The boom had produced volume and very little clarity.
This wasn’t just an observation from the outside. As we stepped back to review our own approach — what we deliver, how we work, and what Greek companies actually need from marketing and branding right now — our earlier doubts proved justified. Marketing in Greece isn’t dead, but it’s not alive either.
The part everyone skips
Before getting into the state of the industry, it’s worth pausing on a question that sounds almost too basic to ask. What is marketing?
The definition has never stayed still. Peter Drucker argued in 1954 that marketing is “the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.” Theodore Levitt warned in 1960 that companies fail when they focus on products instead of the people they serve. Kotler formalized the discipline and has since revised it six times, from mass production to customer-centric strategy to what he now calls metamarketing, where physical and digital experience fully converge. The American Marketing Association itself has rewritten its official definition four times since 1935. Marketing has redefined itself with every major shift in technology, culture, and consumer behavior.
Branding —the deeper layer beneath marketing— took this further. It moved firms away from thinking purely in terms of product offering, and toward something more existential. As David Aaker argued, a brand should go beyond functional benefits to consider organizational values, a higher purpose, and the emotional and social meaning it holds for the people it serves. Companies that grow consistently, in any market, are the ones that got this right first. In Greece, that step is almost always skipped.
It requires something most organizations underestimate: internal alignment before external communication. You cannot credibly communicate a brand that doesn’t reflect the actual culture and operations behind it.
Marketing by default
Marketing in Greek firms is frequently misunderstood at the structural level, and that usually starts at the top. In most Greek SMEs, the founder is the company.
They handle sales, operations, client relationships, and strategy simultaneously, almost every time out of necessity. As Rivero and Theodore argued in 2013, Greece’s limited industrialization prevented the formation of large corporations where marketing develops as a dedicated function. An economy dominated by small firms whose owners default to personal relationships as their primary marketing approach. Marketing gets absorbed into an already overloaded set of responsibilities, and a kind of myopic mentality takes hold. It becomes an execution task, something to handle after everything else is done.
This shows up most visibly in how budgets are framed. Marketing is almost universally treated as a cost to control, not a capability to grow. In our own experience, some B2C companies we’ve partnered with allocated remarkably similar marketing budgets to B2B companies —somewhat around 2–4% of gross revenue— despite having fundamentally different communication needs, sales cycles, and audience dynamics. Once the system needed to measure effectiveness is never built, the narrative that “marketing doesn’t work” conveniently confirms itself.
In this context, word-of-mouth feels like the rational alternative. “We grew through referrals” is something the average Greek business owner would say with pride, and in B2B settings, the logic holds. Personal reputation carries genuine strategic weight where trust is the primary purchase driver. In B2C, it breaks down. You are selling to a market, and the firms that remain dependent on personal connections are, without always realizing it, choosing to stay small.
Greek audiences are more fragmented, more skeptical of advertising, and more likely to research independently before committing. The customer a company needs to reach next is someone who doesn’t know them, yet.
The Greek Landscape
The agency scene in Greece has always been varied. Over the last few years, two distinct profiles have pulled it in opposite directions.
A new generation of marketers is here. Young, digitally native, and culturally sharp. They understand platforms intuitively and carry an instinct for connection that experienced practitioners often lack.
The landscape is also shaped by two recognizable phenomena. The first is those raised by social media, whose natural output is short-form, entertainment-driven content; a format that echoes Greece’s long obsession with television humor (the medium changed, the instinct didn’t). The second is a generation that discovered digital marketing through internet personalities who positioned it as the next big opportunity after NFTs and crypto-investments, with the ambition of retirement before their thirties.
These reflect a profession that became accessible before it was understood. From around 10–15 schools offering digital marketing courses in 2018 to over 30 today, with the number of courses nearly tripling. More people are entering the profession than ever, and fewer places are ready to give them somewhere meaningful to go.
The familiar names remain in place. Subsidiaries of global networks, firms embedded within multinational groups, and homegrown names that have become local reference points. Their value is clearest at scale, in large projects, media buying, and work built on institutional and state connections. In day-to-day partnerships, a different pattern tends to emerge: the pitch is made by senior leadership, the work is handed to whoever is available. According to testimonies by former employees, the internal reality often involves insufficient training, limited professional development, and a gap between what the agency’s name promises and what the team is equipped to deliver. Clients pay for the reputation; what they receive depends on who happens to be assigned.
What these profiles share is what Greeks call maniera, a way of doing things applied regardless of the company in front of you. A style imported or inherited and fitted onto the next client whether it suits them or not. Organizations end up with marketing that looks like marketing, without ever becoming their own.
Between these two poles, there is a middle ground that rarely gets named. Agencies and studios doing honest, sometimes exceptional work in performance marketing, social media, branding, or all three. Many operate without the visibility of the bigger names.
Fragmentation, however, is common here too. Printing houses taking on branding, web developers building digital marketing strategies, social media managers producing content without a brand framework to guide it. The individual pieces may be well-executed. A unifying thread connecting them is usually what’s missing.
Quarantine Epiphanies
It seems like ages since the pandemic. But the aftershocks are still visible in how Greek businesses relate to digital.
That period was a forced experiment in digital commerce and communication. Businesses that had avoided the question for years suddenly had no choice. And yet, once the immediate pressure lifted, many reverted. The urgency dissolved. The habits didn’t fully form.
Prior to the covid outbreak, only about one in three Greek enterprises (33.5%) considered digital transformation a very important strategic priority. A research conducted during the pandemic on Greek SMEs revealed something more uncomfortable. Businesses weren’t even treating digital as a growth strategy, merely as a way to retain existing customers. When asked about the barriers, the top answer wasn’t cost or access to tools. It was lack of willingness to change, followed by lack of knowledge and inadequate management. The challenge was never infrastructural. It was cultural.
The tendency to act on crisis rather than opportunity is a pattern Greek entrepreneurs know well but rarely say out loud.
Meraki, Automated
If digital transformation happened (and still happens) slowly and reluctantly, AI adoption is moving at a different pace entirely.
A market that struggled to embrace data intelligence, e-commerce, and smart CRM systems for over a decade has welcomed AI with open arms. According to a 2025 report, over a third of Greek businesses are now using AI, with a year-on-year growth rate of 55% from 2024.
The barrier to entry is lower, the novelty is higher, and the promise of efficiency maps directly onto the anxieties of a financially pressured market. For many firms, AI is also quietly serving another purpose, accelerating through the digital transformation they never fully completed. Instead of building the infrastructure gradually, they are reaching for tools that seem to deliver the outcomes without requiring the groundwork.
Without the strategic foundations to direct them, AI tools produce output that is fast and plentiful but difficult to evaluate, correct, or build on. The more interesting question has less to do with whether to use AI, and more with what it frees you up to focus on. For businesses with strong brand foundations, AI is a multiplier. For those without, it’s an amplifier of confusion.
Talent isn’t the problem
There is, despite everything described above, one thing the Greek market has no shortage of, and that is creativity.
Greek graphic designers, creatives, and art directors produce work of a consistently high standard.This isn’t accidental. It grows out of a design heritage that spans generations: from Angelos Spachis introducing Bauhaus aesthetics to Greek commercial art in the 1930s, through Katzourakis and Carabott professionalizing the discipline at their K&K Athens Advertising Centre in the 1960s, to Vouvoula Skoura’s experimental multimedia work and Panos Haratzopoulos, founder of fonts.gr (also known as Greek Digital Types or Ellenike Psephiake Typotheke) back in 1995. That’s more than half a century of visual intelligence.
Design at this standard, however, mostly thrives where it is recognized – institutions, cultural commissions, the art world, or within established creative studios whose rates reflect a level of craft that most SMEs simply cannot access. That work earned its place. What hasn’t been solved is how to bring that same standard of thinking to the brands people actually interact with every day — those that have historically been priced out of it or never thought to ask for it.
Brands are not separate from the communities these designers serve. They are part of them. The restaurant on the corner, the logistics company moving goods across the Aegean, the local farmer who produces, processes, and packages his/her own lentils. These are as much a part of the cultural fabric as any gallery or festival. When their visual identity is treated as an afterthought, it’s not just a missed business opportunity. It’s a missed opportunity to improve the world people actually look at — the storefronts, the packaging, the screens.
Everything described in this piece is, in varying degrees, a global phenomenon. What makes the Greek context distinctive is the particular combination: a business culture shaped by decades of economic turbulence, where marketing was absorbed into survival rather than treated as a discipline; a society where personal relationships carry more weight than formal processes; and a creative industry with a genuine design heritage that still mostly serves institutions and high-end clients rather than the commercial brands that need it most.
The path forward doesn’t require a revolution. It requires businesses and agencies alike to subordinate instinct to intelligence. To stop treating marketing as a cost to minimize or a task to delegate to whoever is available. To accept that it is a discipline. One that rewards research, consistency, patience, and honest self-knowledge.
Greece has the creative energy, the cultural richness, and the entrepreneurial hunger to produce marketing that matters. What’s missing is the willingness to build before making noise. To treat every touchpoint as part of a brand experience that earns attention rather than chasing it.
That’s the work. It’s slower, less glamorous, and harder to sell.
References & Further Reading
Aaker, D. (2025). Aaker on Branding: The Playbook to Building Strong Brands. 2nd edition. Morgan James Publishing
Drucker, P. (2012). The practice of management. Revised edition. London: Routledge
Karaiskos, D. (2026). ‘The designer who renewed visual memory’, ekathimerini.com
Kargas, A., Gialeris, E., Komisopoulos, F., Lymperiou, A. and Salmon, I. (2023). ‘Digital Maturity and Digital Transformation Strategy among Greek Small and Medium Enterprises’, Administrative Sciences, 13(11), 236
Kotler, P., Kartajaya, H., Huan, H. D., & Mussry, J. (2023). Entrepreneurial Marketing: Beyond Professionalism to Creativity, Leadership, and Sustainability. Wiley
Kotler, P., Kartajaya, H. & Setiawan, I. (2023). Marketing 6.0: The future is immersive. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons
Levitt, T. (1960). Marketing Myopia. Harvard Business Review, 38, 45-56
Strand Partners and Amazon Web Services (2025). Unlocking Greece’s AI Potential 2025