This paper reports on the perceived sidelining of marketing, and in particular Relationship Marketing, within the contemporary organisation and analyses the potential consequences of this. Based on in-depth interviews with eleven top European marketing practitioners the research suggests that marketing's status has moved on little from the time when Whittington and Whipp (1992: 53) lamented that 'the marketing profession appears to still lack influence' and the call went out to bring marketing back to the centre stage by ditching the marketing mix in favour of the relational paradigm. Indeed, if anything, the position of marketing (and the marketer) appears, from this research, to be even more out of step in the contemporary organisation despite the general acceptance of customer- centric strategies, the traditional domain of the marketer. The reality of the new century is marketers are rarely seen to have either the competence or the powerbase to influence senior management. As a symptom of this demise the paper notes that marketers have effectively lost control of relational strategy as Relationship Marketing transforms, in many cases, into general-management-dominated and -controlled Customer Relationship Management (CRM).