We need to avoid the trap where marketing is blamed for weak growth while being excluded from the decisions that shaped it.
In a lot of organisations, marketing is treated like the paint shop. Useful when something needs launching. Handy for making things look coherent. But ultimately secondary to the likes of finance and operations which ‘run the machine’.
That’s such a dangerous worldview. The main reason a company survives is that customers keep choosing it. That choice is shaped by what we offer, how we price it, how we explain it, how we deliver it, and how we behave when something goes wrong. Marketing is tangled up in all of that. It’s not just just campaigns and comms.
This is why marketing is a leadership issue. Branding Strategy Insider recently argued that the CEO and board have to treat marketing as central to the firm, rather than a silo focused on communications.
If marketing is mainly viewed as a service function, it will be busy but not influential. Meanwhile, the strategic work that actually determines demand gets made without a strong customer voice in the room. Companies drift into their own world of what finance and operations can see happening. Then they act surprised when the market does not respond or chooses a competitor with a better story.
So what does “marketing at the highest level” look like in a B2B company? It looks like leadership treating customer understanding as a core input to decisions. It looks like the board asking not “what did marketing do this quarter?” but “what did we learn about the market, and how did we respond?”
That’s how we avoid the trap where marketing is blamed for weak growth while being excluded from the decisions that shaped it.