Growth Insights for CEOs
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What Is Marketing, Really? Why Founders and CEOs Must Lead the Most Misunderstood Function in the Business
Executive Takeaways
- Marketing is a core enterprise capability, not a support function, and deserves the same CEO-level engagement as Finance and Operations.
- Without a unifying system, individually reasonable decisions accumulate into random acts of marketing.
- Modern tools make execution faster, but they don't create strategic clarity, so the gap between activity and alignment keeps widening.
- CEOs can't delegate marketing entirely. Leading it means ensuring insight, strategy, and execution stay connected.
This blog is part of Chief Outsiders’ Marketing Leadership for CEOs series, an ongoing examination of the critical dimensions of Marketing (the capital “M” is intentional, as you’ll see) that every CEO needs to understand.
Recent Posts

Are You Committing Marketing Malpractice? 4 Ways That CEOs Miss the Marketing Mark
Wed, Aug 27, 2014 — A prospective client recently reached out to me, having found me by searching for fractional chief marketing officers on the Internet. This C-suite executive, who shall remain nameless, dispensed with formalities and said, “I am interviewing 15 marketing firms, and I’d like a list of things that we could do for $20,000.” After I took a beat to absorb his “unique” approach, I responded as any ethical Chief Marketing Officer should – calmly explaining that there are many, many steps required before we could even begin to develop a budget to spend those $20,000 hard-earned marketing dollars – things like identifying goals, objectives, priorities and the like.