Growth Insights for CEOs

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

Seven Considerations in Evaluating your Marketing and Sales Process
Sun, Jun 23, 2013 — I just finished reading several books that come at the changes in the marketing and sales process from different perspectives. Launch by Michael Stelzner, discusses how to use social media to grow your brand and your business. It includes some very pragmatic tools and examples for the marketing crowd. I highly recommend it as a primer for anyone interested in how to optimize their social media efforts. Sales Shift by Frank Belzer presents how the buying process has changed and how it will continue to evolve. Of particular interest is Belzer’s discussion of why sales skills that have worked in the past will no longer be effective going forward. When considering the combination of these two perspectives, the transformation of the commercialization process is significant.