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.
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What can Industrial and Manufacturing CEOs do Right Now?
Thu, Mar 19, 2020 — Industry Specific Advice in a Time of Crisis from the Chief Outsiders CMOs These are challenging times. The actions you take now and in the coming weeks will have a huge impact on what happens to your company, your customers and your employees. Some of the challenges we will face during this crisis will apply to all sectors, but some will be industry specific. To help you decide where your focus should be, we assembled panels of Chief Marketing Officers from our Tribe at Chief Outsiders who have spent their careers working in your industry with companies like yours, to discuss what CEOs need to think about doing, right now. The following summary encapsulates the highlights of our panel discussion for the Industrial Manufacturing industry, hosted by Art Saxby and featuring CMOs Dawn Werry, and Dennis Bailen. For the full benefit, view the discussion video in its entirety (19 minutes). Short of time? See the discussion highlights (6 minutes).