Business Growth Strategies For CEOs: Top CMOs On Marketing Strategy Implementations

What Is Marketing, Really? Why Founders and CEOs Must Lead the Most Misunderstood Function in the Business

Thu, Jul 9, 2026 | Posted by Michael Lang

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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The Solution to Mediocre Marketing? A CMO Leading Multiple Niche Agencies

Thu, Apr 26, 2012 — It sounds like a great idea to turn your business's entire multichannel marketing campaign over to a single large marketing agency, doesn't it? You simply tell the agency, "Here's our target market, this is our brand, here's how we would like to position ourselves. Now go create the content, buy the media and help us grow." And the agency promotes itself as a "full-service" provider capable of handling every detail of your marketing from soup to nuts. So why are the results so frequently lackluster?

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What Is Marketing, Really? Why Founders and CEOs Must Lead the Most Misunderstood Function in the Business

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The Solution to Mediocre Marketing? A CMO Leading Multiple Niche Agencies

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