In many organizations, marketing doesn’t get a seat at the adult table. Sometimes this is obvious. For example, virtually every function’s leader is in the C-suite, but the marketing leader is a VP. 

More often, it’s a subtle power dynamic that anyone watching closely can quickly decipher. You realize that the marketing leader (whose title could be anything from CMO to director of marketing) is not driving a marketing strategy to solve CEO-level problems. Rather, they’re just taking orders from the rest of the C-suite or managing and implementing tactical programs such as SEO-based content marketing to generate leads.

Strategic marketing isn’t merely a lead gen machine, though. And it’s certainly not an order-taking one. 

The purpose of marketing is to build a company’s reputation and relationships to increase, accelerate, and enlarge sales. Strategic marketing accomplishes that by solving a business problem through the tools of reputation and relationship building. 

What does it look like when marketing is solving a business problem?

The business problem many people think marketing should be solving is “We need more leads” (or pipeline or growth). Understandable! That’s the core result of good marketing.

But the business problem is usually not that you don’t have enough leads. That’s the outcome of the problem. The problem is something deeper — a structural challenge the entire business is facing that is leading to a lack of leads, pipeline, or growth. And once you diagnose that deeper problem, marketing can help remedy it. 

Here are some examples of a business problem that can inhibit growth:

• We’re in a declining category

• We’re undifferentiated

• We were once hot shit, but we’re losing ground to competitors

These problems all go beyond marketing. The first is structural (which market are we in, and what kind of product or service do we offer?). The second is product-based or at least product-related (and applies to many adtech companies in commoditized categories). And the third could be a question of product disadvantages, positioning, or sales. But in all likelihood, none of these challenges is merely a marketing problem that can be solved by just doing more marketing.

This is how marketing earns a seat at the adult table — by identifying the no. 1 problem the company, and by extension the CEO, is facing and then figuring out how the tools of reputation and relationship building can help solve that problem. In that scenario, marketing is working alongside product/engineering, finance, and sales to help solve a CEO-level problem. It’s not merely taking orders or doing blog posts to drive leads for an organization that might be in structural decline.

What can marketing add to the conversation?

Marketing’s job is to grow and condition the reputation of the company in the market, so it is particularly well positioned to be the voice of that reputation (in other words, the voice of the customer). 

The CEO is focused on the company’s overall trajectory and market opportunities. The product and engineering folks are focused on product and technology. The sales people talk to customers but are also focused on selling what’s in front of them (and quarterly quotas incentivize “how do I get this over the line?” thinking). 

Marketing’s job is to stand athwart this whirring machine yelling, “Stop! What does the customer actually think of us? What do they actually want?” Often, the marketer will discover that the company’s perception among its customers is a bit different from the perception of it as told by the business’ other leaders. And it is then the marketer’s role, having perceived this gap, to articulate it, formulate the business problem impeding growth, and tell a story that will bridge the gap between the company’s existing perception and what it wants its perception to be. Moreover, the marketer should stand firm if the company simply cannot get from where it is to to where it wants to be, and in that case, the marketer should work with the rest of the C-suite to identify shifts in reputation, or market reception, that are possible and explain how marketing can help facilitate them.

An abridged example of marketing getting a seat at the adult table

The most gratifying work I do is strategic brand redefinition. This is when a company’s CEO brings me in to evaluate where the company is, where it wants to go, and how it can get there. 

Often, it becomes clear throughout this two- to three-month process that the strategic work we’re doing is about more than marketing (or how we present the company). It’s about the overall direction of the company, which is a CEO-level strategic decision.

For example, the company might say, “We’ve historically been in a declining category, so we’ve entered a couple of adjacent markets to shore up long-term growth.” Next, I talk to the customers and find out where the company’s growth efforts have room for improvement — and which of them is viable. Then, I have to figure out how to tell a brand story that will retain the company’s historical strengths in the declining category while also positioning it to succeed in the new growth areas, while also staying true to the product’s strengths/roadmap and factoring in both the customers’ feedback and that of the various members of the C-suite.

At some point in the exercise (if it goes optimally and the CEO really trusts me), it becomes clear that we’re not just redefining the brand. We are transforming the sales pitch, realigning it with a potentially different product roadmap, and reassessing the market opportunities we are most focused on going after as a company. The story, driven by the C-suite’s points of view, the customers’ perception, and the conditions of the market, coheres with all of those other inputs and outputs. Marketing, which owns the story, is not an order taker or lead generation machine. It is an equal partner in the critical thinking that goes into figuring out the direction of the company — and executing on it.

That’s what it feels like when marketing has a seat at the adult table. But you need a CEO who trusts marketing — and a marketer worthy of strategic trust — to make it happen.