The 3 Marketing Responsibilities of CEOs

CEOs rarely come from marketing. Yet they are responsible for marketing the company themselves in its early days and hiring marketing tacticians and/or leaders as the company evolves. Moreover, throughout the life of the company, marketing is critical to generating pipeline, shortening the path to conversion, and attracting talent and investors. So, CEOs need to understand how to get involved in the function.

CEOs have three core marketing responsibilities. They should contribute to and sign off on messaging, develop and align the team on a marketing philosophy, and evangelize the company.

Here’s what each of those responsibilities entails — and why CEOs should take them on.

Contribute to and sign off on messaging

At almost any level from startups to enterprises, the CEO should contribute to and sign off on messaging, which should meet three objectives:

1. Clarify what the company does and for whom

2. Differentiate the company from competitors

3. Drive urgency or clarify why the company is important

Many companies, even large public ones, struggle to get the core messaging right, which is why you can go to many public adtech companies’ homepages and walk away thinking, “What do they do?” It’s the job of the CEO to ensure that the company clears this bar — that anyone who encounters it can quickly understand what they do, who their customers are, how they’re different from the alternatives, and why their work is urgent. This affects the homepage, the sales pitch, and any other public communications.

In the early days of a company, the founding team, including the CEO, needs to answer these questions, and the answers will change frequently as the company garners customer feedback and iterates on the product. 

As a company evolves, it can afford either marketing leaders or consultants to partner with the CEO on the message. As a marketing consultant, the way I approach a brand definition exercise is to interview the executive team, including the CEO, as well as marketing and product leadership and customers to understand what the company’s strengths are, where it’s heading, and how it differs from competitors. Then, I synthesize where the company wants to go with the positioning it has already earned in its customers’ minds into a new story that capitalizes on existing strengths while positioning the company for future growth.

The CEO must provide their perspective to inform the messaging exercise and endorse the story. If they do not, the company will never achieve alignment on the story or messaging, and the lack of internal alignment will translate into market confusion. There’s no point in defining or redefining a brand if the company isn’t aligned on the new direction.

Endorse a marketing philosophy

It is not the CEO’s job to devise a bespoke marketing philosophy or strategy (especially not for mature companies), but the CEO needs to endorse the marketing strategy and kick the tires on the philosophy that informs it.

This may seem obvious, but I think many CEOs would struggle to explain what their company’s marketing strategy is and how it’s informed by a distinct philosophy on how to use marketing to win. (Fair enough — CEOs have a lot of things on their plate.)

To solve this problem, CEOs should ask the marketing team three key strategic questions:

1. What’s the business problem we’re trying to solve?

2. What’s the message? Does it clarify what we do and for whom, why we’re different, and why we matter? What are we going to talk about in-market?

3. Where and how will we distribute the message to win over our customers and those who influence them?

In addition to answering these three questions (or hiring someone who can and aligning with their perspective), CEOs should be clear on the goal of marketing and how to evaluate success. Instead of a hodgepodge of dubious metrics, the CEO and the marketing leader or partner should align on a big-picture goal (e.g. building our reputation and relationships by driving awareness, differentiation, and urgency) and a core thesis on how to do that (e.g. by creating content that inserts the company into the industry conversation in addition to a range of ancillary efforts). 

In short, know what you’re doing with marketing, why, and how it will contribute to the overall success of the business. ‘Making noise’ is not a marketing strategy.

Evangelize the company

Finally, CEOs, especially founders, should play a role in evangelizing the company. The market will disproportionately care what the CEO thinks and associate the company with the CEO’s views and presence even if the CEO doesn’t want it to be that way. Don’t be invisible, and don’t approach this association in a haphazard way. Take advantage of the influence the market naturally affords you.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the CEO should go it alone. Marketers exist partly to guide the CEO on how to influence the company’s customers and those who influence them. But CEOs should play an active role in the tactics that define the company in the market. And they should look for marketers who drive them toward productive controversy and attention orchestration, not yes men and women who applaud milquetoast arguments, unclear positioning, and self-congratulatory LinkedIn posts.

Marketing is little understood. But it’s critical to the growth of any company. So, CEOs, don’t view marketing as a marginal function that’s not worth your time. Marketing needs you, and your company needs marketing. Make sure you have these three bases covered to maximize your impact and generate more pipeline.