Why CMO Candidates Should Uncover and Confront Mismatched Expectations

A recent post at LinkedIn described a situation that occurs far more that it should. The post author wrote that he had been contacted by a CEO who was planning to replace his CMO because "marketing isn't working." The CEO asked if the post author could recommend someone for the job.

By asking a few questions, the post author identified several circumstances that were contributing to the CMO's perceived underperformance. While all these circumstances were important, one was particularly significant. The post author wrote:

"She [the current CMO] had made smart budget calls six months ago, killed low-performing channels, and shifted spend. But pipeline from these decisions won't land for two more quarters. And she's being judged on the lagging output of a strategy she already replaced."

After his conversation with the post author, the CEO decided to address the problematic circumstances and stick with the current CMO, but this isn't the typical outcome. More often, CEOs decide to "fix" their "marketing" problem by replacing their senior marketing leader, which usually leaves the real problems unresolved.

A Revolving Door of Senior Marketing Leaders

The short tenure of chief marketing officers has been well documented. According to the most recent research by Spencer Stuart, the average tenure of CMOs at S&P 500 companies in 2025 was 4.1 years, down from 4.3 years in 2024. CMO tenure is even shorter if we include a wider range of companies.

Marketing academics have attributed the high level of churn among senior marketing leaders to a variety of factors, but most of the "involuntary" churn ultimately results from mismatched expectations.

When the CEO and the senior marketing leader have mismatched expectations regarding the role or performance of marketing, the odds of developing a long, mutually-satisfactory relationship are not good.

Dealing With Mismatched Expectations

The story recounted at the beginning of this post illustrates what can happen when a CEO and a senior marketing leader have different expectations regarding when marketing programs will produce desired results.

Making these mismatched expectations visible before accepting a marketing leadership position with a new company can help a marketer avoid beginning a relationship that has little chance of long-term success.

So, if you're a candidate for a senior marketing leadership role, there are four questions you need to answer before you accept a job offer.

• What are the most important results your prospective CEO expects to see from marketing within the first 12 months that you're in the job?

• When does your prospective CEO expect to begin seeing those results?

• Are your prospective CEO's expectations for beginning to see those results realistic given the economic and competitive conditions in the market(s) the company serves and the resources (budget, people, technology, etc.) you will have available to conduct marketing programs?

• If you determine that those expectations aren't realistic, can you persuade your prospective CEO to modify his or her expectations to make them more realistic?

The answers to some of these questions can be obtained during the interview process, while others will require you to perform some research. The amount of research needed won't always be trivial, but neither is it out-of-line with the importance of the career decision you're making.

If you're a candidate for a senior marketing leadership role, you probably have several years of marketing experience. Therefore, you should be able to use your experience, combined with a moderate amount of research, to come up with a reasonable approximation of how long it will take sound marketing programs to deliver various kinds of results.

For example, suppose that your prospective CEO says that pipeline contribution is the marketing result he deems most important and that he would expect increases in pipeline contribution to begin within 3 or 4 months after you start work.

If you're confident that you can deliver increases in pipeline contribution within 4 or 5 months, this would not be a huge mismatch of expectations. On the other hand, if you judge that it will take 6 to 8 months for your marketing programs to begin having a meaningful impact on the pipeline, this would be a significant mismatch of expectations that should be addressed during the interview process.

There are several other issues where mismatched expectations can undermine the relationship between a CEO and a senior marketing leader. I'll cover some of those issues in a future post.

Top image courtesy of Heather Paul via Flickr (CC).

"Buyability" Isn't Really New, But It Is Really Important

For the past several months, I've been following developments relating to a research and thought leadership initiative launched by LinkedIn in collaboration with Bain & Company. The goal of the initiative is to identify what causes a B2B buying group to purchase a particular company's offering.

This initiative has been led primarily by Jann Schwarz, the Senior Director, Marketplace Innovation & Strategy at LinkedIn, Mimi Turner, the Head of Marketplace Innovation at LinkedIn, and Jamie Cleghorn and colleagues at Bain & Company.

The researchers at LinkedIn and Bain have coined the term Buyability to describe what business buyers need to believe to have the confidence to make or recommend a purchase.

A survey of 750 B2B buyers conducted by the initiative's researchers identified five main factors that business buyers need to feel confident about. When the researchers analyzed the survey results, they found that the most important factor buyers identified is to feel confident they can defend their decision if the purchase goes wrong. This was slightly more important to buyers than feeling confident the product or service they recommended could do the job.

These research findings strongly suggest that an essential element of Buyability is that business buyers must perceive a prospective vendor's product or service to be a "safe" choice.

Buyer Risk Aversion Isn't New

The bias of business buyers toward "safe" purchases is not new. It has been discussed frequently in the B2B marketing literature for many years.

For example, in his 2009 book, The BuyerSphere Project, Gord Hotchkiss emphasized the importance of buyer risk aversion in the B2B buying process. He wrote:

"B2B buying decisions are usually driven by one emotion - fear. Specifically, B2B buying is all about minimizing fear by eliminating risk . . . The importance of risk aversion on the part of the buyer cannot be overstated. It's the essence of B2B buying. To state it in plainer terms, '99% of B2B buying is about covering your butt.' "

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) (now part of Gartner) and Google also pointed to the importance of buyer risk aversion in their popular 2013 white paper, "From Promotion to Emotion:  Connecting B2B Customers to Brands." CEB and Google observed that B2B buying often exhibited greater emotionality that B2C buying and offered this explanation.

"B2B purchases entail personal risk - far more than most B2C purchases. B2B purchase stakeholders fear:

• Losing time and effort if a purchase decision goes poorly
• Losing credibility if they make a recommendation for an unsuccessful purchase
• Losing their job if they are responsible for a failed purchase" (Emphasis in original)

Unbalanced Incentives Cause Buyer Risk Aversion

Most business buyers are predisposed to favor "safe" purchases because of unbalanced incentives. Most buyers perceive that they will receive only minimal rewards (tangible or emotional) if they recommend buying something that works well, but they also believe they can significantly damage their career if they recommend a purchase that goes badly.

As a result, most buyers are inclined to choose what they perceive to be the safest solution that meets basic performance requirements, rather than one that appears to be "better," but more risky.

Buyability Has Great Potential

So, the buyer risk aversion component of the Buyability model isn't really new, but that doesn't diminish the importance or the potential value of the LinkedIn/Bain initiative.

The initiative has already generated a significant amount of interest in the B2B marketing community, and several industry organizations - including, among others, WARC, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and the International Advertising Association (IAA) - are supporting the initiative, which should further increase interest among B2B marketers.

In addition, during a recent presentation, Jann Schwarz and Mimi Turner stated that they are now beginning the work needed to operationalize the Buyability model. This probably means they will soon be providing examples of actions that B2B companies can take to nurture a perception of safety in the minds of their potential buyers.

While we await these examples, the research already done by the initiative's leaders makes three things abundantly clear.

• The most influential factor for building a B2B buyer's confidence in purchasing from a prospective vendor is having previous personal experience with the vendor.

• The second most powerful confidence-building factor is recommendations from colleagues or from similar customers with similar needs and use cases.

• Negative feedback from a buyer's colleagues or peers in the buyer's network, or from other similar customers will usually stop a deal in its tracks.

These research findings suggest that, when performance and cost factors are generally equal, what influential third parties say about you becomes critical for making potential buyers feel confident enough to do business with you.

[Research Round-Up] B2B Marketing Benchmarks, a CMO Outlook, and How Humans Decide

(This month's Research Round-Up features three reports that address a wide range of issues relevant to marketing. Two of the reports (by Benchmarkit and NielsenIQ) are based on surveys designed to capture the perspective and practices of marketers. The paper by WPP Media is based on an analysis of the firm's extensive database of purchase journeys.)

"2026 Brand vs Demand Benchmark Report" by Benchmarkit

Source:  Benchmarkit

• Based on a survey of individuals working at 168 B2B technology companies
• The job title or job role of respondents was not provided
• Respondents were affiliated with companies having annual revenue of less than $5 million to more than $500 million
• The survey was conducted throughout September and October, 2025

The primary objective of this research was to benchmark how marketing budgets and other resources are currently allocated and would ideally be allocated between demand generation marketing and brand and awareness marketing. The survey also addressed current measurement practices and respondents' views on several related issues.

Here are some of the major findings from this research.

• Respondents reported that they are currently allocating 70% (median) of their total marketing budget to demand generation and 25% (median) to brand marketing.

• Respondents said their ideal budget allocation would be 50% (median) to demand generation and 40% (median) to brand marketing.

• The two metrics most frequently used to measure demand generation performance are the dollar value of pipeline generated (79% of respondents) and the number of opportunities created (70%).

• 73% of the respondents said that brand building is a long-term investment that makes demand generation marketing more efficient, and 63% said brand investments directly fuel demand generation performance.

• But . . . only 28% of the respondents said their company can link brand investments and activity to pipeline generated.

"CMO Outlook:  Guide to 2026" by NielsenIQ (NIQ)

Source:  NielsenIQ

• Based on a survey of ". . . more than 250 CMOs and senior marketing decision-makers from influential companies across regions, industries, and organizational sizes . . ." 
• Also based on qualitative interviews of ". . . chief marketing officers (CMOs) across industries . . ."
• A detailed description of the research methodology is not provided
• The guide does not indicate when the survey and interviews were conducted

NielsenIQ (NIQ) (formerly known as AC Nielsen) is a market research firm that primarily focuses on consumer research. However, NIQ's "CMO Outlook:  Guide to 2026" describes several research findings that are relevant for B2B marketing leaders.

For example, NIQ's survey and interviews revealed a growing tension between the pursuit of long-term vs. short-term marketing goals.

• 69% of NIQ's survey respondents said their CEO and CFO believe in the value of long-term brand building, but this was down sharply from 80% in last year's NIQ research.

• 55% of the survey respondents said they were allocating 60% or more of their marketing budget to long-term brand building. That was down slightly from 59% in last year's research.

Other interesting findings from NIQ's 2026 guide include:

• When asked where their organization was performing well, 39% of the survey respondents said media planning and optimization, 37% said content/creative generation, 35% said understanding customers, and 35% said measuring ROI.

• 58% of the survey respondents said they are using up to 5 tools to measure media performance, and another 34% said they are using 6 to 15 tools.

• When asked what methods they use to measure marketing ROI, 81% of the survey respondents said marketing attribution, and 77% said marketing mix modeling.

"How Humans Decide:  What Drives Consumer Choice and How Brands Should Respond" by WPP Media (in association with the University of Oxford's Said Business School)

Source:  WPP Media

• Based on an analysis of WPP Media's database of 1.2 million purchase journeys
• The WPP Media database covers purchases in over 200 product categories in 47 countries
• The white paper provides a detailed description of the research and analysis methodology in the Appendix (page 9)
• The white paper was published in October 2025

The central argument of this white paper is that knowing how people make buying decisions is essential to understanding how brands grow. The researchers describe the essence of their study findings early in the white paper.

"When the complexities of human decision-making are understood, the missing pieces of the equation are revealed:  influence and receptivity. Once influence and receptivity are understood, any assumptions that consumers are equally influenceable, or that media channels are interchangeable tools for reaching them, no longer make sense." (Emphasis in original)

Here are a few of the study's major findings.

• 84% of purchases involve people choosing brands they're already biased towards before they begin shopping.

• The proportion of purchases that are governed by this bias varies across product categories, but never falls below 70%

• Receptivity is a measure of how likely a person is to be influenced by marketing messages. On average, unreceptive consumers make up 23% of all category buyers.

• On average, owned, shared, and earned touchpoints (such as word-of-mouth recommendations and customer reviews) are nearly 3 times more powerful than paid media alone at converting a consumer from bias to purchase.

A Powerful (But Not Easy) Way to Boost the Influence of Marketing

In my latest three posts (here, here, and here), I've been discussing the widely-held perception among marketers that the marketing function in most companies has less influence than it should have - and less influence than it once had.

Some research studies (like this one) have shown that the influence of the marketing organization has declined over the past 2 - 3 decades.

In my previous posts, I've argued that the rise of business strategy has had a significant impact on the role of the marketing function. Over the past sixty years, strategy has become the primary mechanism senior business leaders use to make major decisions about the future of their business and create their gameplan for success.

This development has affected the marketing function for two reasons.

First, the formulation of a complete business strategy will require several decisions that most marketers would call "marketing" decisions. For example, strategy makers must decide how to segment their industry, what their target market will be, and how they will deliver compelling value to their target customers. Most marketers would say these are classic marketing decisions. Think Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning. 

Second, strategy development in most companies is the responsibility of the CEO and usually involves some or all of the company's C-level executives.

So, the bottom line is that the rise of strategy has transformed some "marketing" decisions into "strategy" decisions and changed who typically makes those decisions. This doesn't make the marketing function's loss of influence inevitable, but it does change what marketing leaders need to do to preserve - and even raise - that influence.

In essence, marketing leaders must recognize that how much influence they possess will be largely determined by how much they contribute to (a) the success of their company's strategy, and (b) the effectiveness of their company's strategy development process.

In my last post, I argued that marketing leaders must perform two core jobs well to raise their influence.

First, they must ensure that their teams are creating and running marketing communication programs and performing other marketing activities that support their company's business strategy. I discussed this task in detail in my last post.

Provide Strategy-Critical Intelligence

The second core job is equally important, but less frequently discussed, at least in a detailed way. To increase their level of influence, marketing leaders need to provide their company's strategy development team the information and insights they need to make sound strategic decisions.

The choices that senior business leaders make when developing a business strategy are high-stakes decisions that will have a major impact on their company's competitive success. Therefore, those choices should be made on the basis of detailed and reliable information about the company's capabilities and its competitive environment.

More specifically, strategy developers need detailed and reliable intelligence about their company's industry, its potential customers, and its competitors. I've use the term intelligence intentionally because what strategy developers need is not simply raw data, but data that's accompanied by a sound analysis of that data.

The following outline shows that major kinds of information marketing leaders need to provide to the senior business leaders who comprise their company's strategy development team. This outline is not exhaustive. It contains the types of information that apply to most companies, but additional or other information can be important based on a company's specific situation.

Providing the information shown in this outline, along with adequate supporting evidence, won't be a trivial undertaking for marketing leaders in many companies. The intelligence needed for strategy development differs from the data many marketers now routinely collect. Therefore, providing this intelligence will require a fairly significant amount of research.

The amount of work required to perform this job well can be substantial, but the payoff justifies the effort. When a company's strategy makers have access to relevant and accurate industry, customer, and competitor intelligence, they are more likely to make sound strategic choices, which will ultimately make the company more successful.

For marketing leaders, performing this job well will enhance their influence and, by extension, the influence and stature of the marketing organization. When the CEO and other company leaders view the senior marketing leader as a trusted source of the industry, customer, and competitor intelligence that will help them formulate better business strategy, they will place greater value on, and give greater weight to, the view and perspectives of the marketing leader.

Top image courtesy of Joshua Tree National Park via Flickr (Public Domain).

How to Elevate the Influence of the Marketing Function

Source:  Shutterstock

Many marketers believe that the marketing function in most companies doesn't have as much influence as it should have. In my last two posts (here and here), I discussed why this circumstance developed, and I argued that one of the main causes was the rise of strategy as a business discipline.

Over the past five decades, strategy development has become the dominant process senior business leaders use to create their gameplan for success. Developing a complete business strategy requires company leaders to make several decisions involving customers, competitors, and other market-related factors. 

As a result, the strategy development process essentially transformed a number of "marketing" issues into "strategy" issues.

So, how can marketing leaders increase the influence of the marketing function under these circumstances? To accomplish this goal, the marketing function must perform two core tasks effectively.

• It must create and run programs that support the company's chosen business strategy.

• It must provide the company's senior leaders information and insights that can enable them to make sound strategic choices.

At first glance, these tasks may seem obvious, but they are more nuanced than they first appear. And when they are done properly, they will boost the influence of the marketing function.

I'll discuss the first task in this post, and I'll cover the second task in my next post.

Job 1 - Run Programs That Support Company Strategy

The first job of the marketing function in any company is to create and execute marketing programs that support the company's chosen strategy.

This job may seem easy to understand, but what does "support" the strategy actually mean in operational terms? How can we determine that any marketing program meets the "support" requirement?

In my last post, I introduced the strategy framework developed by Roger Martin, one of today's leading authorities on business strategy. Martin describes strategy as the answers to the five interrelated questions shown in the following illustration:

The answers to these questions constitute the five core elements of a complete business strategy.

• "What is our winning aspiration?" - A description of what strategic success looks like for the company.

• "Where will we play?" - A description of the company's target market.

• "How will we win?" - A description of how the company will deliver distinct and superior value to its target customers.

• "What capabilities must be in place?" - A description of the activities the company must excel at performing to be successful with its "where-to-play" and "how-to-win" choices.

• "What management systems are required?" - A description of the management and measurement systems the company needs to support its other strategic choices.

Martin has also written that the primary job of a company's functional units (e.g. marketing, human resources, manufacturing, etc.) is to provide the essential capabilities and the required management systems identified in the company's strategy.

Martin's approach is useful for marketers because it establishes boundaries or "guardrails" for marketing plans, and helps ensure that marketing programs actually support the company's strategy.

For example, this approach requires that:

• Every marketing communication program should be specifically designed to reach, or create engagement with, potential buyers in the target market(s) identified in the company's strategy.

• All marketing communication programs should describe and present the value provided by the company's products or services in ways that are aligned with the "how-to-win" element of the company's strategy.

• The metrics used to measure the effectiveness of marketing programs should be designed to measure performance in the target market(s) identified in the company's strategy.

The credibility and influence of the marketing function are enhanced when this task is performed well, and when the senior marketing leader effectively communicates the rationale for marketing's activities to the CEO and other senior company leaders.

Performing this job well demonstrates to the CEO and other senior executives that the senior marketing leader and the other members of the marketing team understand the company's strategy and are applying their marketing expertise to make the company's strategy successful.

What the Rise of Strategy Meant (and Means) for Marketing

Many marketers now believe that the marketing function in many companies has less influence than it should have - or once had.

As one example, they frequently point out that the marketing function is usually responsible for creating and running promotional programs, but often has little or no influence over the other three "Ps" of the marketing mix - product, price, and place.

The idea that the fundamental purpose of a business is to understand customer wants and needs, and create products or services to satisfy those wants and needs emerged in the 1950s. As this concept gained traction, many marketing scholars embraced the view that the marketing function in a well-managed company would direct much of what the company does.

In my last post, I explained that the marketing function in most companies never gained the broad authority that marketing scholars anticipated. What actually happened was that strategy development became the primary mechanism senior company leaders used to make major decisions about the future of their business.

Over the past six decades, the strategy discipline has become the dominant method for describing the purpose of a business and creating the "recipe" for its success. In the words of Walter Kiechel:

"Strategy's coming to dominance as the framework by which companies understand what they're doing and want to do, the construct through which and around which the rest of their efforts are organized, eclipses any other change worked in the intellectual landscape of business over the past fifty years." (Emphasis in original) [Walter Kiechel, III, The Lords of Strategy:  The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World (Boston:  Harvard Business Press, 2010)].

The rise of strategy to the dominant position in the hierarchy of business management tools effectively prevented the marketing function from gaining expansive decision-making authority in most, though not all, companies.

To understand how this happened, we need to look at what a complete strategy encompasses and where strategy is made in most organizations.

The What and Who of Strategy

Roger Martin, one of today's leading authorities on strategy, defines strategy this way:  ". . . strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely position the firm in the industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition." [A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, Playing to Win:  How Strategy Really Works (Boston:  Harvard Business Review Press, 2013)].

Martin goes on to describe strategy as the answers to five interrelated questions. The following illustration shows Martin's five core strategy questions and some of the subordinate questions that business leaders must answer to create a complete strategy.

Veteran marketers will recognize that answering some of these questions will require strategy makers to use several marketing principles and methods.

For example, the "Where will we play?" question will require strategy makers to decide whether and how to segment their market and select their target market. And the "How will we win?" question will require them to determine how they will deliver value to customers that is distinct from, and superior to, the value offered by competitors.

The rise of strategy also constrained the marketing function's decision-making authority because of who formulates strategy. In most companies, strategy development was (and still is) led by the CEO, and usually involves some or all of the company's C-level executives.*

So, as senior company leaders increasingly used strategy to define the purpose of their business and create their gameplan for success, they absorbed several market-related decisions into the strategy development process. As a result, those decisions became "strategy" decisions rather than "marketing" decisions.

Under these circumstances, the influence of the marketing function across the company will be largely based on the contribution it makes to the success of the company's strategy.

To maximize the influence of the marketing function, most marketing leaders will need to reframe the function's mission and objectives to make clear that the function's first priority is to support the company's strategy and strategy-making process.

In my next post, I'll explain how marketing leaders can use this approach to increase their influence with other senior company leaders and enhance the influence of the marketing function throughout the company.

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*In larger enterprises with multiple business units or brands, each business unit and brand will likely require a distinct strategy. These strategies are typically developed by each business unit leader or brand manager with input from his or her leadership team.

Top image courtesy of  Stefan Erschwender via Flickr (CC).

Has the Influence of the Marketing Function Declined?

(David Packard, the co-founder and former Chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, once said, "Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department." This post explains why Packard's view is accurate but why it's also not necessarily an indictment of the marketing function.) 

A Perceived Loss of Influence

There is a widespread perception in the marketing community that the marketing function has been marginalized at many companies, that the influence of the marketing organization is not as broad or as strong as it once was.

Marketers frequently cite two circumstances as symptomatic of marketing's diminished stature and influence.

First, marketers often describe the lack of influence in terms of the 4Ps of the marketing mix. They note that in many companies, the marketing function is responsible for designing and executing promotional activities and programs, but has little influence over product, price, or place.

Marketers have also observed that senior marketing leaders often don't play a prominent role in the formulation of their company's business strategy.

Recent surveys by Marketing Week and McKinsey & Company have shown that one or both of these circumstances exist at many companies.

So, has the influence of the marketing function actually declined over the past several years, as many marketers believe? Or, is this perception the result of an inflated view of marketing's influence in the past?

To answer these questions, we need to take a brief tour of marketing history beginning about seven decades ago.

The Emergence of the Marketing Concept

In the 1950's, companies began to adopt a new guiding philosophy for achieving business success. This philosophy came to be called the marketing concept, and its core principle was what we might today call "customer centricity."

According to the marketing concept, business leaders should first develop an in-depth understanding of customer needs and wants, and then use that understanding to create products or services that will meet those needs and wants better than competitors. Furthermore, all organizational functions of the company should be aligned on the primary purpose of satisfying customer needs and wants.

Management icon Peter Drucker provided an early statement of the marketing concept as a management philosophy in his 1954 book, The Practice of Management, when he wrote:

"There is only one valid definition of business purpose:  to create a satisfied customer. It is the customer who determines what the business is. Because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two - and only these two - basic functions:  marketing and innovation."

By the 1960's, the philosophical principles of the marketing concept had become well established in business thinking, and many marketing scholars had embraced an expansive view of the role and authority of the marketing function.

In his 1960 marketing textbook, Basic Marketing:  A Managerial Approach, E. Jerome McCarthy, the creator of the 4Ps model of the marketing mix, described the authority of the marketing function in exceptionally broad terms when he wrote:

". . . marketing should determine what products are to be produced (product development, design, and packaging) what prices to charge (credits and collections and pricing policy), and where they are to be available (warehousing and transportation) - as well as selling and advertising."

Other marketing textbooks soon began describing the role and authority of the marketing function in similar terms, and as a result, many marketers came to believe that a powerful marketing function was the norm in well-managed companies.

What Actually Happened

This belief, while widespread, was never completely accurate,* and it's clearly not accurate today. Recent research suggests that the marketing function in most companies does not have the broad authority and responsibilities the marketing scholars of the 1960's described.

A study published in the May 2023 issue of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science found that only 17% of the companies included in the study had marketing functions that controlled all marketing decisions and set their company's growth agenda.

The influence of the marketing function may have declined in some companies over the past several years, but in most companies, the marketing function never wielded the broad authority many marketing scholars had anticipated.

What actually happened in most companies is that strategy became the preferred way for senior company leaders to make major decisions about the future of their business. And because a sound strategy must address several important marketing issues, senior company leaders began making major marketing decisions as part of the strategy development process.

Therefore, in companies with a mature strategy development process, the marketing function doesn't fully control all marketing decisions. I frequently hear or see marketers complain about "non-marketers" making marketing decisions, and clearly the risk for mistakes increases when the people making marketing decisions don't understand basic marketing principles. However, when marketing is defined broadly, such decision making is probably inevitable and may, in fact, be necessary and beneficial.

Peter Drucker viewed marketing as a general management responsibility. In his 1973 classic, Management Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Drucker wrote:

"Marketing is so basic that it cannot be considered a separate function . . . it is, first, a central dimension of the entire business . . . Concern and responsibility for marketing must, therefore, permeate all areas of the enterprise."

To maximize the influence of the marketing functions in these circumstances, marketing leaders must develop capabilities and perform activities that are specifically designed to support their company's chosen business strategy and strategy-making process. I'll discuss the ascendancy of strategy in more detail and explain how marketing leaders can accomplish these tasks in my next two posts.

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*Marketing functions with broad responsibilities and decision-making authority did exist, primarily in large consumer package goods (CPG) companies that had adopted brand management structures and processes. Proctor & Gamble invented the brand management function in the 1930's, and by the late 1950's, it had been widely implemented by U.S. CPG companies. These companies may have inspired the view of the marketing function advanced by marketing scholars.

Image courtesy of Virtual EyeSee via Flickr (CC).