Nobody walks into the finance team with a view on the deferred revenue policy.
Nobody tells the general counsel the indemnity clause feels a bit heavy. Nobody suggests to engineering that the database would be better in a different colour.
It happens to marketing every single day.
The website. The logo. The tone of the email. The stand at the conference. Everyone has a view, everyone offers it, and a surprising number expect it to be acted on.
The usual explanation is that everybody thinks they’re a marketer because they’ve seen adverts.
There’s something in that. But I’ve come to think it’s mostly our fault, and the reason is specific.
People defer to a function when they can’t evaluate its output, and they can’t evaluate its output when they don’t know what it’s for.
Finance is for keeping the business solvent and telling the truth about the numbers. Legal is for keeping the business out of trouble. Engineering is for making the thing work.
Ask ten people in a B2B company what marketing is for and you’ll get ten answers. Leads. Brand. The website. Making sales’ job easier. Events. Telling the story. Demand.
Those aren’t different phrasings of the same purpose. They’re different purposes.
And a function that can’t state its purpose in one line has no defence against opinion, because there’s no standard to test an opinion against.
Which is where it gets circular.
If marketing existed to do a stated thing, measured a stated way, then somebody’s view on the shade of blue would be easy to handle. Does it move the number? No? Then it’s a preference, and we can have it noted.
Without that, every opinion is as good as every other opinion, including yours. Taste versus taste. And the person with the most seniority wins, which is why so much marketing looks like whatever the CEO last saw and liked.
We didn’t get here by accident.
For thirty years marketing has described itself in whatever terms seemed most persuasive that decade. Brand when brand was fashionable. Demand generation when that was. Growth when that arrived. Revenue when we wanted to sound commercial.
Every reframing was an attempt to sound more important. The cumulative effect was to make the function harder to understand, because we kept changing the answer to what it’s for.
Meanwhile finance has said the same thing about itself for a century.
So I don’t think the fix is better internal communications or a campaign to educate the business.
The fix is to be for one thing, and to be measured on it.
My candidate is the efficiency of how customers are won. What it costs to get one, what that one is worth, and the gap between them. It’s the only thing marketing does that nobody else is doing, it’s measurable, and it survives contact with a finance director.
Once a function has a number, the opinions don’t stop.
They just stop mattering as much, because there’s finally something to test them against.